Uber Storage Meets Ultra Analytics

The ability to not only warehouse a plethora of data — literally petabytes — but to ultra-analyze that data is changing the way telecommunications service providers run their businesses as well as where they conduct some of their back-office operations.

“The back office and the front office have now merged in the data warehouse,” said Ronald Swift, vice president of cross industry solutions for Teradata, a company that sells end-to-end data warehousing and analytics.

Even with his intrinsic prejudice, Swift has a point. It’s really not worthwhile to just collect data and spit it back to aging, siloed back-office systems. It’s better to analyze within the warehouse and make the appropriate information available to a wide audience.

“I want a thousand people looking at the same data [so] they don’t go to meetings and argue about it; they’re working with the same data to come up with solutions,” Swift said.

Shelly Lazzaro, executive director of business intelligence at AT&T Mobility doesn’t necessarily agree that a thousand people should be looking at the data she’s collected in her Teradata warehouse, but she has no problem with that data being used by the right personnel, she said during the 2008 Teradata Partners Users Group Conference and Expo in Las Vegas.

“Our business, our sales force, our financial people, our marketing campaigns use the data. We’ve moved from being a data warehouse to being a mission-critical application for our company,” she said.

Lazzaro knows something about data warehousing. She’s been involved with it since BellSouth Mobility merged with Southwest Bell Wireless to become Cingular, and then again when Cingular merged with AT&T. She’ll no doubt be part of the effort when AT&T Mobile and AT&T merge their warehousing operations into one massive information pool in the future.

Data warehousing, she said, has come a long way from its inception at AT&T as a marketing tool. By tightening up the parameters of the marketing data the carrier got more from its investment by adding its financial reporting program to the Teradata platform.

“That was when we really turned the corner and said we’re going to get in here and swim with the big fish. We were going to be reporting to the street. We also do our ARPU and profit loss off the Teradata platform,” she said.