Data Lakehouse
Telecommunications
United Kingdom
BT Group is one of the world’s largest communications services companies, providing mobile and fixed broadband services to 30 million consumers and one million businesses and public sector customers across the UK. BT is headquartered in London, employs 100,000 staff across 180 countries, and has annual revenues of over £21 billion.
Providing a world-class service through advanced data insights
BT’s network generates many petabytes of data and ingests billions of records from consumers and businesses every day. This data is used for everything from network analytics and capacity planning to real-time fault discovery and preemptive remediation. However, this information was previously stored across the organization in various silos and formats, making data analysis and extracting actionable insights at scale challenging.
As part of a company-wide transformation project to reduce operational costs and improve the customer experience, BT needed a scalable and flexible data platform capable of seamlessly ingesting and analyzing huge volumes of data. Simultaneously, the platform needed to be built on open standards to integrate with a wide range of tools for discovering new trends and insights. While BT initially needed an on-premises platform, future flexibility to move to the public cloud and adopt a hybrid architecture was also a key requirement.
Cloudera’s ability to work across on-premises and in cloud environments were key to BT’s decision to select Cloudera as its hybrid data platform of choice.
“We knew there was a lot of expertise within Cloudera on how we could handle the volume of data we wanted to ingest to support the network, and they are also a partner that we could work with in a regulatory-compliant way,” said Séainín McCoy, Director for Data and AI, NAS, BT Group.
Flexibility and openness underpin a future-proof data platform
Cloudera’s Professional Services team was engaged to support the migration by reviewing BT existing data workloads workloads, collaborating with internal teams to restructure and rebuild them, and upgrading Spark versions on the on-premises Cloudera cluster. This enabled BT to quickly overcome any migration challenges and accelerate project timelines.
By using Cloudera, BT built a scalable, robust and future-proof hybrid platform for data, analytics and AI. Moreover, Cloudera’s observability capabilities make data insights accessible across the organization to anyone who needs them, whilst ensuring strong data governance. Furthermore, as Cloudera is built on open standards, BT has greater flexibility over how it evolves its architecture in the future from an integration standpoint.
“We chose Cloudera for the ability to hold data on-premises, but also because of how its platform has evolved to integrate with other cloud providers as well. That was really powerful for us,” added McCoy.
Operational efficiency and real-time insights
Adopting Cloudera has been transformative for BT. For example, the company can now analyze data from more than 10 million broadband customers to provide hyper-personalized services. BT’s customer support staff have access to near-real-time insights on Wi-Fi performance across every device within a customer’s home, as well as how each of those devices is performing within the BT network.
The platform also assists call centers to resolve and fix customer issues remotely, such as assessing whether a product needs to be moved or upgraded, instead of sending engineers to the customer site. These efficiencies have resulted in millions in annual cost reductions and delivered better customer satisfaction rates.
Additionally, BT now has a solid data foundation for future AI initiatives as it looks to further augment the employee and customer experience. BT is already using machine learning to analyze fraud patterns across its voice call data and use predictive modeling to identify potential attacks. These capabilities enable BT to proactively address issues and improve its overall network security.
