CASE STUDY - TEOCO Increases Performance and Customer Satisfaction
- By John Devolites
- May 9, 2007
Commentary by John Devolites, Vice President and General Manager, Communications and Entertainment Solutions, TEOCO
About TEOCO
Founded in 1994, TEOCO (The Employee Owned Company) is a leading provider of strategic business solutions to large and small enterprises. TEOCO’s Communications and Entertainment Solutions group is the premier provider of network cost and revenue management solutions to the communications industry. TEOCO combines the strength of its renowned software applications with in-depth auditing expertise to achieve unrivaled market penetration and industry leadership in the communications space.
Business Problem
As continued competitive pressures drove consolidation in the communications industry, TEOCO found many of their customers merging together to create larger enterprises with sharply increased transaction volumes. Originally, TEOCO’s systems were designed to support up to $1 billion in monthly billing transaction volume and even less for reporting. However, with increasing customer transaction volumes, the company was experiencing substantial run-time issues and large report issues that resulted in delayed customer response. While the transaction processing was still adequate, the reporting delays were significant and continually degrading.
“Just to give you a very simple overview: AT&T merged with SBC, raising the transactions from $1 billion worth to $2 billion worth per month. Now, with the addition of Bell South and Cingular, there’s another $600 to $700 million of transactions per month, resulting in our application processing nearly $3 billion in transactions per month, but our systems were designed only to handle things in the billion dollars with even less range for reporting,” says John Devolites. To better serve its customers and drive competitive advantage, TEOCO decided that an alternate data warehouse architecture and environment must be implemented.
The Solution
TEOCO did its research and chose to evaluate data warehouse appliances on three major components, the first of which was performance. Devolites says, “At the top end of the spectrum we wanted something that would run at least 40 to 100 times faster on the same types of queries that we were dealing with today on Oracle.”
We basically built up 5 terabytes of data to be able to run our benchmarksagainst. With the DATAllegro appliance, across the board, we saw a 50–100 times performance improvement on the queries that we were running. What that means is that a query that was taking 20–22 hours to run, ran in minutes!
John Devolites, TEOCO
TEOCO set out to find a vendor that could offer a flexible, scalable, yet cost-effective solution. Therefore, a proof of concept was essential to the company’s ability to validate the reliability and performance of any data warehouse appliance. “We basically built up 5 terabytes of data to be able to run our benchmarks against. Those benchmarks were the same that we were running on the Oracle side of the equation. With the DATAllegro appliance, across the board, we saw a 50 to 100 times performance improvement on the queries that we were running. What that means is that a query that was taking 20 to 22 hours to run, ran in minutes,” comments Devolites.
Tangible Benefits
By implementing a data warehouse appliance, TEOCO is now able to mine data in innovative ways. Devolites says, “So this new technology allows us to mine this information in a way we’ve never seen it before. We can look at in-office and call routing patterns. We can look at fraud. We can look at different things that we have never before been able to audit for a communications carrier.
“For one of the carriers, we ran through a whole series of cell phone billing information and identified their top 100 users. Within the top hundred users, there were 10 with over 25,000 minutes per month. Because of the DATAllegro appliance, we were able to look at data in a way that we’ve never been able to before and determine that it was a cab company in Seattle abusing a service plan. Before DATAllegro, there would have been no other way to determine that information,” says John Devolites.
This article originally appeared in the issue of .