Elisa Mobiilsideteenused

Dynamic Growth in Telecommunications
Elisa is a leading supplier of mobile and fixed-line telecommunications services in the Republic of Estonia. The company has an excellent track record of growth and innovation since being established in 1995 as a subsidiary of Elisa Corporation, the largest telecommunications company in Finland and the first in the world to operate a GSM network for mobile phones. Elisa Mobiilsideteenused has grown to over 270,000 customers, serving approximately 25 per cent of the Estonian population.

During the past ten years, the company has expanded rapidly responding to the huge opportunities and dynamic growth in telecommunications. Within the company, many separate systems were developed to support particular activities in individual departments. These included isolated systems to handle customer relationship management, billing and network services. Although each of these systems touched on the same customers and the same services, they did not communicate or share data, and often contained information that was inconsistent.

The lack of a single source of accurate data was slowing decision-making, and affecting the quality of service Elisa was able to give to customers. Several of the existing systems had been developed internally, including customer relationship management and billing systems. It was difficult to integrate these systems, which was constraining operational flexibility within the company, particularly with regard to customer service and billing tariffs which are becoming increasingly important in winning and retaining customers.

When Elisa Mobiilsideteenused decides to introduce new tariffs for mCommerce or SMS services, for example, it needs to capture data from network switches and integrate that information with customer relationship management and billing systems. Data from network switches is also essential to support intercompany cross billing of services between network providers.

Managing Large Data Volumes
Elisa Mobiilsideteenused recognised that the company needed a single, accurate source of information that everyone could access. The IT department took care in selecting the right tools and the right supplier. Very large volumes of data would need to be imported, regularly refreshed and managed, and the chosen solution would need to be very flexible and highly productive in handling a wide variety of ad hoc queries and reporting. Telecommunications is a fast-changing market where it is impossible to predict from day to day what information will be requested or what analyses required.

"We looked at the options, and decided to build a data warehouse using Sybase IQ." said Roman Ustitš, Systems Specialist at Elisa Mobiilsideteenused. "Pilot tests showed that this software has the capacity to handle very large data volumes and deliver query performance many times higher than traditional transaction databases. We have also found that compression techniques in Sybase IQ reduce storage requirements by more than half."

Rapid Implementation
A local Sybase partner, Microlink, delivered the technology platform whilst Elisa's IT staff in Estonia, together with the Finnish arm of Elisa, designed the data warehouse. They established the table structures and set up procedures to import data from some 20 existing systems, including systems handling billing, customer service and network management. Elisa Mobiilsideteenused also implemented a Business Objects reporting front-end through which users can make their queries and generate reports.

Data structures within Business Objects are mapped to sophisticated indexing routines within Sybase IQ which allow information to be located and extracted from the data warehouse in an extremely flexible and productive manner.

Design and development of the data warehouse was rapid. The whole project took less than four months. Elisa Mobiilsideteenused is now self-sufficient in the use of Sybase IQ and has been impressed with how simple the software is to maintain and administer.

"We used to have 20 places where information was stored. Now with Sybase IQ we have one," Ustitš explained. "We don't need to go looking for information, or write code to extract it. Everything is at the users' fingertips. Information that was previously hidden or inactive is now readily available to users and adds real value to our business."

High Performance Data Warehouse
There are 30 users of the data warehouse within Elisa Mobiilsideteenused, representing almost every department. Initially Sybase IQ was implemented in a Microsoft Windows environment. However, data volumes have grown to over 1.1 terabytes and the company has migrated its data warehouse to a Sun Solaris platform to provide increased speed and enhanced fault-tolerance.

Because of the pace of change within the telecommunications business, Elisa Mobiilsideteenused chooses to refresh data within Sybase IQ regularly during the working day, rather than overnight as with most other data warehouse applications.

"A big benefit of the high performance of Sybase IQ is that it allows us to upload data and handle user queries and reports simultaneously. Sybase IQ is the only system that would allow us to do that," Ustitš enthused. "Considering the large volumes of data that we have, the performance of Sybase IQ is very impressive and helps us keep everyone equipped with the most up to date information."

Powerful Information Platform
Sybase IQ has become the focal point of information throughout Elisa Mobiilsideteenused, and houses a huge variety of information on network traffic, customer relations and billing. Inevitably, opening access to large volumes of detailed information has been reflected in the complexity and variety of queries and reports requested by users.

Users get the information they require, at speeds they could scarcely imagine, because Sybase IQ is designed as an analytical tool rather than a transactional database. It uses patented indexing technology to interrogate very large volumes of data and is designed to give ultra-fast responses to complex queries.

In line with the telecommunications industry in which the company operates, Elisa Mobiilsideteenused's business is changing all the time. Rarely a month goes by without new tables being created or new sources of data being added to the data warehouse.

"Sybase IQ is fast, productive and very easy for us to manage and administer," concludes Ustitš. "It has given us a powerful information platform with the flexibility and performance to ensure we stay ahead in a very competitive and fast-moving market."