British Telecom takes control of Amdocs CRM data growth to maintain service level agreements.

Need for database archiving

British Telecom (BT) is one of the world’s leading providers of telecommunications services and one of the largest private sector companies in Europe. Key business activities include local, long distance and international telecommunications services, mobile communications, Internet services and IT solutions.

BT relies on Amdocs CRM solutions to track, manage and maintain customer relationships. BT’s implementation of Amdocs CRM, known internally as “Bridge,” manages enterprise business operations and the IT infrastructure. This system supports more than 5,000 users and 140,000 customers, generating over one million cases per year. Bridge runs in the Sun® Solaris™ operating environment and manages all of BT’s desktop and server assets, including purchases and fault reporting.

BT recognized that accelerating database growth was gradually degrading response time. “We had already bought more storage and processors for the application, as the transaction rates increased,” said Robert Parker, Bridge Application Manager at BT. “Although the cost of disk is plunging, the costs were still significant, and there was still a database issue.”

Like most CRM applications, Amdocs CRM collects large volumes of customer and transaction data that is stored online, even though only a small percentage is needed to support daily operations. Storing historical data online consumes disk resources and, more importantly, impedes access to open cases – directly affecting service levels, productivity and profits.

Explosive data growth

As BT’s business expanded, the number of closed cases in the Bridge database continued to increase. The application was adding more than 5,000 new cases per day to a database already containing more than 1.2 million closed cases.

Over time, the application was adding anywhere from 12,000 to 20,000 cases daily. “In order to reduce database volume, we used a purging tool,” noted David Harley, CRM Chief Designer at British Telecom. “However, the tool was only capable of removing 200 to 600 closed cases daily, far too few compared to the backlog of closed cases and the increasing number of new cases each day.”

Finding and implementing a solution

In the search for an effective solution, British Telecom learned about IBM® Optim™. “We did a market search, and the Optim product was far above everything else,” said Parker.

“During the implementation phase, there were no major problems and only minimal technical training was required. BT was also the first implementation to integrate in the UNIX operating environment,” said Parker. “There was no transitional pain and full implementation was done without additional involvement. It was simple and straightforward.”

“From a service and support perspective, IBM’s customer service has been exemplary; responsive in both the managerial account side, as well as in technical support. Their development staff and support teams focus on commitment and delivery,” Parker concluded.

Optim is fully integrated with Amdocs CRM and understands the CRM’s complex database schema and unique data relationships. Companies can archive complete sets of rarely accessed customer data, based on user-specified criteria. Comprehensive archive, browse and restore capabilities are integrated within the Amdocs CRM workflow; yet, the actual archiving and data management tasks are transparent to agents and business users.

Effective database archiving

Optim has met and exceeded BT’s requirements for effective database archiving. “We were able to archive approximately 50,000 closed cases an hour and save the data to archives, where the data can be easily researched and restored when needed,” said Harley.

Archived data can be stored on a more cost-effective medium and made available to browse and restore in real time from within Bridge. The result? Performance, availability and reliability are greatly improved, and planned hardware expansion has been deferred – with the potential for significant cost savings.

“We see the implementation of IBM Optim as essential for the continued operation of Bridge, given the levels of data we are generating,” Harley concluded.

Archiving delivers on improved performance

“We have now had 18 months without excess data in the system, archiving daily,” said Parker. “Bridge supports IT for BT Group, and there are four internal IT helpdesks where any user of BT systems, internal or external, can report a problem or fault with the system.”

“We have a specific application service level agreement (SLA) on availability of the service,” Parker continued. “Bridge is a critical application that must be available 24/7 and the performance is measured and reported. Without database archiving, we would not have been able to meet the established SLAs. It would have been a catastrophe.”

“If we had not found Optim, we would have talked to Amdocs or done something on our own, which would have been costly. It would have been a full application project to develop an archiving solution, which would have almost certainly been more expensive,” commented Parker. “In terms of prospective solutions, the lower total cost of ownership (TCO) offered with Optim was far more superior,” said Parker.

Process Manager

BT and Amdocs jointly developed Process Manager, a utility that facilitates coding and automating each business process. However, implementing Process Manager resulted in an increased number of process instances saved in the Bridge database. “If left unaddressed, this growth would degrade the overall response time, and the Process Manager would become unusable. As weeks expanded to months, solving the problem was a high priority,” said Parker.

Because the database archiving technology can be easily customized, Optim was up to the task. “In terms of Process Manager instances, we are removing hundreds of thousands of process instances daily. Optim easily exceeds the daily transaction rate generated from Bridge usage,” Parker commented.

“Broadly speaking,” Parker said, “we archive 3 to 3.5 million closed cases every year and remove large volumes of Process Manager data. When you consider that creating a process instance occurs hundreds of times a day, the amount of data to be managed is significant.”

Essential for managing database growth

IBM Optim leads the market in providing comprehensive enterprise data management and database archiving capabilities. “We have the solution and don’t need to look any further to meet our future requirements with this new enterprise database archiving standard. In terms of opportunities for BT as a company, our emerging Center of Excellence will be the focal point,” said Parker.

“In adopting Amdocs CRM as a strategic solution for BT’s service management layer, application usage will increase across our enterprise, as will the need to archive historical CRM data,” said Parker. “As an architectural solution, Optim will be an integral component for archiving Bridge data that has high transaction rates and data retention requirements.”

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.