Verizon Business

Informatica PowerCenter Reinforces the Marketing Efficiency of Verizon Business and Puts its Siebel 7 Investment to Work

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“We have been using Informatica data integration technology for six years. PowerCenter allowed us to rapidly respond to all integration needs related to the development of our marketing and systems organization. Informatica directly contributes to the performance of our sales and marketing teams in an increasingly competitive telecom sector.”

— Hervé Grangeret, Data & Reporting Analyst, Verizon Business

Fast Facts

Challenges

• Improve the targeting and monitoring of marketing operations by consolidating all customer and prospect information into a CRM system
• Migrate the marketing bases of 14 countries (Europe and Asia-Pacific) and consolidate them into the Siebel 7 data warehouse

Informatica Solution
Informatica PowerCenter

Architecture

• Data integration: Informatica
• Environment: UNIX/Windows NT Sources: Siebel, data files from call centers, diverse management applications for prospects
• Target: Siebel CRM running on Oracle

Benefits

• Improved responsiveness of development teams in organizational and data source changes
• Reduced delivery time of new interfaces through the reuse of components developed in PowerCenter
• Simplified daily maintenance of integration flows
• Daily delivery of upgraded data to Sales and Marketing teams
• Substantial Siebel 7 return on investment as a result of the extension of its data warehouse to non-Siebel sources

Verizon Business: A Worldwide Infrastructure Serving Innovation

Verizon Business provides international communications solutions and IP services around the world. As the result of a merger between MCI and Verizon, Verizon Business currently operates the largest Internet network in the world: 448,750 miles of network in 150 countries, 200 data centers, and 8,800 local points of presence. Its 130,000 global customers receive end-to-end service on a unified platform governed by a single contract.

Such a broad market presence has a direct impact on Verizon's ability to innovate. Several billion dollars in investments, particularly in IP services, enable Verizon Business to implement network improvements and superior customer service — the basis of their next generation of services.

The Initial Context

In 2000, the European division of WorldCom launched a project to consolidate client information from their Siebel CRM system (opportunities, sales history, and client relationships). This consolidation also included data about prospects managed by different systems in France, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Germany. Designed to improve analysis as well as target and manage marketing campaigns, the Siebel CRM system needed to integrate data purchased from outside providers and support file exchanges with call centers.

"To integrate these diverse sources of data into new Siebel CRM, we first manually developed a number of interfaces in PL/SQL," recalls Hervé Grangeret, Data & Reporting Analyst at Verizon Business. "But the mappings developed manually proved to be too complex and costly to substantiate, manage, and maintain.

To provide each country marketing team with a database in line with their expectations, we had to standardize the development of the interfaces and their maintenance and automate the daily processing of resulting data volumes." To satisfy these needs, in June 2000, the company decided, based on the recommendations of outside consultants, to deploy the Informatica PowerCenter data integration solution.

A Seamless First Project

"Who says new tools generally present new challenges?" asked Mr. Grangeret. "Thanks to the ease of use of PowerCenter, the Paris-based development team developed all the necessary interfaces and rolled out the first driver in four months." The project was then deployed successively in the six aforementioned countries by reusing the Siebel mappings, in accordance with the driver, and by developing mappings enabling the integration of the data coming from certain sources into the CRM system of each country. PowerCenter facilitated the set up of a daily feeding process from the local CRM systems and concentrated on five hours of data processing carried out each night. "Besides its capacity to process high volumes — 1 million corporate accounts in France, 2 million in the United Kingdom — PowerCenter considerably simplified the maintenance of the interfaces and reduced the time necessary to respond to new needs," explained Hervé Grangeret. In addition, the Informatica solution ensured a quick return. For example, in the United Kingdom where the marketing database used to be outsourced, the return on investment was achieved in less than four months.

Increased Responsiveness to Change
In 2002, a reorganization of European marketing necessitated the consolidation of six local instances of the CRM systems. With PowerCenter, the feeding processes of the new database were developed in three months thanks to the reuse of previous work. The European CRM systems and the local instances, as well as their respective feeding processes, functioned simultaneously until the deployment of Siebel 7. This new version of Siebel provided new features, such as analysis and marketing campaign management, along with a data warehouse fed via an integrated version of Informatica PowerCenter.

In early 2003, the company chose to use the Siebel data warehouse for client data consolidation in the European and the Asia- Pacific regions. "The Siebel package included a pre-defined PowerCenter mapping to extract data from the transactional base and integrate them into the data warehouse, but for sources external to Siebel we had to redevelop all the interfaces," explained Hervé Grangeret. "Fortunately, the expertise acquired from prior projects allowed us to quickly extend the data warehouse to non- Siebel sources, even if we were not familiar yet with the star schema imposed by this data warehouse."

When upgrading to Siebel 7, the project team also had to retrieve data from the local applications of fourteen countries in the consolidated Siebel system. "This preliminary migration could have been long and complicated, but with PowerCenter, we carried it out with ease by developing a single data mapping," added Hervé Grangeret.

A Solution for Mission Critical Operations
Verizon Business continues to capitalize on the investment it made in the Informatica platform six years ago. PowerCenter provides daily feeds of warehouse data used by the marketing teams in the analysis of campaign results and optimizes their targeting. "PowerCenter allows us to provide Marketing with full and updated data, implementing processing and integration, not only for Siebel data, but also for the call centers and marketing sources of each country," commented Hervé Grangeret. "In addition, the Informatica solution allowed us to spread the use of the Siebel data warehouse to the sales teams, especially by integrating information related to turnover. The allotment of accounts to sales people changes regularly. We use PowerCenter to develop and drive the evolution of the processing routines corresponding to these needs."

Hervé Grangeret is very involved in the French Informatica Users Group over which he has co-presided for two years. He attentively monitors developments in Informatica products. "Like any company, Verizon Business has a great need for data cleansing, duplication removal, normalization, and data profiling. Closely integrated with PowerCenter, the Informatica Data Quality™ solutions seem very appealing for this reason. The addition of these data quality features will undoubtedly boost the value of our PowerCenter solution," he concluded.