Providing mobile phone access to over four million citizens of the Punjab and Karnataka states of India, Spice Communications Ltd (an associate of Idea Cellular Ltd) brings the world a little closer, even for those living in largely rural areas.  With much of the cost driven out of pre-paid and post-paid calling plans, mobile access is now a reality.  Growth rates in the past years have been faster than anywhere else in the world, adding six million new subscribers a month.  Mobile phone ubiquity is no longer just the domain of large cities, but of small towns and villages.

Sustaining growth and service to its customers, Spice Communications Ltd (an Associate of Idea Cellular Ltd) grew at a similarly paced rate adding a new Spice cellular subscriber each second of every working day.  And, through the course of doing business, phone companies collect enormous quantities of raw information on customer usage patterns. The bulk of the data originates in call detail records (CDRs) that are created for customer billing and financial transfers between telecom companies. Most of the information comes from Spices own customers with each and every call, but Spice also receives data from other telecommunications companies as those calls pass through the Spice infrastructure.  In short, Spice was adding substantial amounts of data to its internal systems, with little time or resources to bolster its infrastructure.  
Maintaining a 12 terabyte data warehouse populated with three months of customer call data, Spice runs advanced multi-dimensional analytics on the information to identify sources of revenue loss and uncover gaps in its service offerings.  At a micro level, Spice maintains this data to ensure customer loyalty by offering relevant and targeted solutions for individual subscribers, based on identified use patterns.  For the larger view, this allows Spice to develop and deliver cost-effective promotions, mobile access and opportunity to the Punjab and Karnataka states.
Profit margins are thin in the highly competitive telecommunications industry and even small degrees of efficiency improvements add up and fund investments in services and basic infrastructure. The telecommunications industry is one of the most challenging and data-intensive marketplaces in existence.  Competition is relentless, and management has to constantly make on-the-spot decisions based on the available information.  

Reinventing an exhausted database system, Spice is ready to counter competitive offers and provide more options without endangering profitability and introducing additional costs. With more data Spice can model different scenarios, and act towards the greater organizational and customer benefit.  The rejuvenated system capability has also spawned a new batch of what-if questionssomething that was previously impossible.  
Keeping to its promise of affordable access to millions, Spice developed a sophisticated analysis system to manage massive amounts of transaction data, while keeping costs at an absolute minimum. 

Spice Communicationss success brought its own set of challenges, chiefly, managing internal systems to assure consistent delivery and to meet customer service level expectations.  Explosive business and data growth began to not only erode at both of those key elements, but threatened to drive associated costs skyward.  The need for a centralized, accessible and cost-effective data warehouse solution was apparent.  And while the need was clear, the pathway to success less so.
The data warehouse needed to address the requirements of the marketing, finance, customer service, sales, and engineering departments. The current system was stressed to capacity, with users often unable to extract even rudimentary information  it was not unusual for the system to be unavailable to concurrent users.
With a ten-fold increase in data, the inability to analyze data limited the companys decision-making process. Not only were ad-hoc, what-if queries out of the question, the standard queries that monitoring the pulse of the company were getting unwieldy. Around that time, to even further raise the stakes, the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of India imposed a stringent set of information reporting requirements that were designed to elevate telecommunication operational standards and enhance the countrys infrastructure. It was clear that the IT team needed to make key changes in order to continue Spices success.
The solution lie in a new architecture, warranting a column-based analytics approach with Sybase IQ.  This design serves to provide access and query capabilities across very large data sets without the attendant performance degradation.  This system also streamlines maintenance functions like backups, transfers, and redundancy, ensuring continuous availability for users.  
Specifically, the new system allows for multi-dimensional analysis across millions of customer records to ensure appropriate loyalty programs and revenue enhancing opportunities.  Removing the need to develop summary tables, in the new de-normalized format, tables are stored once, and allows joins across any number of tables.  So users access all relevant data for all queries and reports.  This also dramatically reduces the workload and number of call tickets to the IT team, as users are empowered to produce simple reports or highly complex queries themselves.  

Additionally, because the company needs to maintain third party systems for external source data collection, Spice uses Sybase Replication Server with DirectConnect / ETL tool to move that data into Sybase IQ.  This infrastructure takes advantage of the existing operational systems without new hardware or introducing a system change.

The technology was key to not only ITs performance, but was at the very core of Spices ability to serve its customers.  The IT team developed the new system with specific criteria based on expectations of growth and service level requirements.  The new system provides optimal performance to leverage the data captured for business intelligence, fast data loads to minimize user impact, preserves existing architecture with an open solution and reduces data storage space to directly impact costs and management. 

