Telewest Utilizes Sequent's NUMA for DW
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Telewest Communications, one of the UK's leading cable communications companies, has built its first customer data warehouse to support its accelerating customer base and increased range of services. The advanced telecommunications and entertainment supplier has selected Sequent's powerful NUMA-Q 2000 enterprise server as the data warehouse platform.
Based on Oracle's RDBMS, the data warehouse is being used by Telewest's marketing department to improve its understanding of customer behaviour and to help maintain the price competitiveness of its telephony services. Telewest can now track, in detail if required, all its telephony customers, collecting data on product usage, traffic, calling patterns and trends.
"The telecoms market is one of the most competitive in the business world and tracking and analysing customer data is vital to achieve a competitive edge," said John Harrison, head of corporate systems at Telewest. "We were deluged with offers from suppliers when we started the data warehouse project and held discussions with many, including Sequent. We finally selected Sequent as it was clearly ahead in technology with its NUMA-Q 2000 enterprise servers."
Harrison continued: "Starting with one billion telephone records, the volume of data at Telewest is expected to reach a terabyte by the end of 1998, as cable television and Internet customer data is added to the warehouse. Given this growth in data volumes NUMA-Q 2000 was the obvious choice for both our scalability and performance requirements. This, coupled with Sequent's reliable track record at Telewest and excellent service, convinced us we were making the right decision."
The new data warehouse is already proving its worth. Telewest's financial planners have been able to prepare forecasts and track performance with unprecedented levels of accuracy and within a much shorter time scale.
"Sequent's performance claims for NUMA-Q 2000 are very high but the actual performance we have experienced has far exceeded these expectations," commented Harrison. "I believe that NUMA is a clear platform of choice for high-end Unix systems and we have already moved other systems at Telewest to Sequent's NUMA-Q 2000."
A Sequent two-quad NUMA-Q server, based at Telewest's data centre at Knowsley in the North West, acts as the platform for the data warehouse. A further one-quad NUMA is being used to support a customer contact management application.
Sequent's NUMA-Q 2000 customers include: AMP Asset Management, Boeing, Burlington Coat Factory, Employment Services, Ford Motor Company, Millipore Corporation, National Association of Securities Dealers, Inc., NatWest Credit Card Services, Polizei HH, Source Informatics, Telkom South Africa, University of Auckland, Unocal 76 Products Company and Wolseley Centers. For more information, see http://www.sequent.com