Some query execution times down to 40 seconds from 16 hours; manual testing now four minutes not 44 days
Alberto Rey Villaverde of Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) has published a blog outlining the data infrastructure it has built over the last two years and outcomes. He is VMO2’s Director of Advanced Analytics and Data Science and says that being able to gain greater insight and intelligence from mind-boggling amounts of data very much faster is the key to its transformation.
He writes, “We realized that if we wanted to revolutionize the telecommunications industry, we would first have to revolutionize our own business,” and explains: “In the event of outages on the broadband network, it took us hours to understand what the problem was, and then a six-month lead time to correct any algorithms in our modeling.
Data at operator’s disposal
Villaverde continues, “As data analysts, our goal is to use the data at our disposal to gather insights to increase efficiency, target customers and improve our products. However, we don’t always have a precise question in mind from the outset.
We come to the data with high-level problems we want to explore, we ask a question, get an answer, and then refine our journey from there. Iteration is the key.
Before we migrated to Google Cloud, iteration was impossible,” noted Villaverde. “Migrating our data to Google Cloud has been like switching on the lights in a dark room.
“Now when we want to know something about our business, with some of the query execution time reduced from 16 hours to 40 seconds, we can refine our way to valuable insights within hours, if not minutes, instead of days or weeks.
“What’s more, the average time for manual testing is now four minutes, as opposed to 44 days, while we experience almost no monthly downtime for our data analytics applications, as opposed to the two hours a month we were used to.”
An added benefit is reducing energy consumption the operator’s carbon footprint.
Data democracy next
The next phase is what VMO2 calls data democratisation, that is, putting “all this valuable data directly into the hands of the business departments that need it, enabling them to self-serve insights quickly and easily to empower informed business decisions. This is an essential part of our journey to becoming the modern telecommunications company that we want to be,” Villaverde says.