BT has reported substantially increased revenues after
its IT department used advanced technology to migrate the records
of its 500 largest business customers from a legacy mainframe-based
system to a state-of-the-art billing system 13 months ahead of
schedule.
The project involved the transfer of millions of customer
billing records, dating back 15 years. Its success has allowed the
company to introduce new telecoms services 18 months ahead of
schedule, contributing to a £100m increase in revenue, said BT.
The migration is the first stage in a project by the company to
move to a single billing system, Geneva from Convergys, as BT
realigns its IT around off-the-shelf packages, rather than bespoke
technology.
“The project is the first time we have done a billing migration
of that scale with customers of that size,” said BT chief architect
George Glass.
Transferring the data from BT’s existing system to Geneva, which
runs on HP Unix servers, would have taken 18 months using
traditional data migration techniques. This would have involved
moving data from the legacy system to a holding database and
cleaning and manipulating it, before transferring it to the new
database. But with this method the data rapidly becomes outdated,
said Glass.
Instead, the company hired portfolio management tools supplier
Celona to automate the data cleansing and transfer process. This
allowed the telecoms supplier to run both billing systems in tandem
for six months using a single set of data, while it tested the
systems for compatibility.
By maintaining a single instance of the data, customers were
able to access their billing records and order services without
disruption while the migration was underway.
“The key thing was to ensure the integrity of the data that
comes out of the billing system so that we did not lose the
confidence of our customers,” said Glass. “Celona intelligently
switches data between the old and the new billing systems so we
could do confidence and accuracy testing.”
The telcoms supplier has begun the migration of billing records
for broadband services. Voice services will migrate next year, with
mobile services to follow.