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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