Yes

Yes

Direct access to meaningful information is probably the most significant benefit of the  Spice Communications Ltd (an Associate of Idea Cellular Ltd)system.  Users, who previously were completely reliant on IT resources to develop and run complex analyses are self-empowered with an easy-to-use system.  There is also no limit to the kinds of types of analysis that can be conducted on the new system  and conducted without risk to operational performance.

Management is now able to make better-informed decisions using trustworthy and updated information.  And IT hardware requests to maintain an underperforming system are eliminated, allowing capital expense to be funneled into new and innovative projects.  

The IT staff is relieved of the seemingly endless report or query building efforts, providing better focus and improved resource optimization.  Storage requirements are decreased, and load times now fit within business-acceptable timeframes.

At the end of the chain of benefits are the customers, who benefit from improved service levels from their telecommunications provider, recognition as loyal customers, and recipients of targeted offers tailored to identified use patterns.  And perhaps most importantly, customers benefit from driving the cost out of the process, allowing for a more accessible, available connection to the world around them.

The Spice implementation allows a multitude of users, all with different perspectives and tasks, to access a singular, trusted data source for projects and business initiatives.  So across the organization, data is consistently presented, free of contention issues and independent of source system silos.  Customers receive relevant, targeted information and offers, allowing them to personalize their service experience according to their needs and price thresholds.  Creating an environment for broad access and connectivity, Spice has evolved the data model for telecommunications into an integrated, holistic and performing system.  Internal users are pleased with the results, and can more efficiently deliver  and measure  programs that benefit Spice and its broad base of customers.

We are now able to retrieve data from almost any source, load it faster, roll out new features quicker, and generally be more creative and innovative in our product development environment. We have been able to equip our business users to feel confident in executing ad hoc analyses, which in turn has reduced the load on IT. Weve reached the point where our users just couldnt live without their BI.

Serving as a model of efficiency and smart data management across Spice , the analytics system is one of the best systems in the company.  Using the term exploiting in the best possible way, the system reduces extraction time, improves cost efficiencies in storage and maintenance and delivers more information faster to all constituents.  A Spice Communications Ltd IT manager states, If we were to remove this system, our business would come to a halt.

The previous system limitations allowed only three months worth of data to be stored online, with longer views impossible to access by users without requesting a tape drive extraction.  The new system now provides Spice with 13 months of current and online data, providing a richer set of information for longer-term, more meaningful analysis, and improved decision-making.  

The implementation for the project took a scant three months, illustrating the Spice teams preparedness and data mapping efforts.  Each data source was identified, mapped to the central warehouse, and integrated into a seamless whole.  Data definitions were developed and uniformly applied across multiple business units and users to assure consistency in references and metadata.  Ad hoc queries could then be developed directly by the users, without IT intervention or translation, and reports could be run on demand to suit management or immediate business requirements.  

With data growing by leaps and bounds, the system continues to deliver without requiring a DBA to manage and oversee the database.  In an environment where every bit of data translates into company revenue and customer intelligence, a self-running database system is unheard of  yet possible.

Users are now armed with a rich data source to derive meaningful information from massive amounts of raw data, allowing them to actually develop and conduct queries that previously only existed in their dreams.

While the need was clear  with reports timing out, queries withdrawn, and load windows creeping into operational hours  Spices own management presented the largest hurdle for the project.  The challenges lie in convincing management of the relatively radical solution, and going with a vendor that was unheard of within the organization.  

In short, management required proof.  Through a rigorous on-site proof-of-concept, the IT team established that the new system could meet the business requirements with faster query speed, phenomenal compression ratios, and cost-savings.

Once implemented, Spices management, as a beneficiary of the new solutions capabilities, were quick to support the effort  seeing first-hand as reports that used to take three to four hours generate in minutes.

Funding for additional storage and hardware was always a challenge, but that became one of the primary drivers for the new solution.  The IT team was consistently met with resistance as they campaigned for additional funds to expand capacity of the previous system.  So while the cost-effectiveness of the solution needed to be proven, this justification was helped by the reduction in capacity expense requests.

Exceeded

The new system at Spice  serves as a model throughout the organization as a testament to smart technology use, efficient design, and optimization of existing resources.  After a year of faultless production use, the analytics system produces massive amounts of useful information directly to users without one rupee of additional investment.

The IT team is now considered one of the more successful groups within the company, and are often tapped for expertise and insight for projects in other areas.

Given the dramatic need for change, the new system was adopted almost immediately.  Existing queries could be performed without interruption at speeds of 10X previous returns, storage requirements were reduced by 50%, and new analysis could be not only contemplated, but executed.