Talend offers a new "ETL unlimited" package for Business Intelligence at Virgin Mobile France

SURESNES, France - June 16, 2008 - Talend announced today that it has sold to Virgin Mobile France, the leading alternative mobile operator (MVNO - Mobile Virtual Network Operator) in France with more than 700,000 customers, its data integration solution Talend Integration Suite to drive its business operations.

Open source: architectural choice and economic necessity
Since it began its operations, Virgin Mobile France has chosen to adopt open source technologies. “We made this decision for both economical and philosophical reasons: the MVNO business is a very specific one and there is no turnkey solution dedicated to our activity. We had important customization needs and we wanted to be able to modify the code easily,” explained Lionel Beaudet, Technical Manager at Virgin Mobile France. “Even if the open source solutions have a cost, their quality-price ratio is unbeatable. Moreover, through an access to the source code, we can keep control of our information system.”

Today the vast majority of the information system at Virgin Mobile France relies on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl) stack: Web Applications, CRM, Back Office. MySQL constitutes the foundation of the architecture: “Our databases need to manage important data volumes: our customer base will reach one million subscribers in 2008 and their calls generate about 5 millions invoicing tickets per day. These volumes are increasing continuously,” continued Lionel Beaudet.

In a very competitive sector, in which there are more and more players, MVNOs are facing important challenges, particularly in terms of accounting and marketing. “With more modest means than the traditional operators, the MVNOs must carefully manage their growth (the number of customers has doubled in one year). They have to deal with profitability and at the same time to know better their customers, in order to satisfy them as much as possible,” explained Nasser Naili, Senior Manager at Logica. “They need to deploy a performance management system that covers different areas such as finance, marketing and providers relations. The senior management at Virgin Mobile France is aware of those issues and wanted to implement tools which could address those challenges.”

Towards global performance management
Even if the teams at Virgin Mobile France were completely satisfied with the transactional performance of their information system, reporting and performance monitoring capabilities were insufficient: “The implementation of a Data Warehouse was required to meet the analytical needs of several lines of business, especially marketing, sales, and finance,” explained Lionel Beaudet. “After a tender for the outsourcing of this project, we selected Logica's offer, which recommended Talend Integration Suite for the extraction of data, and Business Objects for the queries.”

The solution deployed by Logica covers four main areas: sales performance management (sales per month and day, distribution of sales per channel, customer profiling, etc.); and marketing management (usage segmentation & analysis through the decryption of millions of invoicing tickets) to create new offers better fitting the needs of the customers. The first area is now operational and the second is being deployed. The solution is also going to integrate soon customer service data (number of calls, offering changes, migration, etc.) and financial data, mainly to manage risk and fraud.

“The only enterprise-ready open source data integration solution”
Virgin Mobile France uses Talend Integration Suite to extract data from the production databases, transform this data, and integrate it in the Data Warehouse database. Organized according to a star schema, this database allows for efficient and fast selection and aggregation of selected data, to guarantee analytical accuracy.

“Talend Integration Suite organizes data by fetching it in different production database tables and consolidating it in the Data Warehouse. It helps us go beyond the limits of transactional systems and offer our users high performance reporting services,” added Lionel Beaudet. “With hindsight, we can affirm that Talend offers the only open source data integration solution which is really enterprise-ready and which provides all the necessary features, the performance of a professional solution, quality technical support and a high degree of integration with MySQL and the rest of our environment. Its appropriation is easy and fast and it offers many customization options.”

Virgin Mobile France decided to choose Talend Integration Suite for two main reasons. “On one hand, we benefited from high quality and very reactive support services. The implementation of the solution was performed by Logica but we now manage it in-house, even though we sometime require support. On the other hand, the solution facilitates collaboration work and gives us the ability to work as a team on the same project, which helps us save time,” indicated Lionel Beaudet.

After a few months, Virgin Mobile France can perform up a first assessment of its project. “The benefits gained by Virgin Mobile France can be found in two strategic domains: first, the senior management has gained better visibility on the business and this allows them to respond quickly to changing market conditions and to define priorities. And also, the marketing team now has the information it needs to gain market share and to grow customer loyalty,” said Nasser Naili. “The system allows the company to increase its agility and differentiation on the market.”

After the deployment of the last two parts of the initial project, Virgin Mobile France plans to develop further its reporting system, particularly in order to integrate new offerings and take into account the evolution of regulations. “A Data Warehouse project never ends and we will continue to refine our tools in order to respond more and more accurately to the needs of our users. Versatility and ease of maintenance are also very important aspects of the integration solution,” concluded Lionel Beaudet. “Concerning that point, Talend Integration Suite also gives us full satisfaction.”

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