|
|
 |
|
|
|
Interoute
Interoute, One of Europe's Leading Telecommunications Companies, Uses MicroStrategy Software to Underpin its Operations and Improve Customer Relations
 |
|
The Telecoms market is one of the fastest moving in history. Since UK deregulation in the 1980s, the market has delivered a new generation of companies offering a wide range of new products and services. |
Interoute, one of Europe's leading telecommunications companies, is using MicroStrategy's Business Intelligence solutions to underpin its operations, improving customer understanding to reduce churn while simultaneously improving quality and reducing operational costs. The company has also developed an extranet providing access to the data warehouse via the Web for its reseller customers. Interoute Telecommunications is a pan-European telecommunications group and one of the fastest growing in the world. Operating in 11 countries throughout Europe as well as North America, the group offers a wide range of communication services to business customers, residential users and other carriers. The group operates its own international network with gateway switches in London and New York and continues to build national networks in selected countries throughout Europe. Interoute has more interconnects in the UK than any other carrier except BT and has full operating licences and interconnect agreements in most major European countries. Interoute is a privately owned company with annual revenues in excess of $300 million and over 1300 employees worldwide.
The market is fiercely competitive, with established global players facing the regular arrival of new local market entrants looking to leverage the new deregulated opportunities. This creates intense pressure to constantly tailor products, services, costs and line quality in a bid to win customers to a specific carrier network.
Interoute embarked on a Europe-wide Business Intelligence strategy with MicroStrategy in 1998. Prior to this the company was running handcrafted queries across a copy of its billing system. Explains Niall Mackey, European Business Applications Manager at Interoute, "MicroStrategy WebT, MicroStrategy AgentT and MicroStrategy NarrowcasterT provide the functionality and flexibility to support our business intelligence needs."
Working closely with consultants from MicroStrategy, Interoute created a data warehouse running on Microsoft SQL Server 7. Call Data Record (CDR) information is taken from the telephone switches, mediated, matched and rated and loaded into the data warehouse. The information is available to Interoute staff for analysis within 15 minutes of the call occurring. The company has centralised its warehouse in London, with information from switches across Europe feeding into a data warehouse now holding in excess of a terabyte of data.
The warehouse is accessed by staff across Europe through MicroStrategy Web. "This is an elegant, cost-effective solution," says Mackey. "With no client side software to support or local database expertise required, we have been able to roll out MicroStrategy across Europe very easily - even to the small subsidiaries in countries where deregulation has not yet occurred." The centralised approach also provides management with a total view of the network.
Interoute currently has some 160 users of the system across Europe, from management to sales and marketing, account managers, billing and engineering. "Users have really taken to MicroStrategy," he says. "They love its web feel and the value of the information they now access has inspired them to create their own reports and really utilise the technology."
This Business Intelligence application is making a huge improvement in the way Interoute manages its business - allowing us to improve our relationships with customers and have better control of our operational costs
To date, the company has gained benefits in a significant number of areas including network performance, margin analysis and fraud analysis. "At the highest level, the CEO has total visibility of the profitability of the company across different regions and different products," Mackey says.
"Traffic monitoring is very important," he adds. "With almost real time traffic analysis we can see the state of the network - a level of visibility that is critical to the success of a telecoms organisation." The system also monitors such things as answer sieze ratio (ASRs) which in many countries is a regulatory need. "In some countries your licence can be impacted if the ASR falls below a certain percent," he says. Since Interoute uses other carrier networks as well as its own it is important to be able to constantly monitor the level of service to ensure the ASRs are not being compromised.
One of the anachronisms of the market is the incidence of looping. This occurs when calls get passed from one carrier to the next, each utilising different pre-negotiated rates for the call. "Calls can end up looping round and round between several carriers. This clogs up the switch and costs us money especially if calls are to high rate destinations such as India or South America," he says. "We use MicroStrategy Narrowcaster to raise an alert - via email or voicemail - whenever this happens, ensuring Interoute can take immediate action to stop the looping. This is saving us a significant amount of money," he confirms.
Since MicroStrategy Web has been made available, its use has broadened extensively. For example, although the engineering department has its own fault ticketing system, it is actually using analysis of the CDR data for fault management and network testing. It is also supporting capacity monitoring, enabling engineers to reroute calls to other carriers when networks get busy.
