Love at first Site
Posted by: lgrtelecommunications on: February 1, 2010
Remember the days when some of the biggest events in town were the official launches of a company’s new website? I recall well the circa 1997 launch of a major airlines’ site in London, managed by an ad agency (for which I worked) that was given a tremendous budget to forge this brave new frontier of “cyber-advertising”. The development took many months but was still relatively cheap, so the bulk of the budget was spent on a lavish launch event for hundreds of invitees, which brought together a strange mix of dignitaries, celebrities and techie geeks to share the champagne.
A new Home for LGR
The culmination of the evening was the unveiling of the new website – back then, a case of Netscape Navigator pulling up a very simple home page in a slow, piece-by-piece manner, amongst much “ooh-ing” and “aah-ing” from the audience. It was of course just a basic online brochure for the airline – online bookings, for example, were still some way off yet – but that didn’t stop this momentous event from even making the papers the next morning.
Today it’s a bit different of course. LGR launched it’s new global website today, and managed to get it all done with no launch event, no dignitaries or celebrities, no champagne, no press, and of course no Netscape Navigator. But launch it we did, and we hope you’ll enjoy the new design and find the growing repository of LGR-related information to be informative.
Thanks to Piszko Design (www.piszko.com) for their tireless efforts in the face of far less budget and much tighter deadlines than we had in 1997!
True selects CDRlive for its EDW
Posted by: lgrtelecommunications on: October 14, 2009
So it’s official – True Corporation, a large quad-play operator in Thailand, has selected CDRlive as the primary platform for its new Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW). It’s been a long time coming, with a rigorous vendor selection process that lasted nearly 18 months, but in the end, LGR and Oracle have come out ahead of the likes of Teradata, Netezza, Greenplum and IBM.
True is a large conglomerate with a business model built around converged communications services. In Thailand, it is the market-leader in broadband, pay-TV and VOIP services, and it’s wireless division (True Move) is one of the largest operators on SE Asia with close on 20m subscribers.
With all this communications ‘real estate’, True was looking for an EDW that could first and foremost provide a single view across all of its lines of business, thereby ensuring that like its services, its business intelligence was also converged at an executive level rather than residing in departmental silos. Beyond that, True also needed an EDW platform that could provide real-time insight into each customer’s experience of its various services. The benefits are obvious – faster trouble-shooting, better customer service, optimized products and services and ultimately increased ARPU.
Also of note is that True has decided to deploy the CDRlive solution on Oracle Exadata, and has ordered a full rack of the Oracle Database Machine. This makes it the first telco globally to deploy on Exadata since the products launch a few months ago. LGR’s deep involvement with Exadata since early in the design phases has been no secret, and its experience and expertise is sure to have played a big part in True’s decision to opt for this market-leading product.
The first phase of the CDRlive roll-out will bring the True Move business online, and will focus on two key areas – Finance (including Revenue Assurance, Inter-Carrier Billing and Least Cost Routing) and Subscriber analysis.
For more on the True Corporation win, see the LGR Press Release here: PR – 20091015 – True Corp
CDRlive V4 is here!
Posted by: lgrtelecommunications on: June 1, 2009
LGR Labs, the South Africa-based development hub of LGR Telecommunications, has just announced the release of CDRlive V4 to the general market, effective today. And in a parallel statement, the LGR US office has also revealed that the CDRlive system at AT&T will be immediately upgraded to V4, showing strong support for the CDRlive software from one of the world’s largest carriers.
More than just an incremental upgrade, CDRlive V4 represents a complete ground-up re-design of the CDRlive product, centered around the newly-developed CDRlive Framework which is the foundation for the next generation of software. The design philosophy has leveraged LGR’s vast experience within some of the world’s leading global networks, and transformed this into next-generation software that provides:
- Speed: Dramatic performance increases across the system
- Consistency: Each module has the same underlying functions
- Agility: Quicker, easier system upgrades and changes
- Manageability: Simplified system configuration and monitoring
- Auditability: Increased traceability measures
Particularly positive for customers is the news that upgrade paths are very clear and low risk. CDRlive V4 has been specifically designed to be fully backwards compatible with CDRlive V3, so that any part of CDRlive V4 will be fully functional within a CDRlive V3 environment, and vice versa. When you combine this with the fact that CDRlive V4 adopts a very modular approach, it is clear that customers have a lot of flexibility in terms of choosing between an upgrade in phases or a single migration. Furthermore, CDRlive V4 can also be upgraded at any point in time (e.g. mid-month) as a change in software version will have zero impact on any data within an existing system – irrespective of the data source.
