Uber Storage Meets Ultra Analytics

The next step was about as scary as adding financial numbers to the mix: paying sales reps’ commissions using warehouse data.

“I was so nervous about that because there’s nothing worse than to get somebody’s paycheck wrong,” Lazzaro said. “We did it. We launched. And we pay over $2 billion annually in commissions. It’s a huge deal for us to pay all those from the warehouse.”

AT&T also started to use something that Swift calls the 21st Century part of data warehousing: instant analytics. “In the Active Data Warehouse (ADW) we can look at what’s going on today, [what went on] yesterday and even predict tomorrow, so we [can] do things today that reflect opportunity in the future,” he said.

Opportunity is the reason sales folks wake up in the morning so that group wanted to use some of the exact same data from the financial reporting but with a different spin. We built a daily sales report,” Lazzaro said.

AT&T also launched a sales dashboard that sits on top of Teradata, providing instant access to information. “It’s truly magnificent the way it will allow us to put the information into our store managers’ hands to give them the power to know what’s selling, what’s not. It’s one of those flagship-type things,” she said.

Data warehousing even helped AT&T winnow customers who weren’t necessarily good for the bottom line. The warehouse-based Account Level Profitability Project determined customers who spend most of their time roaming — costing AT&T more than it was bringing in.

“Basically, we go in and fire bad customers; we say we don’t really want you, we want you to go to Verizon or we want you to go to Sprint because you cost us money,” Lazzaro said. “We have saved hundreds of millions of dollars to the bottom line by implementing this application and it’s growing. That project alone paid for our warehouse three or four times over.”

In the end, the warehouse is part of a new telecom paradigm that delivers data collection and analysis on demand to a multitude of end users.

“When we started doing this we had 10 million subs. We grew to 73 million, then updated numbers weekly, then nightly and sometimes intra-day,” Lazzaro said. “Our business has grown so complex that we really have to be there ahead of the game so that we’re there when they come to us for business.”