Telecommunications
Posts about database and analytic technologies applied to the telecommunications industry, especially in call detail record (CDR) applications. Related subjects include:
Some Netezza customer metrics
From the conference call based on Netezza’s July, 2008 Q1, as of the end of Q1:
- There are now 191 Netezza customers.
- 18 of those were new.
- 78% of Netezza’s business was in North America and 22% was international.
- Netezza operates in 10 countries.
- “The top 4 vertical markets represented approximately 75% of our business, with those markets being telcos, retail, financial services, and the analytic service provider segment. “
- One analytic service provider was greater than 10% of revenue for the quarter, and is expected to keep buying a lot in subsequent quarters. Also, one analytic service provider standardized on Netezza. I’m guessing that’s the same customer.
- “We ended the quarter with 45 [quota] carrying teams made up of a sales rep and a systems engineer and our plan is to continue to hire direct sales teams at the pace of 3 to 5 per quarter every quarter. These direct reps accounted for 85% of the business while the indirect activity was 15% this quarter.”
| Categories: Application areas, Data mart outsourcing, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Market share and customer counts, Netezza, Telecommunications | 1 Comment |
Teradata’s major vertical markets in 2007
From a May, 2008 earnings conference call transcript:
- telecommunication, media and entertainment industry is 28%;
- financial services is 24%;
- retail is 19% of our revenues last year;
- manufacturing 9%;
- government 7%;
- travel and transportation 6%;
- and healthcare 5%.
| Categories: Application areas, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Telecommunications, Teradata | Leave a Comment |
Data warehouse appliance power user TEOCO
If you had to name super-high-end users of data warehouse technology, your list might start with a few retailers, credit data processors, and telcos, plus the US intelligence establishment. Well, it turns out that TEOCO runs outsourced data warehouses for several of the top US telcos, making it one of the top data warehouse technology users around.
A few weeks ago, I had a fascinating chat with John Devolites of TEOCO. Highlights included:
- TEOCO runs a >200 TB DATAllegro warehouse for a major US telco. (When we hear about a big DATAllegro telco site that’s been in production for a while, that’s surely the one they’re talking about.)
- TEOCO runs around 450 TB total of DATAllegro databases across its various customers. (When Stuart Frost blogs of >400 TB “systems,” that may be what he’s talking about.)
- TEOCO likes DATAllegro better than Netezza, although the margin is now small. This is mainly for financial reasons, specifically price-per-terabyte. When TEOCO spends its own money without customer direction as to appliance brand, it buys DATAllegro.
- TEOCO runs at least one 50 TB Netezza system — originally due to an acquisition of a Netezza user — with more coming. There also is more DATAllegro coming.
- TEOCO feels 15-30 concurrent users is the current practical limit for both DATAllegro and Netezza. That’s greater than it used to be.
- Netezza is a little faster than DATAllegro on a few esoteric queries, but the difference is not important to TEOCO’s business.
- Official price lists notwithstanding, TEOCO sees prices as being in the $10K/TB range. DATAllegro’s price advantage has shrunk greatly, as others have come down to more or less match. However, since John stated his price preference for DATAllegro as being in the present tense, I presume the price match isn’t perfect.
- Teradata was never a serious consideration, for price reasons.
- In the original POC a few years ago, the incumbent Oracle — even after extensive engineering — couldn’t get an important query down under 8 hours of running time. DATAllegro and Netezza both handled it in 2-3 minutes. Similarly, Oracle couldn’t get the load time for 100 million call detail records (CDRs) below 24 hours.
- Applications sound pretty standard for telecom: Lots of CDR processing — 550 million/day on the big DATAllegro system cited above. Pricing and fraud checking. Some data staging for legal reasons (giving the NSA what it subpoenas and no more).
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data mart outsourcing, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DATAllegro, Netezza, Pricing, Specific users, Telecommunications, TEOCO | 7 Comments |
One Greenplum customer — 35 terabytes and growing fast
I was at the Business Objects conference this week, and as usual went to very few sessions. But one I did stroll into was on “Managing Rapid Growth With the Right BI Strategy.” This was by Reliance Telecommunications, an outfit in India that is adding telecom subscribers very quickly, and consequently banging 100-150 gigs of data per day into a 35 terabyte warehouse.
The beginning of the talk astonished me, as the presenter seemed to be saying they were doing all this on Oracle. Hah. Oracle is what they moved away from; instead, they got Greenplum. I couldn’t get details; indeed, as a BI guy he was far enough away from DBMS to misspeak and say that Greenplum was brought in by ‘HP’, before quickly correcting himself when prompted. Read more