K2
The Telenor Group, Norway
The Telenor Group is a leading provider of telecommunications services - providing voice, data, content and other communication services in 13 countries across Europe and Asia.
The company uses LispWorks in K2 - a single integrated internet production system which contains information about customers, accounts, products and services, and manages the relationships between these. The system is extremely flexible with regards to product definition and technical integration of new service platforms, and provides fast implementation of new products. Automatic service activation or provisioning occurs in a matter of seconds. The flexible definition of access levels also provides the possibility for secure self administration of services by customers.
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General Architecture of the K2 System. |
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The key technical features of K2 are:
- Object oriented multiple layered and multithreaded architecture for scalability and reliability.
- True client server architecture.
- Web-based client interface.
- APIs custom-made for clients.
- Data storage in Oracle SQL database.
- The system runs on multiple Linux servers, Oracle databases and is configured to create a fast, reliable and scalable solution.
Special features unique to the K2 architecture are:
- Dynamic object loading.
- Hot patch of running server processes.
- Transactional control with client side of webserver.
- 100,000 lines of Common Lisp code
LispWorks, which has a very competitive licensing approach, has helped Telenor build a complex system with limited resources. Using Lisp has enabled the company to continuously develop the system, avoiding inelegant solutions yet maintaining very high availability.
This has also made the system very adaptive to changes in the business model and to the spectrum of products offered.
K2 was moved from Sun SPARC Solaris servers to x86/x64 Linux in November 2009. This task was eased by LispWorks' high degree of portability between these platforms.