Interoute is also using historical information within the data warehouse to automate its network design - previously a black art. "In the past we used spreadsheets to work out how many switches and trunks were needed in a country to serve the expected demand," he says. "Now we are modeling on historical information, taking feeds from the data warehouse and conducting 'what if' analysis on potential network designs. The results are far more accurate and enable us to justify the chosen network design," he says.
Interoute has also used the Business Intelligence infrastructure to provide an extranet to its resellers. "Resellers now have secure access to the data warehouse providing information about their customers including traffic monitoring and performance," says Mackey. "They love it and this service is a real competitive differentiator for Interoute."
For example, with near time analysis Interoute's premium rate resellers can assess the performance of their lines, close down poorly performing lines immediately and replace with another product - saving them up to a week in loss making lines. He confirms, "Resellers are definitely opting to use Interoute over other carriers as a result of this system."
Looking forward to the next phase of development, the company plans to open up this service both to the public using a Business to Consumer model (B2C) and to potentially re-badge the extranet access on behalf of its resellers, allowing them to provide this service under their logo for their customers.
Interoute has already begun to significantly expand the information held in the data warehouse. In addition to implementing a new billing system - Alcatel Calculus, the company has opted for the Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application. Information from Siebel, finance, fraud, quality of service and network management applications will enable Interoute to assess new opportunities for improving revenue and customer retention. "We aim to fully understand all our customers needs and offer them the services that most suit their lifestyle, including such things as Web and WAP based self-service facilities."
"For example, if we increase the quality of service to India at a certain price how will that effect customers? Will they make more calls?" Mackey says, "We will also ascertain which customers are the most valuable and how they react to campaigns through campaign monitoring."
Critically, "For the first time we are going to be undertaking these queries on a cross Europe basis," he says. "In the past we have operated on a country by country basis, with products specific to each country. Now, with the new billing application, we will offer corporate customers one bill for the whole of Europe covering all their subsidiaries." Customers will also be able to monitor this information via the Web and, once Alcatel Calculus is implemented, pay their bills over the Web.
There are already almost 200 users of the data warehouse and Mackey believes that over the next year the tools will become a standard part of the Interoute desktop. He says, "We are setting up MicroStrategy InfoCenterT at the moment and planning to target senior managers: the ability to send messages for reports to mobile telephones is very powerful and will be a valuable management tool."
Interoute is currently upgrading its data centre, based on Compaq hardware running Windows NT, to allow 2 million customers to access the data warehouse. "We want to be able to scale up quickly," he says. "We expect the data warehouse to be up to 5 terabytes by the end of 2000."
To date, he confirms that Interoute has gained significant financial benefits from fraud reduction and increased network efficiency. "We have also saved time on customer queries since they now have self-service access via the extranet," he confirms.
He concludes, "This Business Intelligence application is making a huge improvement in the way Interoute manages its business. The telecoms industry is information intensive, it changes fast and it can be difficult to keep up. We now have a management information system within the company, allowing us in turn to improve our relationships with customers and have better control of our operational costs."
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
The market is fiercely competitive, with established global players facing the regular arrival of new local market entrants looking to leverage the new deregulated opportunities. This creates intense pressure to constantly tailor products, services, costs and line quality in a bid to win customers to a specific carrier network.
|
|
|
|
|
| |
Interoute embarked on a Europe-wide Business Intelligence strategy with MicroStrategy in 1998. Prior to this the company was running handcrafted queries across a copy of its billing system. Explains Niall Mackey, European Business Applications Manager at Interoute, "MicroStrategy Web™, MicroStrategy Agent™ and MicroStrategy Narrowcaster™ provide the functionality and flexibility to support our business intelligence needs." |
|
|
|
|
| |
This Business Intelligence application is making a huge improvement in the way Interoute manages its business - allowing us to improve our relationships with customers and have better control of our operational costs
To date, the company has gained benefits in a significant number of areas including network performance, margin analysis and fraud analysis. Niall Mackey, European Business Applications Manger at Interoute says, "At the highest level, the CEO has total visibility of the profitability of the company across different regions and different products." |
|
|
|
