REX

Retours d’expériences Big Data en entreprise
HP - AT&T
AT&T LEVERAGES HP VERTICA ANALYTICS PLATFORM TO CHANGE
THE ECONOMICS OF PROVIDING ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS TO
DECISION MAKERS
OVERVIEW
AT&T has made Big Data analytics a core component of the business decision-making process to drive its growth
and maximize customer satisfaction. In May 2013, the telecommunications company augmented its Enterprise
Consolidated Data Warehouse with the HP Vertica Analytics Platform (HP Vertica) to improve the performance of
critical analytics workloads. HP Vertica, a core engine of the HP HAVEn Big Data Platform, has surpassed AT&T’s
expectations and is providing company decision makers with actionable insights into areas such as customer and
network use patterns.
John Yovanovich, Director of Data Strategy, Delivery, and Support at AT&T, explained that his company chose the
HP Vertica Analytics Platform after concluding that “we needed a platform that supported the columnar database
technology required by critical workloads.” This conclusion reflected the increasingly
prominent position of Big Data analytics at AT&T and the potential value the company sees in it.
Yovanovich credits HP Vertica with changing how analytics are consumed and used by AT&T’s lines of business
(LOBs). Above all, his internal LOB clients demand a robust analytics platform that can
run required queries quickly and efficiently. Before deploying HP Vertica, AT&T could not fully exploit the potential
of Big Data analytics because of the cost and time associated with running certain queries on its legacy platform.
With HP Vertica, Yovanovich’s team provides superior outputs at a much lower cost, so business teams are bringing
many more projects to his team.
Yovanovich cited a number of ways in which HP Vertica drives value for AT&T. From the onset, the move avoided
investment costs of $11 million in pending capacity expansion. Business decision makers get query results in less
time and can run more complex queries and analyses. As such, they have more actionable information in their hands
sooner, which helps them craft improved business strategies and make better decisions. This results in improved
services for AT&T’s customers, improved customer relationships, and operational efficiencies.
Meanwhile, Yovanovich’s team has benefited from the speed with which HP Vertica runs queries and its ease of use;
he estimates that teams responsible for preparing and carrying out data queries have become roughly 20% more productive
since deploying HP Vertica. Finally, AT&T is paying much less to run analytics workloads on HP Vertica than it
was paying to run analytics workloads on its legacy platform. This allows business units to migrate certain workloads
to HP Vertica and pay much less even as the quality and speed of the outputs improve substantially.
Based on discussions with Yovanovich, IDC calculates that AT&T is achieving discounted benefits of
$63.38 million over five years with its to-date deployment of 570TB of data on HP Vertica, including cost savings
on analytical queries compared with its legacy row-based analytics platform, costs avoided for increasing its legacy
platform’s capabilities, more efficient retention of data, and improved productivity for its data analytics team. Over a
projected five-year period, this results in a return on investment (ROI) of 657% and a payback period of 4.0 months.
IMPLEMENTATION
AT&T’s Big Data strategy is centered on leveraging the voluminous customer use data that feeds into the company’s
Enterprise Consolidated Data Warehouse to create actionable insights and ultimately business advantages.
As of October 2014, the warehouse employs 3.2PB of storage in total and supports all of AT&T’s home and business
solutions product and service lines. The foundation of AT&T’s Big Data strategy is to feed this huge amount
of information — more than 100 million files an hour flow from AT&T cellular towers alone — into shared relational
databases and then move this data into the data warehouse via the Hadoop open source software framework for
analysis driven by analytics platforms.
Two years ago, AT&T began evaluating columnar-based analytics engines after concluding that performance limitations
with its legacy row-based analytics solution would prevent it from fully leveraging data to drive its business.
It had discovered that it could not economically run many of the complex data queries and analyses requested by
its LOBs on its legacy row-based analytics platform. As a result, AT&T sought a more robust, query-oriented analytics
platform with columnar-based analytics technology to enable it to handle more complex queries and handle
queries more efficiently.
AT&T carried out a proof of concept with several Big Data analytics engines and found that HP Vertica came out
on top in both performance and cost. “No one came close to HP Vertica on price,” Yovanovich said. “We also liked
the fact that they are a market leader in columnar database technology with a proven track record among largevolume
customers like us.”
Document réalisé par la Société Corp Events - Janvier 2015
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