Beyond ONE focuses on creating people-centric digital experiences, designed for the future of content consumption, at fair prices. With the acquisition of regional operations of Virgin Mobile, Beyond ONE aims to integrate and enhance its offerings.

Employees:

700
Customers:

4 million
Business type:

Mobile services (MVNO), Mobile financial services, Digital aggregator
Middle East coverage:

UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Kuwait
LATAM coverage:

Colombia, Mexico, Chile

Summary

Challenges

Analyzing and managing large data sets to create a personalized user experience.
Managing increased data storage requirements.
Adhering to strict regional data privacy regulations.

Solution

Deployed scalable and flexible data analytics.
Leveraged advanced data analysis within strict privacy regulations.
Drove data-led strategic decision making.

Results

Reduced manual steps in data management
Decreased operational costs
Improved business flexibility and scalability

Challenges

Analyze large data sets using AI-driven queries to create personalized user experiences for a diverse customer base
Managed increased data storage needs due to a rapidly growing customer base and expanded services
Implement a flexible licensing and deployment model to support expansion leveraging AI and advanced data science

Beyond ONE’s objective is to transition the company from a pure telecommunications operation to a digital service aggregator across telecommunications, entertainment, education, banking, healthcare, and more. To start this journey, it recently acquired Virgin Mobile Middle East and Africa (VMMEA) which was one of the early movers into virtual mobile networks in the region. Its brand offerings consist of Virgin Mobile and FRiENDi Mobile, both popular with different audiences.

With a focus on expansion, Beyond ONE will introduce new services, experiences, and technology that will simplify and benefit its customers’ lives. To create a personalized user experience, it is essential to analyze large data sets coming from different parts of the business. Beyond ONE’s Group VP of Data & Analytics Santosh Kurakula, explained, “We are radically reshaping the way personalized digital systems are created. To do this effectively we need to extend our data analytics capabilities to all group entities. We have used OpenText™ Vertica Data Platform for almost a decade and continue to be impressed by its capabilities. With some four million customers, we run sophisticated AI-driven queries against billions of transactions and terabytes of data. Vertica query results are returned swiftly without impacting the performance of our production databases. Every year we routinely evaluate our Vertica environment against other market offerings. We consistently find in favor of Vertica for its ease of dealing cost-effectively with many types of data and sources, its advanced integration capabilities, and its unparalleled performance.”

However, the recent acquisition and Beyond ONE’s expansion plans called for a different way of working. With a rapidly growing customer base and the ambition to offer new services, the amount of data generated by the combined company was requiring too much data storage capacity. In recent years, the company has started to take advantage of the opportunities presented by advanced data science, leveraging Vertica machine learning capabilities. With a corporate-wide Vertica data lake, Beyond ONE needed a more flexible licensing and deployment model.

Eon Mode allows us to run a Vertica environment using commodity hardware and we make tangible storage savings thanks to Vertica’s effective data compression. Overall, we have substantially reduced our operational costs.

Santosh Kurakula
Group VP of Data & Analytics, Beyond ONE

Solution

Moving to Vertica Eon Mode gave Beyond ONE the familiar and much-loved analytics capabilities in a cost-effective, scalable, and flexible deployment model. It enabled the company to extend the reach of Vertica within the organization to benefit all.

Products deployed

OpenText™ Analytics Database (Vertica)

Unlock robust analytics on massive data while minimizing compute and storage requirements

Deploying Vertica Eon Mode for scalable and flexible data analytics

The team talked to Beyond ONE’s professional services partner, Integrated Digital Technologies, about a more scalable license structure. Integrated Digital Technologies, with its proven expertise, actively collaborated with the Beyond ONE team, ensuring a solid understanding of the company's challenges and aspirations. They worked together on a detailed analysis of workflows and requirements, defining a customized solution to address Beyond ONE’s unique challenges.

Kurakula commented, “Our partner introduced us to Vertica Eon Mode. This offers the ability to separate compute and storage, as well as support containerization which makes it much easier to scale up when we need it for our resource-heavy queries. It also gave us a pathway to the cloud. This is particularly useful as one of the acquired Virgin Mobile operations (based in Latin America, our first expansion into that market) runs its Vertica environment on AWS, and we are considering a similar move in the Middle East.”

He continued, “We decided to purchase license capacity for 200TB of data which gives us the flexibility to expand without worrying about scalability. We procured the Vertica licenses through Integrated Digital Technologies, and they supported us expertly in setting up the new infrastructure and implementing expanded Vertica use cases.” The customization of Vertica use cases, including those for non-telecommunications departments such as Finance, showcased Integrated Digital Technologies’ commitment to aligning the solution with Beyond ONE’s business objectives.

