Traffic Data Warehouse                             
for a global mobile network operator

Our customer is one of the largest fixed-line and mobile telecommunications companies in the world (amongst top five in market value).

"The work of JCommerce was professional, timely and extremely productive."

Karri Mustonen
Subcontracting Manager


Team

The project was implemented by an international team. The real installation took place in Spain and Columbia while the project was managed from Finland. The design and implementation team consisted exclusively of Polish specialists from JCommerce. 

Challenges

The main purpose of this project was to implement the solution providing functionality of collecting large volumes of data coming from multiple mobile operator network servers and integrating them under a unified reporting platform. The data represented mobile network’s events and its daily amount was estimated at the level of 0.5 a billion records. Though the previous system was able to monitor current state of the network and generate alerts in case of any problem, it was not able to store the atomic data for longer than 7 days. The system did not provide any reporting or analyzing historical data functionalities what was the main reason of the customer’s decision to develop the data warehouse solution.

Solution

Traffic Data Warehouse (TDW) solution is a history analysis system which integrates data collected from 30 separate source systems (mobile network servers) by various integration mechanisms (also via webservices as one of only three such projects in Europe). The data warehouse is processing up to 1.5 GB of data every 5 minutes. The repository volume is at level of dozen TB. At the top of a data warehouse, there is an analysis platform installed (BusinessObjects Enterprise XIR2), basing on which the end users are able to produce reports using any web browser. The number of pre-defined reports implemented during the development  is around 300, covering 4 separate business areas. The project also has an additional module for automatic calculations of Key Performance Indicators, analyzing trends and generating alerts (SMS, SNMP, mail) based on their profiles.

Business Benefits

• Integration
  Implementation of the TDW solution provided
  a complete integration platform which merges multiple external sources into a unified environment. The solution is not only a place for storing the incoming volumes of data, it is also
  a source for various native network operator systems. The communication with external systems is based on diversified methods (SOAP, SNMP, flat files, database connections).

• Access to reliable information
  The unified platform provides an easy access to reliable data coming from multiple sources. Thanks to using business terms, the multiple-leveled structure of data arrangement (atomic data, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly aggregates) is easy to understand by the analyst. In spite of high level of complexity and huge amount of data, system is completely transparent for the end user.

• Analyzing and reporting
  BusinessObjects tools asserts powerful reporting capabilities which can fulfill the most complex end-user requirements. The pre-defined set of reports consists of reports delivered to users via mail or ftp (in BusinessObjects native, xls or pdf formats) as well as ad-hoc reporting for more advanced (can be viewed using a web portal). Moreover, the system gives the possibility to analyze trends in the network and monitor any variances of values to make business decisions quicker.

• Scalability
  Technologies used in the project make it extremely flexible and let the system develop with the customer’s growth. It is ready to easily store more data along with incorporating new mobile network servers.

Technologies

Linux RedHat
Oracle 10g + ASM + RAC
BusinessObjects Enterprise XI R2
BusinessObjects Data Integrator
SOAP
SNMP