Virgin Media has dumped an Oracle system to
analyse customer data, and will instead use a
Netezza data warehouse platform.
Virgin Media is to standardise its
enterprise data warehouse and business intelligence (BI)
platforms on the faster
Netezza Performance Server (NPS) systems.
Virgin Media will use Netezza technology to analyse customer
data, such as call detail records (CDRs), from the now fully merged
and re-branded companies of NTL, Telewest and Virgin Mobile.
During proof-of-concept testing, Virgin recorded an average 252
times performance improvement over its legacy Oracle solution.
Howard Watson, chief technology and information officer at
Virgin Media, said, “The project started at Telewest, where we had
a data warehouse in place to capture corporate data repositories
for regulatory compliance, network routing and telephony high usage
analysis.
“But, owing to the performance issues with the older
architecture, we were restricted to querying data specific to
international, mobile and premium rate calls for high usage
analysis. Now, with Netezza, we are able to analyse all call types
and run historical reports.”
Prior to the Netezza Performance Server arriving, the company
had outsourced the analysis of NTL telephony data. This is now
performed in-house, with a rapid return on hardware investment
expected. Watson said, “It is a huge step forward for our credit
services and revenue assurance teams to be able to interrogate
customer data in real time.”
The Netezza Performance Server platform stores, filters and
processes terabytes of data within a single unit, analysing only
the relevant information for each query. This allows the
Netezza Performance Server system to speed through processes.
Virgin continues to use BI tools from Informatica and Business
Objects, which are now integrated with the NPS platform.
Orange migrates to Netezza platform >>
Netezza website
>>
Virgin Media press office >>
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