Moving from an enterprise node-based license model to Vertica Eon Mode also gave the team the opportunity to introduce an Amazon S3 cloud object storage solution as a data repository, with tight integration to an OPTIC data lake, big data solutions, and business intelligence tools to visualize query results. With storage facilities separate from the computing nodes, queries can be executed against much larger data sets without negatively impacting performance at all.

Leveraging advanced analytics within strict data privacy regulations

Beyond ONE operates in a highly regulated market and the team liked Vertica’s InDatabase machine learning capabilities, such as pattern matching and predictive analytics, to ensure that the data is managed and stored according to the necessary regulations and standards. Although the data analytics team is based in United Arab Emirates, the way Vertica manages the data in accordance with strict telecommunications data privacy regulations means that data collected in one country is not moved to another country. Leveraging ODBC or JDBC connections, the team is still able to perform advanced analytics that benefit from a wider data set.

When the Beyond ONE data analytics team began to leverage Vertica’s machine learning capabilities more fully, basing advanced use cases on the functionality, VerticaPy appeared on their radar. VerticaPy is a Python library that is used for machine learning and data science tasks in conjunction with the Vertica database. It allows data scientists and analysts to perform machine learning tasks, such as regression, classification, clustering, and more, directly within the Vertica database. This means they can build and deploy machine learning models on large data sets without needing to extract and preprocess data separately.

Driving data-led strategic decision making with Vertica

The team leverages Vertica for ‘traditional’ telecommunication data analytics use cases, such as churn prediction to improve customer retention, and to determine the most relevant offer considering a customer’s buying behavior. As a result of applying advanced analytics, Beyond ONE’s customer churn rate has significantly reduced.

Kurakula explained the expansion of Vertica beyond these use cases, “Our Vertica data analysis drives strategic decision making throughout our business. Our mobile applications are integrated with Vertica to provide comprehensive usage behavior reports and invoicing to our customers. Our Finance colleagues use it report on revenues against budgets, Product divisions can drill down into the performance of particular models to steer new product development, and Sales colleagues use our analytics extensively to measure the performance of different channels and to calculate commission payments.”

Every year we routinely evaluate our Vertica environment against other market offerings. We consistently find in favor of Vertica for its ease of dealing cost-effectively with many types of data and sources, its advanced integration capabilities, and its unparalleled performance.

Santosh Kurakula
Group VP of Data & Analytics, Beyond ONE

Results

Beyond ONE enjoys the user-friendly one-stop-shop Vertica offers and substantially reduced its operational costs with more efficient data storage and the use of commodity hardware. Vertica’s roadmap aligns neatly with the company’s own future ambitions.

Reduced manual steps in data management

While approximately 40 people across the organization leverage Vertica for various purposes, Kurakula has no need for specific Vertica database administrators, as he explained, “Because Vertica is so open and integration-friendly, we have never needed to spend time optimizing the data and creating indexes before loading it into Vertica. This is a great resource saving for us. We can literally take any data format from any source and dump it into Vertica. Using some simple Vertica-supplied tuning tools, the data is ready to be analyzed and interpreted in no time.”

Decreased operational costs with efficient data storage

There are many benefits associated with the use of Vertica, though it is not easy to quantify these as the organization is in so much flux with new acquisitions. Kurakula was clear in his continued faith in Vertica, “Because Vertica is our one-stop-shop for AI-driven advanced data analytics, we save costs deploying and maintaining different tools for the various regions. Eon Mode allows us to run a Vertica environment using commodity hardware and we make tangible storage savings thanks to Vertica’s effective data compression. Overall, we have substantially reduced our operational costs. Looking ahead, we can see an easy and seamless move to the cloud, requiring just a simple data copy to be deployed when we’re ready.”

Delivered data analytics flexibility and scalability to support future growth

Kurakula concluded, “Ever since our decision to adopt Vertica all these years ago, it has continued to develop in line with our own evolution. Our expectation roadmap aligns perfectly with Vertica. When we were ready to adopt a more sophisticated AI-driven approach to our data analytics, Vertica was right there with VerticaPy and the advanced machine learning capabilities we needed. And when we experienced a data explosion following our Virgin Mobile acquisition, Vertica Eon Mode gave us the flexibility and scalability required to continue growing our business with abundance. Thanks to having relevant data at our fingertips, we feel perfectly prepared to create a hyper-customized user experience for our millions of customers.”