SES transforms into end-to-end service provider

Challenge

SES is a communications satellite company that has 65 satellites that cover 99% of the world population — distributing over 7,700 digital TV channels to 325 million homes globally. As part of a new business strategy, SES needed to transition from a wholesale, infrastructure provider to an end-to-end service provider to customers across the world — from the crew on a ship in the Pacific that needs access to Netflix to direct-to-home platforms that want to better understand how their customers use their services.

Objectives

SES needed to transform its digital landscape and establish closer relationships with its customers by building a customer portal to unify their experience.

Solution

The SES IT team needed to better integrate disparate business solutions, systems, applications, and data sources in a quick and efficient manner. SES’ previous integration approach — point-to-point integration — slowed the IT team down due to the number of applications they needed to connect. “Historically, we've done a lot of application integrations already. But we were doing this in a more traditional manner, where there were a lot of point-to-point connections,” said Stefan Okhuijzen, SVP, Business Applications. “We just noticed that we couldn't keep up with the applications and integrations we had.”

SES wanted to move beyond point-to-point integration; so they turned to MuleSoft for a new integration approach that promotes faster integrations via APIs and a platform to make it happen.

Using API-led connectivity and Anypoint Platform™, SES built APIs to expose key applications, systems, and data sources. This API-led approach revolutionized the way SES’ IT team works. “APIs, by design, are supposed to be easily upgradable, easily changeable, layered, they provide the flexibility that we want," says Ruy Pinto, CIO. Further, these APIs were then reused for future projects — making integration implementations much faster. “With MuleSoft, we are building a more global library of reusable components...that make our lives easier," says Stefan.

Results

Using Anypoint Platform and API-led connectivity, SES was able to dramatically improve the customer experience by delivering its customer portal. Today, the portal provides customers with the ability to get insights into satellite traffic patterns and other important details, such as what websites users are visiting on the satellites’ servers.

In the future, if SES wants to aggregate and start creating building blocks of applications that our customers can use and join in different ways, MuleSoft allows us to do that.

Ruy Pinto

CIO, SES