Case study: BT uses open source BI to support its voicemail system

Low cost of ownership and tighter control over the software make Jaspersoft the ideal business intelligence tool for telco

BT has a dedicated team that champions open source products

BT has deployed open source software to support its voicemail system, which currently serves around eight million UK customers.

With the help of systems integrator Unisys, the telco deployed Jaspersoft ’s open source business intelligence (BI) software in its statistical data warehouse (SDW) around 18 months ago, following an initial six-month development project around the source code.

About 50 employees currently use Jaspersoft to query and report on data stored in BT’s vast voicemail database. Staff can analyse mailbox and message counts by class of service, service provider, and usage level and frequency, for example, and produce and distribute reports quickly and easily in multiple formats, which include PDF, Excel, Word and CSV.

This has helped the telco reduce the time it previously took to research and respond to its voice mail customer queries, and to lower the cost of producing ad hoc reports that were previously available only either in standard, daily formats or obtained by submitting a special request to Unisys.

“We used to drive information straight off the messaging platform into Excel spreadsheets, which were emailed around the organisation,” said Andrew Hutchinson, delivery manager for BT SDW. “But sometimes we wanted specific requests rather than wait for daily or weekly reports – the ability to ask for something specific and perform per-user querying ad hoc rather than use the standard reports.”

Having made the decision to bring in a more complex BI tool, BT worked with Unisys to identify a suitable software package. A number of different software options, both proprietary and open source, were considered, but Jaspersoft won out due to its flexibility, low cost of ownership and because it was considered a more natural fit for BT’s existing Linux-based servers.

“We asked Unisys to look at competitive solutions, including a well-known, off-the-shelf BI package. But after analysis we discovered it did not meet BT’s minimum software security requirements and was not as capable out of the box as Jaspersoft,” said Andre Gayle, solution designer for BT’s Innovate and Design division. “We also worked out that we would save money on licensing costs and wanted full control of the open source software, so we can change it [the source code] as we needed.”

At last count the SDW contained more than 11 billion records, and captures keystroke-level data on every voicemail session that occurs among BT customers. Standard reports include operational statistics like voice mail system usage. But with Jaspersoft BT has been able to create its own reports to help with problem solving and data integrity auditing, both for internal purposes and at the request of its customers.

“It is the first thing we run to to look at system and messaging performance, address capacity planning issues and check whether anything we have changed [in the system] has adversely affected anything else,” said Hutchinson. “We can see the ports in use and use that to track congestion issues.”

The software is supported largely by BT and Unisys IT staff, though they can refer to Jaspersoft if required.

“We chose an upgraded support package over the free version, where we actually get a phone number to talk to someone from Jaspersoft if we need to, but the cost of that was negligible,” said Gayle.

BT is planning to expand its use of Jaspersoft to help track customer problems, inquiries and behaviour in the future, but may have to pay an additional licensing cost paid on a per-server, annual subscription basis for the professional version of the software, which contains the necessary functionality.