Telecommunications Industry Leader Alcatel-Lucent Shaves Months from Data Integration Efforts and Dramatically Reduces Costs for R&D Group

Data Integration from Talend helps Alcatel-Lucent Ease Integration across Multiple Systems in R&D Group.

Alcatel-Lucent is a leader in mobile, fixed, IP and Optics technologies, and a pioneer in applications and services. Alcatel-Lucent includes Bell Labs, one of the world's foremost centres of research and innovation in communications technology.

With operations in more than 130 countries and one of the most experienced global services organizations in the industry, Alcatel-Lucent is a local partner with global reach.

The Company achieved revenues of Euro 16 billion in 2010 and is incorporated in France and headquartered in Paris.

Efficiency Challenges for the R&D Applications Group

Applications Group at Alcatel-Lucent is one of five major groups in the organization.  The research and development team, with 3500 engineer, is focused on the development of software applications. The tools that support this group include project management, defect management, time tracking, documentation management, requirement management tools. R&D Applications Group had a vision to create more efficiencies and process that would enable the group to share data across the various systems and display the data in a collaborative environment through dashboard views. Most recently the group started an initiative focused on creating BI tools and dashboards to better manage data throughout the group.  However this would require eliminating the manual processes required to collect and share the data.

Prior to selecting Talend, scripts were created internally to get data from the various tools into an Access database using an ODBC link to the main database. The hand coded scripts were used to move the data from the main database into Access and then into an Excel file which was displayed in SharePoint. This was not only time consuming and difficult to maintain, it didn’t support any real-time synchronization. In addition, getting any special connectors required intervention from the IT group in which each connector would cost anywhere from $100,000 to $150,000 and took six months to one year to build.

“The manual processes we encountered to simply share and move data across our various tools made it virtually impossible to create efficiencies for our R&D Group.” Jean Paul Saliou – Director R&D Operations

Researching Various Tools

R&D Applications Group evaluated several tools but ultimately selected Talend Integration Suite Enterprise Edition as the tool of choice due to its flexibility, ease of use and look and feel of the solution.

“Talend has proven it’s worth through flexibility, ease of use, and the ability to dramatically reduce the time and costs to integrate data across various systems.” Marc Lacaille, BI Project Manager

How the World in the R&D Group Has Changed

With the use of Talend, Applications Group was able to replace old connectors between the various tools including connectors to Accept 360 (from Accept Software), the organization’s Requirement  management tool, JIRA (from Atlassian), one company’s bug tracking tool and various other tools. Today these systems share data across them and the data is integrated into various MySQL data marts and the main data warehouse. The data is then used to populate the organization’s home grown BI tool and Web 2.0 communications tool. All of this is managed using Talend which is the basis for the group’s BI initiatives.

The data is then visualized in dashboards that are updated hourly versus daily, and they are pushed to various teams across the organization.

Calculating the Return on Investment

Today Alcatel-Lucent no longer requires a specialized developer to update scripts in old connectors, shaving in upwards of six months off of delivery time and up to $150,000 in costs for each connector. Applications Group can now make the connection between various tools in the R&D group much faster and at a dramatically reduced cost. The first component was built and in production in two weeks, enabling two major systems to share and synchronize data across them.

More than Just ROI

To the people in the R&D Applications Group, it’s not just about time and cost savings. They found a tool that is so flexible and easy to use, it doesn’t require any IT intervention. In addition, the Talend community has been very valuable in providing inputs on various connectors.  The group at Alcatel-Lucent plans to create a library of Talend components that they can pull from when they need to integrate various systems across the organization. In fact, they’ve shared their connectors on the Talend community and leverage components shared by others on the community.