British Telecom manages continued data growth to improve Siebel operational efficiencies and support 24/7 service level requirements.

Why IBM?

IBM® Optim™ provides integrated, scalable, cross-platform capabilities to archive Siebel historical business and customer data from multiple base tables, preserve the referential integrity and retain access.


British Telecom keeps customers connected
British Telecom (BT) Group is one of the world’s leading providers of global telecommunications services, serving customers in Europe, the Americas and Asia Pacific. Principal activities include networked IT services, local, national and international telecommunications services and broadband products and services. BT is dominant in the UK with 90 percent of the market share. With an estimated 100,000 employees in the UK, US, Europe and the Far East, BT offers solutions and services to over 170 countries. BT’s strategy is to build long-term partnerships with its customers, while focusing on new-wave technology to support networked IT services, broadband, mobility and managed services.

BT Group consists principally of four lines of business. By market share, BT Retail is the UK’s largest communications service provider to the consumer and small business markets. BT Wholesale provides network services and solutions within the UK, serving over 500 communications companies, including other BT businesses. Openreach operates the physical assets of the local access and backhaul networks, providing Wholesale Line Rental and Local Loop Unbundled lines to communications providers. Lastly, BT Global Services provides global reach and a complete range of networked IT solutions and services to the top 10,000 global multi-site organizations worldwide.

To accommodate continued business growth and to improve efficiencies for customer service and sales, BT Retail implemented Oracle’s Siebel CRM applications to provide a consistent interface for all contact center staff through approximately 50 call centers. BT Retail’s service agents manage thousands of calls every day. This large and mature Siebel implementation had been in operation for less than four years and supported 22,000 users.

The OneView Siebel implementation supports legacy and the Consumer New Wave business, comprising domestic households and small business customers. The OneView system covers about 30 call centers, approximately 10,000 call center advisors and an average of 14,000 concurrent sessions. In contrast, the OneSiebel implementation supports BT Global Services and BT Wholesale customers that often require thousands of telecommunications assets (voice, broadband and data services) to support their own call centers. The OneSiebel system supports 14,000 users and 3,500 concurrent sessions.

Anticipating data growth challenges
The BT Siebel Architecture Team, responsible for maintaining application performance, knew that any increase in the volume of online transactions per day would intensify performance issues. The OneView system was defined to manage 7 terabytes (TB) of data and was currently approaching 3 TB. The number of concurrent sessions was expected to exceed 15,000, and the number of concurrent users was expected to increase to 12,000. Likewise, the OneSiebel system was defined to manage 800 megabytes (MB) of data and was managing 600 MB. Although the transaction volume for OneSiebel was typically lower than for OneView, the OneSiebel transactions were more complex.

Continued organic growth was projected to be significant, with Siebel Activities increasing by five percent each month and Orders increasing by three percent. In particular, the BT Siebel Architecture Team anticipated that production databases would increase dramatically over the next three years, as customer data was migrated from legacy systems. BT also anticipated compliance with Data Protection regulations and the need to protect the privacy of customer data that resides outside of the main production system.

The BT Siebel Architecture Team was well aware of the value of archiving as a method for managing data growth to improve service levels, having previously utilised an in house solution. However, BT had reached a performance threshold with this in-house approach. Going-forward, they would not be able to archive enough historical data to effectively manage incoming volumes of new data. The goal was to avoid any problems by implementing a Siebel-approved archiving solution. Being proactive, the Architecture Team sought to find a solution 12 to 18 months ahead of the time when they would reach pain thresholds.

Defining business and technical requirements
“I worked on the BT OneView implementation and was tasked with provisioning a strategic archiving solution for both the OneView and OneSiebel platforms,” said Stuart Globe, Leader of the OneView Performance Architecture Team at BT Retail. “Archiving was a challenging problem for us because of the large volumes of data we process each day – in the OneView project alone, we were archiving one to two million records per 24-hour period, and we knew that this volume could increase to 10 million records per 24-hour period within the year.”

“We considered building our own direct solution, but recognized the disadvantages associated with increased risk, higher costs and lack of support. We decided to discuss our requirements with Siebel Alliance partners that might be able to assist with this challenge,” said Globe. “We wanted to find the best archiving solution that was available for our specific requirements.”

