Frontier Communications Corporation's business objective is clear: Putting the customer first is the No. 1 value. The communications company wants to offer customers the best service possible; from a business perspective, it needs to manage the increasingly complex workloads in its enterprise data warehouse (EDW) more effectively.

Scott DeLap, financial systems and reporting director of Frontier Communications Corporation, says customer service and service quality are key differentiators for his company.

What the company required was a system management capability. As it turns out, Teradata Active System Management fit the bill.

"We believe key differentiators for our company are customer service and service quality," says Scott DeLap, financial systems and reporting director. With the goal of enhancing customer relationships while generating additional sales, the company, which operates in 24 states, developed a marketing campaign to e-mail subscribers timely, targeted information about products and services. Frontier's marketing team uses e-mail addresses collected via its Web site and real-time telephone conversations between call center representatives and customers.

Once the data is collected, the Frontier marketing team builds daily campaigns targeted at specific subscribers to recommend appropriate products or special offers. "It's another channel for us to present our products and services to our customers. The theory is that individuals who are giving us valid addresses will pay attention to our offer," DeLap says.

Initially, real-time data collection proved a challenge. "Our goal was a response time of around two to three seconds, but we were getting more like five to 10 seconds, consistently," DeLap explains. "That was too long to wait, so often the rep would skip it." Teradata Active System Management "really allowed us to get the function working properly," he adds.

With the increase in workload complexity, Frontier, the second-largest rural local exchange company in the United States, needed to reallocate resources to ensure the data warehouse was running at peak performance and processing the workload efficiently. "Almost every [data] warehouse has a mixed workload, but we added a different component, which is this active real-time mode," DeLap says. The first step was defining and understanding the specific workloads the company needed to manage, which the system management tool helped identify as the real-time function, the load process and the ad hoc queries. The Teradata solution "has the capability of looking at your history, so you can see your workload factually and learn from it," adds DeLap.

To support the real-time data entry function and guarantee an acceptable response time, Frontier dedicated 10% of the server specifically for that purpose. The company then manipulated the workload priority for the load processes and ad hoc queries based on the hour of the day. "It really acts like a traffic cop for us," says DeLap of the system management product. "We tell it the priority of the different pieces of workload by the time of the day. So, for example, ad hoc queries have a higher priority during business hours while the load process has a lower priority in the daytime. If the load happens to be in that time frame, it's going to sit behind any queries that are going on. However, we have the ability to flip it and say 'Now it's nighttime,' so the load process then has priority."

Frontier's Teradata Active System Management monitors workloads to ensure requests remain in acceptable boundaries. One way this happens is by alerting database administrators to out-of-the-ordinary requests. "With [the solution] in place, we are better able to complete our workload on schedule and collect the information we need, like e-mail addresses. It comes down to everyone being much happier with this toolset in place," says DeLap.

The system management component is integral to helping Frontier gather real-time information while effectively managing mixed workloads, and it's something the company will continue to develop. "We have been discussing ways to do more with active data warehousing—projects that would extend beyond e-mail and possibly involve additional attributes to help our marketing capability, but also our customer support," DeLap says. "We expect to do more of this as we go forward." T

Jackie Zack is a freelance business, marketing and technology writer based in Brighton, Mich.

Photography by Richard Freeda

Teradata Magazine-September 2008