Lightbend > Case Studies > Verizon Wireless Enhances Performance with Lightbend Reactive Platform, Doubling Results with Half the Hardware

Verizon Wireless Enhances Performance with Lightbend Reactive Platform, Doubling Results with Half the Hardware

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

Akka Platform
Lightbend Reactive Platform
Spring Boot

Tech Stack

Java Virtual Machine (JVM)
Asynchronous Non-Blocking I/O

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Cost Savings
Customer Satisfaction
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management

Applicable Industries

Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Use Cases

Process Control & Optimization
Remote Asset Management

Services

System Integration
Software Design & Engineering Services

About The Customer

Verizon Wireless is a major telecommunications company in the United States, known for its extensive mobile network and a wide range of services including voice, data, and video. As a large corporate entity, Verizon has been at the forefront of adopting new technologies to enhance its service offerings and improve customer experience. The company has a significant online presence, processing numerous business transactions and customer orders through its e-commerce platform. Over the years, Verizon has expanded its digital capabilities to include support for various smart home devices and digital assistants, such as Alexa and Google Home, as well as social media platforms like Facebook. This expansion has led to increased demands on its commerce platform, necessitating a robust and scalable solution to handle the growing volume of online transactions efficiently.

The Challenge

The existing platform was a huge monolith, and since the code base was so large, software builds often took a whole night to run. Setting up a testing, development or production environment required five to 10 days of work, and deploying an emergency fix to production took 24 hours. Even worse, the legacy platform couldn’t handle the massive increase in site traffic on holiday sales days and other big events, such as the launch of a new iPhone. So, for more than a decade, Verizon’s engineers had to recreate the entire e-commerce site in parallel with a special light code base that disabled logging, removed all complex transaction requirements, and was subjected to massive load testing. This bespoke website only ran in production for a few days each year, even though it took more than six months to create. Verizon’s site never crashed on the holidays or after a new iPhone launch, an industry record unmatched by any other cell provider. But all of that special code was tossed out every year and never re-used.

The Solution

Verizon set up a special team of architects to review alternatives to the Oracle platform. They quickly embraced reactive principles, and over a two-month period, they evaluated every major platform on the market. The final two choices were Spring Boot from Pivotal and Akka Platform from Lightbend. What Verizon liked about Akka Platform is its ability to scale as needed, its hot reload features, and the ease of use it provides for ops teams. Akka Platform also delivered blazing performance through its support for stateless, asynchronous non-blocking I/O, the ability to bounce a server in seconds, minimal garbage collection, and a hot reload capability that cuts development cycles in half. Moreover, compared to the legacy Oracle system, which required 20GB of reserved memory since everything was cached locally, Akka platform only required a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) footprint of under 500MB—making it considerably more memory-efficient.

Operational Impact

Verizon quickly built out a new system for both the Verizon app and the mobile platform, and the before and after results were stunning.
In the mobile phone network industry, average customer response times through the website are around six to seven seconds. With its legacy platform, Verizon was at six seconds. With Akka Platform, that time was slashed to 2.4 seconds.
The performance and user experience benefits have translated into amazing bottom line business results. Sales on the new platform increased 235 percent; conversion rates jumped 197 percent; builds took 40 percent less effort; and total cost of ownership (TCO) was cut in half.
By halving its resource requirements on both the hardware and human side of the equation, Verizon Wireless achieved results that are twice as good as with the previous platform.
The CIO is now taking the new Lightbend system to other major business groups at Verizon, such as billing and point of sale, to encourage them to move to Akka Platform.

Quantitative Benefit

Customer response times reduced from six seconds to 2.4 seconds.
Order processing capability increased from 1,600 orders per minute to 12,000 orders per minute.
Sales on the new platform increased by 235 percent.
Conversion rates jumped by 197 percent.
Total cost of ownership (TCO) was cut in half.