“From a business perspective, we wanted to work with a vendor who was approved by Siebel. We also wanted a cost-effective solution that would not impact the 24x7 highly interactive operations of our Siebel systems. With global call centers, there is no batch window, archiving would have to be an online process,” Globe explained. “From a technical perspective, we wanted a cross-platform archiving solution that included the capability to export records from multiple base tables, as well as associated link and child tables to ensure referential integrity of the data. The quality of the archived data had to be guaranteed. We also needed relatively easy, on-request access to archived business and customer data. Lastly, the solution had to be scalable to support archive volumes estimated as high as 10 million records daily.”

Siebel suggested that BT evaluate the IBM® Optim™ Data Growth Solution for Siebel® CRM. Following a presentation to Stuart Smith, Director of Performance and Architecture, they decided to move to the next stage and determine how suitable, technically and economically, the Optim solution would be for BT.

Selecting the Optim solution
“In evaluating the initial presentation, we learned that the Optim solution was approved by Siebel to access the base tables directly, which was one of the primary components we were looking for, particularly with our desire to improve performance,” commented Smith.

IBM was invited in to validate Optim’s architecture and performance within BT’s environment and was successful in meeting all requirements. The validation engagement demonstrated Optim’s capabilities to be scalable for both online and batch window optimization. Optim also provided an intuitive development environment for the Siebel platform administrators and critically is technically validated as a solution by Siebel.

“In addition to demonstrating Optim’s integration with the Siebel application, the results of the validation engagement proved that Optim would allow us to achieve performance improvements beyond what we were experiencing in our existing Siebel Enterprise Integration Manager (EIM) archiving environment,” said Smith. “Because we recognized the value of database archiving and considered archiving to be a necessary component of our Siebel operations, we simply planned to replace our existing in-house archiving solution with the IBM Optim Data Growth Solution for Siebel CRM.” BT made the decision to purchase Optim within six weeks of the validation engagement.

Improving Siebel operational efficiencies
An important phase in the implementation enablement of archiving came through discussions with users and business sponsors. This proved to be valuable in defining both the scope of the archiving and the retrieval policies required by the wider user community. IBM’s Professional Services team focused on design and project consultation to propose a best practice methodology, and BT took advantage of these services to assist with the development and implementation and also utilised these services to train BT archiving administrators.

“We always had clarity and understanding about the adverse affects of continued data growth on our Siebel applications. We wanted to be proactive in having the archiving technology in place before we reached the critical threshold where we would experience the negative impact of data growth on our business activities,” said Globe. “We are now implementing Optim on both the OneView and OneSiebel platforms. We plan to archive Orders, Faults, Activities, Contacts and Audit Records by age and status, based on the requirements of our business users. The throughput using Optim for archive processing is four or more times faster than EIM. Implementing Optim to manage continued data growth has allowed us to ensure that Siebel operational efficiency meets service level requirements for customer service.”

Moving forward
After purchasing the Optim Data Growth Solution to support its Siebel database archiving requirements, BT Retail also purchased the IBM Optim solutions to improve Siebel test data management and protect privacy. Optim’s subsetting and data masking capabilities will allow BT Retail to build realistic development and testing environments, while complying with data privacy protection requirements. Another goal is to gain further acceptance among its business users by providing the Optim Archive Viewer™ component, which delivers transparent access to current and archived data in a single view.

“Once the users know that archived data is easily accessible, it will be easier to gain acceptance to increase the amount of data being archived,” said Globe. “We are just beginning to realize the benefits across the enterprise.”

About IBM Optim
IBM® Optim™ enterprise data management solutions focus on critical business issues, such as data growth management, data privacy compliance, test data management, e-discovery, application upgrades, migrations and retirements. Optim aligns application data management with business objectives to help optimize performance, mitigate risk and control costs, while delivering capabilities that scale across enterprise applications, databases and platforms. Today, Optim helps companies across industries worldwide capitalize on the business value of their enterprise applications and databases, with the power to manage enterprise application data through every stage of its lifecycle.

For more information
To learn more about IBM Optim enterprise data management solutions, contact your IBM sales representative or visit: www.optimsolution.com.