INDUSTRY: TELECOM
Vocus Communications
Key Benefits
- Increased market share of nbn broadband to 7.7%.
- Delivered analytics and BI platform 75% faster.
- Helped overcome capacity limitations of existing infrastructure.
- Avoided capital costs of on-premises platform.
- Gained a platform that delivers increased business value over time.
Client
Australia-based Vocus Communications (Vocus) is a telecommunications company. The company owns an extensive infrastructure network of metro and backhaul fiber and connects both capital and regional cities across Australia. As of its 2016 annual report, Vocus had a market capitalization of AU$3.5 billion (US$2.6 billion).
Challenges
- Vocus saw the value of using data analytics to both acquire customers who have newly connected to the nbn and reduce the rate of churn for existing customers.
- Reduce customer churn by offering existing customers a far superior customer experience on the nbn network versus the ADSL/copper network.
- Vocus faced several challenges with its on-premises infrastructure. Because Vocus had largely grown through acquisition, the IT infrastructure was an amalgamation of separate, fully utilized platforms.
Solution
Vocus looked to the cloud to run its analytics platform and address the challenges it had with its on-premises infrastructure. Vocus engaged AWS Partner Network (APN) Advanced Partner Bryte Systems to create the analytics platform using their BryteFlow software.
- The data is extracted by BryteFlow in near real-time with zero load on the sources and comes from multiple systems across Vocus brands as well as the Internet.
- The extracted data gets deposited in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), at which point the BryteFlow software processes this Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) to create replicas as on source – this high-volume processing is all done automatically with the BryteFlow software with zero coding.
- The processed data is deposited on the Amazon S3 Data Lake and is used by data scientists for their models and machine learning and is also transferred to an Amazon Redshift data warehouse for complex and recurring SQL queries for Business Intelligence and reporting.
Says Morgan, “You have to understand the amount of work it takes to build a fully integrated data-analytics platform like ours. But through the power of BryteFlow and the modularity of AWS, we have already developed several data models that deliver valuable customer insights to the business.”
Result
- Vocus is successfully modelling data on newly connected households and businesses with existing customer information to generate strong sales leads.
- Vocus overcame the lack of processing power and storage capacity available through its old on-premises infrastructure.
- The company also avoided the capital costs that were another barrier to creating an on-premises solution for its analytics platform.
- By using the BryteFlow software, Vocus was able to speed up the implementation of its data-analytics platform. Says Morgan, “We delivered our data-analytics and customer insights platform in three months by using AWS and BryteFlow – reducing deployment time by at least 75 percent.”
Vocus has created a platform to drive nbn market share and deliver further value to all Vocus brands over time. Says Morgan, “We are just putting our customer churn model into production. Looking ahead, as we build on our AWS platform and add real-time customer experience feeds, for example, we’ll be able to enhance our strategies around customer servicing and acquisitions.”
