Recently telecommunications companies have grown in size and complexity. Many large operators like Orange, Vodafone, Telenor, and Deutsche Telekom have dozens of subsidiaries in various countries and even on different continents.

Many subsidiaries have their own data warehousing technology. Often, these technologies aren’t easily compatible, and require extreme amounts of overhead. This can cause subsidiary data to feel like a local silo, inaccessible to the group headquarters, let alone other subsidiaries. Performing group-wide analyses requires jumping through hoops to force a common structure to aggregate the data.

At 1010data we believe in the idea of “one version of the truth.” We allow a large telecommunications operator to host all of its data in a private cloud, ensuring simple transparency between the subsidiary and group. This greatly shortens the information relay chain between strategic decision makers and the data they need to drive their decisions.

This transparency will allow the group headquarters to have simple and easy access to each subsidiaries data. They will be able to see key metrics and reports in seconds, with no technical experience necessary. The group can even enable individual subsidiaries to view operator wide data when deemed beneficial.

We have seen that empowering business users with real data leads to a more complete picture of the company, and ultimately helps drive results. Over the next few weeks we will add posts further explaining our offering in telecom, why it is so fast and flexible, and how it can help your business.

Dr. Dobbs had a nice story (Big Data Inside Stormy Clouds) about how the cloud is driving improvements in BI, e.g. offering more flexibility for developers.  A source quoted in the article said that: …cloud BI represents a way for software engineers to build reporting and analysis solutions more easily. We have found that building BI/analytics solutions on top of a platform like 1010data’s allows developers to focus on the business needs they are trying to address, and not on performance or hardware issues

The article also cited an IDC study that was bullish on the use of the cloud for BI and analytics: A recent IDC survey and presentation, The Maturing Cloud: What the Grateful Dead Can Teach Us About Cloud Economics.. showed that 50 percent of respondents said it was highly likely they would pursue the public cloud for BI and analytics — and nearly 70 percent said it was likely they would pursue a private cloud deployment.

Another quote in the article said: Many large enterprises are interested in cloud BI as a horizontal tool to provide a simple, distinct, affordable ‘IT sandbox’ where software developers can work on project experimentation and evaluation can occur far from the production environment. The organization may also want to use cloud BI to develop and deliver a departmental BI project more quickly and inexpensively than other options. In both cases, avoiding the time and expense of buying and configuring server hardware, operating software, and database software holds a strong appeal and greatly accelerates the evaluation-to-deployment cycle

Dr. Dobbs is written for developers, and the article is written to appeal to that type of audience.  We agree with the benefits cited above, and would just also add that cloud-based BI can offer direct benefits for a wider range of users too.  E.g., business users can also use cloud-based BI to simplify reporting and analytics.  Further, large enterprise are increasingly using the cloud not just as a sandbox; a number of our clients have used it to deploy production enterprise data warehouses.