When Richard Branson's Virgin brand went into the mobile phone business in Australia, the company's CIO realized that the venture had to be built on a single source of truth. Virgin Mobile Australia turned to Oracle 9i Database because it could accommodate everything from payment systems to CRM and resource planning. Learn: Why Oracle met Virgin's "Get It Done" philosophy. How Virgin managed the implementation at breakneck speed. How the size, speed, and flexibility of Oracle Database accommodates expanding business goals.

As Published In February 2004

Virgin Mobile's Oracle-based data warehouse helps keep the churn rate down and the revenues up.

To say that Richard Branson's compilation of commercial enterprises is large and eclectic is a bit like saying New York has a few restaurants, some of them even quite good. Branson's companies, all operated under the Virgin brand, are, like the man himself, fresh in their market approach, stylish, easy, and confident. The collection of companies, which spans the world, includes trains, planes, automobiles, and dozens of other ventures, and runs the gamut from lingerie to limos (and even limobikes). The self-made billionaire businessman's enthusiasm for enterprise seems unbounded by anything—not geography, industry, or at times, seemingly, even capital.

Branson seems to have an uncanny ability to quickly assess an opportunity and, for those that show solid potential, develop them swiftly and decisively. And so it went, when Nick Gatland went to work for Virgin's new Australian offshoot, Virgin Mobile, in the summer of 2000. "The board wanted to be operational in time for the upcoming holiday season, and that gave us only a five-month time frame to design and build the IT and network architecture and get the company up and running," Gatland, the company's chief information officer, explains. "We understood that the data warehouse was a critical piece of that architecture from day one. We had to be able to see how successful our business proposition was in the marketplace, what elements were being best received by our customers, how our customers were doing, and how happy they were with the elements they were using."

Virgin Mobile Australia's CIO soon realized that the company needed a data warehouse underpinning all the information in the organization to produce one version of the truth, because there were so many systems involved, each holding different data. "We had an enterprise resource planning system, a customer relationship management system, and a prepay engine and postpay engines as our core business applications," Gatland says. "The architecture was complex. Other than banking, I can't think of an industry that requires as sophisticated an architecture."

Given the time frame, the IT executives at Virgin Mobile asked themselves two questions: "Who has a product suite that can do the job?" and, more important, "Who has the key individuals in whom we have the confidence to build something this complex in such a short time frame?"

There were two factors guiding the original design of Virgin Mobile's data warehouse, Gatland explains. "The board had a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) that they required us to track, and marketing was very clear about needing to have a strong focus on understanding the customers and what they used, so they required a strong marketing database.

"We didn't even have time for a standard selection process," Gatland says about the decision to go with Oracle. "We went straight to Oracle and said, 'These are our requirements, goals, and time frames; now show us how you will help us get there.' And they did."

Keeping IT Flexible

As a company, Virgin is known for having strong brand loyalty among its customers. That loyalty, says Gatland, begins with the value proposition Virgin offers. "From the beginning, the campaigns stressed the 'No contracts, just a fair deal' concept. No hidden charges." And in response, the customers are streaming in. Virgin Mobile expects to reach a base of 400,000 subscribers by early this year.

Snapshot Virgin Mobile Australia www.virginmobile.com.au Mobile phone service provider Virgin Mobile Australia is a member of the Virgin global family of products and services. Launched in Australia in October 2000, Virgin is one of the most recognized consumer brands in the world. Year founded: 2000 Number of employees: more than 300 Software: Oracle9i Database, Oracle Warehouse Builder, Oracle Discoverer, Oracle Designer, SQL Navigator, Cognos Impromptu, Cognos PowerPlay, Cognos PowerPlay Enterprise Server Administration, UNIX 11.0.0 Hardware: HP2 N-Class 4000, HP4 N-Class 4000 Services: Oracle Consulting

To tackle the unique challenges Virgin's "get it done" philosophy demanded, Virgin Mobile's Barry Evans, who is now the company's chief operating officer, assigned his small start-up IT team of less than a dozen members to each of the key systems—ERP, CRM, billing, and so on. "Each team member was a can-do-type individual and was told, 'You are responsible for getting your piece across the line by such and such a date,' and all of them, through strong team effort, played their role in achieving the company's goals," says Gatland.

They did it initially by teaming with vendor and consultant partners, as many as 350 team members at times, and gradually transferring knowledge to Virgin Mobile staff as they joined the company. One key partner was Oracle Consulting, which used Oracle Warehouse Builder to help meet the extremely tight deadlines. "Having seen other implementations, we knew that they had a solid team and were using good tools. Without a strong, GUI-based development tool, it would be impossible to do what they did. The fact that they met our deliverables and our target dates itself proves the worthiness of the product to me," says Gatland. In fact, Gatland and his team liked it so much, they use it in-house now to continue developing and improving the system.

Knowledge Is Power

"We were reliant on the Oracle Consulting guys to deliver on time," Gatland relates, "and I can only sing their praises. They brought a strong understanding of the industry as well as expertise in building a data warehouse, and they worked well with all our other vendors. We've continued to work with them to build on what we've already done."

What began as an information platform offering just KPIs and marketing data has since expanded to cover many more areas of Virgin's business. "Now, we're much more deeply involved in the financial side of the business," Gatland says. "The system was instrumental in allowing us to monitor both the revenues and contribution of our customers. It automated reporting of our average revenue-per-user (ARPU) KPI, which is the key indicator of our success. Virgin Mobile has a significantly higher ARPU than the industry average, and the system's ability to slice and dice its analysis down to any group of customers has helped the company move to profitability. The data warehouse also helps us meet the myriad reporting requirements to support our affinity distribution partners, and we have also used it to keep a close eye on potential fraudulent customer behavior. It has become a full business intelligence solution."

"Knowledge is power for our staff," Gatland says. "It's very easy to suck data into a warehouse and store it. It's far harder to structure that data in a way that reflects your business and makes it easy for your people to analyze your business. That is how we are using Oracle tools, to turn that data into a well-structured set of information for decision-making. Being able to pull data from multiple places together to get an integrated view of your customers and services, that's the challenge. But that's what we've built with Oracle."

Lynn Tryba has written for CNNfyi and reports for the Nashua, New Hampshire, Telegraph.