Overview
One of the largest mobile operators in Latin America depends on insights from billions of records it collects daily to deliver telephony and value-added services to mobile users and business customers.
- Precise and timely billing reconciliation is critical, with millions in monthly revenue from retail channels at stake.
- Reconciliation speed and accuracy also affects the ability to provide quality customer and partner services and to manage costs, expenses, and revenue.
- Network efficiency depends on access to up-to-date operational data.
- 5G adoption is expected to create a 10X-50X increase in data volume (up to several petabytes), presenting challenges as well as opportunities.
Netezza can’t keep up
Previously, the company used a Netezza data warehouse on top of a data lake to analyze customer data for use by finance and other departments–for example, to reconcile revenue from prepaid SIM cards sold by retailers. But with an 800% growth in data volume over time, that platform could no longer keep up with business needs:
- Netezza struggled to process more than 1 billion records per day.
- Query latency and system availability were highly unreliable.
- The inability to quickly validate SIM card revenue and reconcile payments to retailers put millions in monthly revenue at risk.
Modernizing the platform with Yellowbrick
The company evaluated several data analytics platforms, with most showing only modest performance improvements and some promising a risky migration process. Yellowbrick was the exception: its performance at scale, compatibility with existing tools, reliability, and ease of use were superior. It was also critical that Yellowbrick’s integration partner, Appliance Technologies, could take full responsibility for the end-to-end project, from migration to implementation, to service and support. Today, approximately 100 business-critical applications are utilizing the Yellowbrick data platform.
Results Include:
- Ad hoc queries complete 20X faster, with hundreds of concurrent users accessing six months of transactions for deeper, more accurate insights to support upsell and cross-sell
- Operational reports now update in real time, instead of in hours or even days, contributing to more efficient infrastructure utilization
- 8X more data can be ingested for immediate analysis (up to 1TB per day), enabling analysis of fresher data for use cases like fraud detection
- Revenue reconciliation now happens in real time instead of batch, safeguarding millions in monthly revenue that were at risk
- Millions saved in data center costs, thanks to a 20X reduction in required rack space