One
of the most data intensive processes that must be carried
out by a Telecommunications operator is the analysis
of all the data regarding the use of the network services
that it provides. Telco business activity relies on
the information obtained from the data stored in the
Data Warehouses, and successful data management is
critical for the business.
ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) processes collect
data from several sources, cleanse and unify them,
and feed them to a data warehouse or database or to
another process to be analyzed. Today, the evolution
of digital-related processes, the implementation of
enterprise resource planning, and customer relationship
management systems challenge ETL processes because
the processing power required has increased and the
time needed to treat the data records and convert them
into useful business information must be shrunk beyond
what the implemented IT-infrastructure can handle.
Grid technology can bring the solution to currently
saturated ETL and other Telco processes. Generally,
the data managed by ETL processes are discrete, independent,
and self-contained units. When the data units are not
inter-dependent, the complex transformation rules can
be applied separately; they can be computed in parallel
among the existing computational resources, greatly
reducing the computational time cost. Besides managing
data, Grid Technology can be used in network planning & management,
datamining and datawarehousing, CDR and EDR analysis,
fraud detection, or audio and video format conversions.
Our projects with companies in the Telecommunications
sector have demonstrated that a Grid solution provides
better performance and robustness, that Grid solutions
are more efficient and profitable for volume-growing
processes, and that the ROI of a Grid deployment is
higher than the ROI for a traditional solution. Plus,
a Grid-enabled process is guaranteed to be finished
in time, to be carried-out despite possible execution
errors, to use all available resources, and to be cheaper
than other solutions. |
