The Company

Telekom Malaysia (TM) is the leading provider of communication technologies, services and systems in its service area. The company offers a full range of products and services to businesses and consumers, including fixed line and wireless connections, as well as VoIP, virtual private networks (VPNs) and Internet connectivity, among many others.

TM´s stated mission is to deliver exceptional value to its customers and other stakeholders. In support of this objective, Telekom Malaysia has developed extensive software and hardware infrastructure, which needs continual maintenance and upgrading.

The Challenge

TM, as a leading company in its field, strives to provide its customers with world class, up-to-date technology and services. Virtually all of its operations, including customer service, maintenance, upgrade and expansion of the system depend heavily on the ability to forecast system requirements and to plan for the future. Accordingly, starting in the mid-1990s, the company developed a major standalone forecasting tool. Over time, it became obvious that this application would need to be upgraded in order to accommodate the growth of TM´s customer base, as well as many new technologies and services that had been introduced. Moreover, a major upgrade was needed in order to be compatible with modern computer architectures that use the client-server model.

In the interval since the original development of TM´s forecasting system, the Java™ language and system have become ubiquitous. One of the main reasons for this is that Java programs are platform-independent – they run on any computer that has an installed Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and, of course, the necessary peripherals and communication links. Accordingly, TM´s system engineers decided to convert the forecasting system, which was originally written in the C programming language, to the Java language. The platform-independence aspect of Java is very valuable, and the choice of Java was easily justifiable, but it brought with it a new set of challenges. The most formidable of these was to re-use most of the existing forecasting system, which consists of 10 major modules, by converting it to Java.

As part of the upgrade and re-engineering of the forecasting system, some major new modules were added. One of these is CLIPS™, which is a public-domain expert system that greatly simplifies the user interface. CLIPS, which stands for C Language Integrated Production System, is written in C, and contains about 200 modules; it is a major subsystem. With the addition of CLIPS, a manual re-write became essentially out of the question – it would have been too costly, too time-consuming and too error-prone.

The Solution

Telekom Malaysia chose AMPC™ from Axiomatic Solutions Sdn Bhd to perform the automatic conversion of the C programs to Java. AMPC is a unique integrated development environment whose compiler translates programs written in C to standard Java bytecodes. The Java bytecodes can then be executed on any suitable platform that supports standard Java.

The Result

The TM conversion project was completed successfully, on time and within budget. The project cost would have been significantly greater had the language conversion been done manually, and the project schedule would have been much longer as well. TM now owns a forecasting system that is up-to-date, much more capable and user-friendly than it was previously, and easily modifiable because AMPC allows for continued maintenance in the original C language. This is a significant advantage in view of TM´s deep understanding of the C version of the program.

About Telekom Malaysia

Telekom Malaysia is Malaysia's number one provider of information communication technologies. TM´s vision is to be the Communications Company of choice – focused on delivering exceptional value to its customers and other stakeholders.

For more information about TM please visit www.telekom.com.my