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DIRECTV Enables Active Data Warehousing with GoldenGate’s Real-Time Data Integration Technology

GoldenGate Real-Time Data Integration Solution

REVIEWER: Jack Gustafson, director of Data Warehousing for DIRECTV.

 

BACKGROUND: DIRECTV, the nation’s leading satellite television service provider, presents the finest television experience available to more than 16.3 million customers in the U.S. Launched in 1994, they currently have 7,000 employees in the U.S. and Latin America and $13 billion in revenue (2006).

 

HARDWARE PLATFORMS: Oracle/Siebel CRM 7.7 application on the Oracle 9i database and HP Tru64 operating system, slated to migrate to HP-UX SuperDome in 2008.

 

PROBLEM SOLVED: We know the importance of customer service. However, because of system lag time, late-breaking appointments and scheduling changes, many of our field service technicians were not getting to our customers in the timeliest manner. We knew it was critical to improve the information flow between our home service providers and our headquarters to deliver the highest level of customer satisfaction. Prior to implementing Teradata and GoldenGate’s real-time data integration solution, our system was more batch-oriented, and we were unable to make last-minute changes to a schedule or work order, which irritated customers and created some conflicts.

 

PRODUCT FUNCTIONALITY: We needed to make all of our business and operational data in the Oracle Siebel application available for reporting and analytics. The first step in the process was to offload the data from Oracle Siebel to a Teradata warehouse, where reports could be run without impacting performance on the production system. In order to provide the highest level of customer service and the most current data for marketing reports and analytics, employees across the organization were demanding the most up-to-date information. We also wanted to be able to commit to an enterprise-wide service level agreement (SLA) of no more than 15 minutes of data latency in the warehouse. With GoldenGate, we move data in a matter of seconds and provide the freshest data to our business users. We are also using GoldenGate’s real-time data to do same-day callbacks to customers who have canceled their service to offer special retention incentives. With GoldenGate, we are able to track all of our customer information in real time to maintain the superior level of customer satisfaction and retention DIRECTV is known for.

 

STRENGTHS: GoldenGate’s key strengths are its enablement of real-time data feeds to the warehouse, heterogeneous platform support, ability to move transactional data to any database and overall high performance. GoldenGate delivers the most up-to-date information, helping us provide an integrated view of the business, while at the same time empowering business users with the right information at the right time to make better, more accurate decisions. It’s a very flexible solution.

 

WEAKNESSES: While this occurrence is uncommon, we feel that when attempting to extract a component on a committed transaction or log, you have to begin at the beginning of the transaction, which results in increased manual labor. While the product meets our business and technical needs within our active data warehousing environment, this piece could be smoother.

 

SELECTION CRITERIA: GoldenGate’s ability to access information in real time across multiple databases, the high level of performance and the product’s ability to integrate with Oracle 9i were the main contributors to our selection process.

 

DELIVERABLES: GoldenGate delivers data in real time to the Teradata warehouse, giving end users the ability to produce timelier and more accurate reports. We can get data out of our source system logs, providing usable, integrated information to our call centers and better track data. From this, we can quickly and easily perform customer and product segmentation and analysis, which help our sales and marketing teams to make accurate, timely business decisions.

 

VENDOR SUPPORT: GoldenGate Software provided an on-site resource to help with the implementation and answer questions along the way, working closely with our business intelligence team. Additional knowledgeable and responsive phone support was provided from initial proof of concept onward. The best part of working with GoldenGate is the results.

 

DOCUMENTATION: We could run the product easily if we had to rely on the documentation provided because it is both complete and easy to understand. GoldenGate

 

Real-Time Data Integration Solution
GoldenGate
301 Howard Street, Suite 2100
San Francisco, CA 94105
(415) 777-0200
http://www.goldengate.com/

 


Product reviews are customer testimonials. We thank the author of this review for taking the time to share his or her expertise.

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