BT Increases Control and Improves Customer Service with Streamlined Global IT Infrastructure and Standardized Database Administration
 
 

BT Increases Control and Improves Customer Service with Streamlined Global IT Infrastructure and Standardized Database Administration

  • Oracle Customer:  BT
    Location:  London, United Kingdom
    Industry:  Communications
    Annual Revenue:  Over $5 Billion

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BT Group plc is one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services, with operations in 170 countries. Its main activities include providing fixed-line services, broadband, mobile, and TV products and services; as well as networked IT services. As part of BT Group plc, BT Operate is responsible for managing all IT and network infrastructure platforms, and ensuring reliability, security, and efficiency across the entire network.

BT has provided communications services for more than 100 years. During recent decades, BT’s IT and infrastructure estate has grown significantly to reach current global volumes of 17,000 databases and 30,000 servers. Managing an estate of this size and complexity is a significant challenge, and BT aims to streamline, consolidate, and simplify operations to improve efficiency across its lines of business.

BT Operate chose Oracle Enterprise Manager to help standardize database versions and manage the infrastructure of its new customer-facing database-as-a-service offering. With Oracle Enterprise Manager, a database administrator (DBA) uses the same processes, regardless of geographical location, increasing control and significantly reducing the risk of errors caused by manually prioritizing tasks and custom scripting.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from BT

  • “With the Oracle Enterprise Management stack, BT can now deploy a database in 20 minutes―a task that previously took several weeks. As a result, we have realized decreased hardware costs and increased system agility, enabling us to more quickly deliver services to market.” – Surren Partabh, CTO, Core Technologies, BT Operate

  • Standardize and streamline database performance and configuration management across a global suite, providing the infrastructure to deliver leading-edge communications services to a vast range of business and retail customers
  • Ensure uniformity across the global IT suite, which currently encompasses 17,000 databases
  • Achieve database automation to reduce time to production and improve standardization and reliability
  • Provide an accurate audit trail of any changes within the databases, enabling database administrators to quickly identify the source of a problem as it arises
  • Provide a unified view of database administrator performance, to build best practices from development through to production in a 100-strong database administrator community throughout the global organization

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Implemented Oracle Enterprise Manager to help standardize versions and methodology for monitoring and managing the global Oracle Database infrastructure
  • Participated in the Oracle Strategic Customer Program Plus to ensure successful deployment of Oracle Enterprise Manager and to maximize return on investment
  • Saved hours in locating and diagnosing problems within the databases, improving both customer service and infrastructure reliability
  • Prevented customer service issues on a proactive basis, due to the ability of Oracle Enterprise Manager to quickly identify the source of service issues
  • Reduced database downtime during two serious incidents that could have negatively impacted customer service, or incurred penalty payments for failing to comply with communications industry requirements
  • Improved customer service on a continual basis, with increased service reliability of 28.2% during the first quarter of 2011
  • Gained the ability to implement new ideas quickly, to plan for and meet global market demands for innovative communication products and services
  • Managed the database infrastructure with the same number of database administrators by standardizing and automating configuration and management, maintaining existing overhead costs by eliminating the need to hire additional staff
  • Assisted with analysis of database and application usage, enabling the team to confidently decommission applications and databases no longer used, helping to reduce the real and environmental costs associated with the legacy infrastructure

Why Oracle

BT is a very complex organization with a significant legacy infrastructure. As part of its IT strategy, the company plans to consolidate and rationalize its infrastructure to support business processes.

“Oracle Enterprise Manager is the way forward for BT. It enables us to monitor our applications, understand where we can make improvements within our overall infrastructure, and see which applications we are no longer using to reduce operating costs.

“Standardization is also very important—not just of technology and processes, but also standardization of methodology, “said Surren Partabh, CTO, core technologies, BT Operate. “Oracle Enterprise Manager enables us to harmonize methodologies across the organization to bring synergy and predictability to our business, while saving time overall.”.

Oracle Enterprise Manager provides a visual representation of how applications are used and removes the need to interpret figures. BT uses the solution in a reactive way to monitor what is currently happening, but plans to proactively use the information to analyze its infrastructure and interpret trends.

Each of the 100 database administrators within BT uses Oracle Enterprise Manager every day. When the company upgrades to Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c it hopes to use Oracle Enterprise Manager even more frequently, as a result of having additional automation tools.

Implementation Process

BT participated in the Oracle Strategic Customer Program Plus to ensure a successful deployment of Oracle Enterprise Manager and to maximize return on investment.

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