I’ve been working at SOLIDitech in Cape Town, South Africa since May 2011. It’s been an amazing experience and as I prepare to move to Melbourne, Australia at the end of April, I figure I should spend some time reflecting on the projects and challenges I worked through.

First, though, a bit about the company; SOLIDitech is a software firm that develops it’s own Business Automation Platform targeted at Internet Service Providers. We currently employ 53 very talented people and have our platform deployed to 42 customers in 10 countries throughout Africa and Asia.

Work Overview

System Migrations

When I first joined SOLIDitech, I was put on a 4-man team that was working on migrating one of our new clients from a legacy platform to our own customised platform. This was a year-long project that involved developing some new features, billing customisations, service automation and migrating all our client’s customer data to our system.

Some of the features I worked on were:

1. Order processing framework - whereby a quote is converted into an order and each order line has a workflow to provision the product.
2. RICA and credit vetting - automated credit bureau SOAP API integration, scoring, reporting and order integration.
3. Service automation - automated ADSL and Dial-up service provisioning, usage reporting and usage billing.
4. Migration framework - service migration plug-ins, data parsing and clean-up.

Near the end of the project I was the last remaining original team member and spent 6 month’s at the client: 3 months working day-and-night to get ready for the go-live and the 3 months after go-live providing support, fixing bugs and implementing enhancements.

Since my first migration project, I have successfully migrated data from many more systems to our platform, though migrating to a live system provided more challenges.

More to follow soon…