IBM Builds One of the World's Largest Data Warehouses for BT; 82 Terabyte Proof of Concept Using Single Database Secured Deal Over Proprietary Solution - Company Business and Marketing

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, Feb 14, 2000

British Telecommunications (BT) has invested (pound)5 million ($8 million) in phase one of a major customer business intelligence initiative based on IBM NUMA-Q servers. The implementation on completion will be one of the largest data warehouses in the world with over 13 terabytes of storage capacity. It will include a powerful and functionally rich integrated e-marketing software suite from Prime Response. The total solution provides BT with significant competitive advantage in terms of attracting new customers and building successful long-term relationships with existing ones.

As part of the procurement process and in order to ensure that the risk of the project was minimized, BT requested that IBM and EMC Corporation demonstrate performance, availability and scalability by building an 82 terabyte data warehouse running the Oracle 8i database.

This proof of concept, built by IBM and EMC at EMC's engineering facilities in Hopkinton, Mass., used BT data to provide typical volumes, thus ensuring a "real world" benchmark that demonstrated how manageable and powerful a single system solution can be for an enterprise-wide data warehouse in support of business demand.

"The BT proof-of-concept showed that NUMA-Q scales beyond what was previously thought possible with a single database instance," said Richard Winter, an expert on large databases and president of Winter Corporation, which performed an audit of the tests. "The NUMA-Q solution combined manageability with scalability while handling very large volumes of data staking a claim along the frontier of business intelligence."

Following the successful conclusion of the proof of concept and other evaluation activities, BT embarked on a major business transformation project, which embraces three key requirements for change. They are: the establishment of electronic channels and integration with other channels to market; Swift, a single customer repository for BT UK and; campaign management that will transform the way BT manages direct marketing in the UK.

Through the NUMA-Q architecture, the massive scalability of the customer repository will enable BT to consolidate the large volumes of existing data currently held in disparate databases throughout the organization. On this platform an application by Ab-Initio will extract, transform and load (ETL) customer and billing data across customer segments. The ETL function will manage files by taking customer data from BT's systems, combine customer information with billing information and share it with other applications and databases.

The IBM solution will also underpin the implementation of Prime Response's integrated e-marketing application, Prime@Vantage, supported by an Oracle database. This will give BT the ability to improve current campaigns through automation, enable more event-driven and opportunistic marketing, and facilitate co-ordinated multi-channel delivery.

Phil Dance, applications delivery manager at BT, comments "For BT to maintain the leading position in the market and improve relationships with customers, we need to intelligently use the large databases of information to develop customer focused activities, particularly as Internet usage grows and e-commerce develops. The proof of concept has reassured us that the data warehouse is flexible and robust enough to handle the job."

"The ability to address very large data sets is a key to achieving real customer focus in an e-business environment. BT is again demonstrating leadership in deploying technology on behalf of the customer," said Ian Miller, vice-president of products and solutions for the IBM Web Server division "NUMA-Q offers next generation technologies like massive scaling of processors and I/O and integral fiber channel storage area networking that brings power to a new generation of applications."

Frank Farese, EMC's Vice President of Global Alliances, added, "EMC Enterprise Storage systems and software are the information foundation for the world's largest data warehouses. Leading companies, like BT, are maximizing the value of their information through consolidated data warehouses based on EMC's proven solutions. EMC's Symmetrix systems and software allow data warehouses to scale, while ensuring that the information is properly protected, managed and always available."

The proof-of-concept for BT proved that the platform combining an IBM NUMA-Q server with 48 Intel Xeon processors, 82 terabytes of EMC Symmetrix Enterprise Storage and a 35 terabyte Oracle 8i database was more than capable of delivering a stable, scalable, manageable environment for the largest Data Warehouse applications.

NUMA-Q servers are the leader in scalable Intel-based server solutions for e-business with industry leading Non-Uniform Access (NUMA) architecture and I/O technologies. NUMA-Q and NUMACenter platforms are optimized for the scalability availability and manageability requirements of large and rapidly growing e-business infrastructures. There are more than 10,000 NUMA-Q installations worldwide, including some of the world's largest and most sophisticated business intelligence, CRM and ERP environments. FMI: http://www.ibm.com/servers.>

COPYRIGHT 2000 EDGE Publishing

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group