Digicel Haiti Delivers Timely Data to Drive Business Strategy as Country Rebuilds Following Earthquake
 
 

Digicel Haiti Delivers Timely Data to Drive Business Strategy as Country Rebuilds Following Earthquake

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Part of the Digicel telecommunications group, which operates throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, Digicel Haiti launched in 2006 and today serves more than 3 million cellular customers. The company’s mission to provide its customers with reliable cellular service became even more important after the 2010 earthquake, as many Haitians rely on cellular phones as their only means of communication.

To manage the business strategically and meet growing customer needs, Digicel Haiti required a faster, more reliable data warehouse. To achieve these goals, the communications provider migrated its existing data warehouse to Oracle’s Exadata Database Machine X2-2 HC Half Rack. Since deploying the system, it has gained access and insight into customer intelligence previously unavailable, helping Digicel Haiti transform the way it addresses the market. The provider completed the complex IT project under stressful post-earthquake conditions without interruption to the day-to-day business operations. Since deployment, Digicel Haiti has been able to expand the hours it services its customers and accelerate the time it takes to provide sales, marketing, and customer care staff with key data to drive the business.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Digicel Haiti

  • “Our market growth is completely related to the benefits we have achieved with Oracle Exadata Database Machine. With the faster data warehouse, we can give our business users timely access to strategic information, helping them to target sales efforts, quickly resolve network problems, and deliver reliable, quality service to our customers across Haiti.” – Rabih Youssef, Chief Information Officer, Digicel Haiti

  • Ensure the company can provide the reliable, high-quality cellular service on which its subscribers in Haiti rely, often as their primary form of communication
  • Resolve data warehouse performance issues that previously caused delays in providing business users with vital data needed to target sales efforts, resolve communications network problems, and deliver customer care
  • Establish a stable foundation for future company and network growth along with the flexibility to adapt to changing market demands

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Migrated its 38 terabyte data warehouse onto Oracle’s Exadata Database Machine X2-2 HC Half Rack in just two months, gaining significant performance increases that ensure business users have the data they need, such as customer event records, to make strategic decisions to improve service and grow revenue
  • Improved system performance by 55% overall, eliminating the need to run central processing units (CPUs) and memory at full capacity
  • Provided an average of 50 daily users with quick access to the data warehouse query tool, enabling them to quickly find data and run reports
  • Reduced the time required to deliver key business reports from 8-to-10 hours to 3-to -4 hours
  • Enabled business users—ranging from sales staff all the way to C-level executives—to arrive at 8 a.m. and immediately view the previous day’s reports, helping them to strategically target sales outreach, network maintenance, and other customer-facing activities
  • Reduced storage requirements due to the built-in storage in Oracle Exadata, freeing the organization’s legacy storage system for other purposes
  • Guaranteed rapid data warehouse recovery in 4-to-6 hours instead of the 10-to-15 hours required in the legacy environment, which is vital to recovering business operations in the event of a future emergency situation, such as another earthquake or hurricane
  • Gave the organization the agility that it needs to adjust network bandwidth to follow the migration of customers in the event of a disaster
  • Simplified overall management of the provider’s IT environment, which includes more than 300 servers and several databases

Why Oracle

Digicel Haiti wanted an out-of-the-box solution to quickly resolve its data warehouse performance issues. It benchmarked Oracle Exadata Database Machine against several other options and, ultimately, chose Oracle Exadata because of its performance and speed, the company’s familiarity with Oracle products due to the company's use of Oracle Database, and the solution’s compatibility with third-party systems, including Digicel Haiti’s reporting system. Also, Digicel Haiti felt confident in the support provided by Oracle Partner Fujitsu. On the hardware side, Digicel Haiti has relied on Oracle’s SPARC Enterprise M-Series servers since its 2006 launch and continues to rely on these products because it feels they are a good fit for the demands of the communications industry. Digicel Haiti uses SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers running Oracle Solaris as back up data warehouse system.

Implementation Process

Digicel Haiti completed the very complex migration in just two months despite very difficult working and living conditions for its IT staff following the earthquake. Along with Oracle Partner Fujitsu, it also worked closely with Oracle Consulting Advanced Technology Services to gain the expertise required to complete a smooth migration. After migration, Digicel Haiti ran the legacy environment and Oracle Exadata in parallel for two weeks to ensure a smooth transition and to benchmark performance improvements. In the near future, Digicel Haiti plans to add another Oracle Exadata half rack to provide a full rack system and enable database consolidation. It will also work with Oracle Advanced Customer Services to complete an upgrade and to reconfigure some of its database nodes to optimize performance. The provider will then explore compression features inherent in Oracle Exadata with the aim of improving future capacity.

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