The LGR offices will be releasing further information about CDRlive V4 to their customer base over the coming weeks and months, but please contact Paul Hartley (paul@lgr.biz) should you have any questions or requests for information.
Metro Classic Golf Tournament
Posted by: lgrtelecommunications on: May 11, 2009
LGR has continued its sponsorship of- and participation in the annual Metro Classic Golf Tournament, in support of the Atlanta Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America. This year the tournament was held on May 7 at the Chateau Elan Golf Club in Braselton, with AT&T continuing as the title sponsor of the day for the sixth consecutive year.
(left-right) Paul Hartley, Greg Mishkin, Grant Salmon and Doug Mendel
LGR dispatched two ‘crack’ golfers in the form of Grant Salmon (CEO) and Paul Hartley (General Manager), who joined their colleagues Greg Mishkin and Doug Mendel from AT&T Marketing in an epic foursome that had high hopes of pulling off an upset victory. Sadly, despite perfect weather conditions and a pristine course, the team battled to come to terms with their sense of direction and the dense undergrowth, and returned a round that was somewhat short of first place.
“Unfortunately, the handicap system wasn’t able to take full account of our gross inadequacies as golfers, otherwise we might well have had a tighter finish with the leaders,” commented a bemused Hartley at the end of proceedings. “But to be fair to the organizers, I don’t think they could have fully anticipated a foursome that was quite as ‘agricultural’ as ours. We’d also like to extend our sincere apologies to all the residents living on or near the course.”
On a more serious note, Hartley was full of praise for the overall event. “It’s a great day out for a great cause,” he said, “It has raised more than $1.2 million for the Boy Scouts in Atlanta, providing financial support and scholarships to underprivileged kids, and delivering quality education programs that build character, self- confidence, leadership skills and values. That is something that LGR is very proud to be a part of, and it has been a privilege to have joined our customer, AT&T, as a sponsor of the tournament over the last few years.”
Big in Japan
Posted by: lgrtelecommunications on: February 26, 2009
Following a week of successful customer meetings in Japan, LGR took center stage today with a keynote address at the Oracle Exadata Summit in Tokyo. Marking the official launch of Exadata in Japan, the Summit not only provided an eager audience with a full briefing on Exadata and the HP-Oracle Database Machine, but also showcased a highly impressive demonstration of the Database Machine’s performance advantages over traditional architectures.
Following a detailed technical briefing from Juan Loaiza, SVP of System Technologies at Oracle, LGR took the stage in the form of Grant Salmon, CEO of the company. Salmon’s presentation provided insight on how LGR had already experienced the benefits of Exadata’s technical leadership, and was translating this into tangible business value for it’s customers.
“We started beta-testing Exadata back in 2007, and following extensive benchmark testing against our large production sites, we able to show a 20x overall improvement in performance,” points out Salmon. “This translates into obvious benefits in terms of the agility and productivity of the large telco data warehouses that LGR operates around the globe.”
But Salmon maintains that the Exadata performance benefits will be felt far beyond the data center, and that organizations should prime themselves for entirely new ways of doing business.
Grant Salmon explains the business benefits of Exadata
“We’ve seen massive benefits in areas such as data mining and predictive analytics,” says Salmon. “Projects such as Competitor Analysis, Churn Prediction and Social Network Analysis – we are not only able to do more with the brute power of Exadata, but we have shorter development cycles and far greater flexibility in design. It’s fair to say that we are now able to do things that until a few months ago were deemed to be either too time consuming, too costly, or just downright impossible.”
Following the event, Salmon and his colleagues also joined the Oracle team in providing a detailed post-summit briefing to assembled analysts from the likes of Gartner, Forrester and IDC. Much of the discussion centered on the impact of Exadata’s extreme performance on business operations, and LGR was able to provide numerous case examples drawn from its global operations. It also provided deeper insight into the implications for industries with particularly high data volumes – such as telecommunications – and used its quad-play customer in Thailand (one of the first Exadata adopters) as a prime example.
