Download PDF

IBM > Case Studies > Lightning-fast analytics boost network service levels, driving greater customer satisfaction

Lightning-fast analytics boost network service levels, driving greater customer satisfaction

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration

Applicable Industries

Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Use Cases

Predictive Maintenance
Real-Time Location System (RTLS)

Services

Software Design & Engineering Services
System Integration

The Challenge

Phact, a telecommunications service provider, needed to accelerate its big data analytics capabilities to support its telco clients serving millions of customers in a highly performance-sensitive industry. The company was previously replicating its main IBM DB2 database running on Linux to a separate Microsoft SQL Server database to enable analytics. However, this replication could take up to one minute to make operational data available for analytical processing—an unacceptable delay in telecoms terms, where every second counts. In addition to introducing this delay, this approach also offered limited performance when executing complex queries.

About The Customer

Phact is a one-stop-shop for software and hardware solutions, support and consultancy based in Venray, the Netherlands. The company provides specialist data integration and analytics services, and supplies business intelligence solutions to companies in all market segments. Among its clients are telecommunications companies serving millions of customers. These telco clients rely on Phact for rapid analysis of huge volumes of operational data to identify and resolve issues, ensuring customer satisfaction by maintaining competitive service levels.

The Solution

Phact migrated its telco service analytics applications from Microsoft SQL Server to IBM DB2 with BLU Acceleration. This enabled clients to run high-speed analytics alongside online transactions in the same database. The company upgraded its production landscape to IBM DB2 with BLU Acceleration without downtime. As the new functionality was already covered by the company’s existing DB2 license, Phact was able to deploy the new analytics capabilities without increasing its costs. By moving analytical workloads off the replica database onto IBM DB2, Phact streamlined its data management and dramatically increased the speed of insight.

Operational Impact

DB2 with BLU Acceleration enables up to 160 times faster insight—accelerating problem resolution and helping improve service reliability.
The use of column-organized tables eliminates the need for auxiliary indexes, simplifying both the initial setup and ongoing maintenance.
The new solution has reduced database size by more than 60 percent, which speeds up backup and recovery processes and reduces disk and memory costs for Phact.

Quantitative Benefit