Salmon and Loaiza shake on it after the Summit
Summing up the event as well as LGR’s experiences thus far on its APAC tour, Salmon was extremely positive. “We had excellent meetings with the likes of Softbank and NTT DoCoMo, and look forward to further positive developments when we move on to meet with network operators in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia in the coming weeks,” he said.
“It was also a great privilege to be a part of the launch of Exadata in Japan, a country that has historically been not only a pioneer in telecommunications, but also an area of great success for our partner Oracle. We are very grateful for the generous hospitality shown to us by the Oracle Japan team, and certainly look forward to working closely with them in the months and years ahead.”
For more on Exadata: www.oracle.com/exadata
To visit the Oracle Japan website: www.oracle.co.jp
Data Warehouse Architect of the Year
Posted by: lgrtelecommunications on: September 23, 2008
Hannes van Rooyen, chief architect at LGR, today officially received his award as Oracle’s Data Warehouse Architect of the Year for 2008. Honored at a lunchtime function during the annual Oracle OpenWorld conference, Van Rooyen was named the winner in the DW Architect category as a result of many years of success with extremely large data Oracle warehouses, as well as his deep involvement in the beta-testing of Oracle’s latest data warehousing solutions – Oracle Exadata and the Oracle Database Machine.
Speaking immediately after the awards ceremony, Van Rooyen gave some insight into the reasons for his success. “LGR has been an important Oracle partner for many years through our pioneering work in the field of data warehousing, and I have been fortunate to work with a great number of excellent colleagues at Oracle who have shared in our success around the world,” he said. “Oracle’s database and associated technologies have proven to be bullet-proof in the environments we’re running in, and the support we receive globally from the Oracle team is second to none.”
Van Rooyen was particularly enthused about his most recent work with Exadata and the Oracle Database Machine. “They’re marketing it as ‘Extreme Performance’ and a 10x speed-up over traditional systems,” he said, “but frankly, from what I’ve seen I think they’re under-selling it!”
More in the Nov/Dec issue of Oracle Magazine: Oracle Magazine – Data Warehouse Architect of the Year
Vodafone Fiji goes live
Posted by: lgrtelecommunications on: June 20, 2008
LGR’s Australian office was proud to announce today that the new CDRlive site at Vodafone Fiji has gone live. The project has been undertaken in partnership with Emagine International, which provided the Campaign Management solution that resides alongside the CDRlive data warehouse, together forming a single, best-of-breed system for comprehensive customer experience management.
While one of the smaller networks in the Vodafone Group, the Fijian operation faces familiar challenges as it’s market opens up to ever-more competitors, and it chose the LGR-Emagine solution as a means to maintain its competitive advantage as well as drive new projects in areas such as customer loyalty, new revenue stimulation and churn management.
Avanthi Senarante, the Chief Marketing Officer at Vodafone Fiji, was clear as to why they chose the LGR-Emagine partnership. “We selected LGR and Emagine because of their vast industry experience around the world,” she said, adding that Vodafone had been “particularly impressed with the results that LGR and Emagine have delivered from previous projects with other large carrier.” LGR and Emagine have also had strong, successful partnerships at Telstra in Australia and True in Thailand.
While the system is still in it’s infancy, Vodafone Fiji has already achieved some respectable results with its first few marketing ventures. For example, a recent campaign targeted at prepaid subscribers most at risk of churn produced a 280% increase in customer retention rates, to say nothing of the obvious positive impacts to the bottom line.
It’s hardly surprising then that Gerda Brand, LGR’s General Manager for the APAC region, is delighted that this new customer was now in production. She believes that the secret to success is the speed of delivery driven off the CDRlive data warehouse. ““With real-time data delivered from CDRlive and the nimbleness of the Emagine platform, Vodafone Fiji has been able to cut response times down to hours, even minutes,” she said. “In a highly competitive market, this can be the difference between winning or losing the customer.”
For more on the Vodafone Fiji launch, see the LGR Press Release here: PR – 20080620 – VF Fiji
