Supernova Award Category

Data to Decisions

The Problem

To increase efficiency with its financial reporting, Verizon’s business leaders wanted a cost-effective solution to empower them with actionable information. The Verizon GTS team had one PeopleSoft system and two SAP ERP systems that delivered financial information and business transactions throughout the enterprise. Ingesting data from their PeopleSoft and SAP systems into the data lake resulted in these challenges:

• The GTS team used several separate utilities to capture source changes, which added unnecessary complexity and time while creating higher risk for error
• The alternative data replication solution from Oracle failed to support SAP pool and cluster tables, which was a key requirement to make the solution work. It also required a complex middle tier to populate the data lake, which added an additional layer of labor, time and cost to the initiative
• Extra processing and delays were undermining the accuracy of daily reports.

The Solution

Verizon’s IT team searched for solutions that could ingest data in real time, understand the SAP data dictionary and perform real-time change data capture(CDC) on the complex SAP pool and cluster tables. They tested Attunity Replicate, which successfully moved its SAP ECC data and PeopleSoft data in real-time into its Hortonworks data lake. The Verizon GTS team found Attunity Replicate helped them to:

• Centralize all disparate ERP data into a Hortonworks data lake, improving financial insights and enabling real-time analytics 
• Capture and translate data from complex SAP format and easily export it via an intuitive user interface–completed 10 times faster compared to previously tried alternatives
• Replicate SAP data to all major targets, including databases, data warehouses and Verizon’s Hortonworks Data Platform
• Continuously update the data lake using CDC technology to ensure the freshest data is available in real-time for improved decision making 

The results

All divisional and corporate financial reporting/business intelligence (BI) teams now have access to ERP data in one place. As data changes, it is automatically uploaded to the data lake in less than an hour rather than overnight so that the most up-to-date data is available for daily reports.

The Verizon GTS team was able to eliminate the middle-tier Oracle database, reducing significant maintenance time and cost, and easing the strain on valuable developers. As more value is generated by delivering real-time insights and analytics in combining various data sets with the financials, the GTS team expects to discover new insights by bringing additional data sets to the data lake. This will allow Verizon to make more strategic decisions for different parts of the business and will accelerate key business initiatives. “Attunity Replicate has helped make our data universally available within our enterprise. It is also helping us generate more business value from it,” concluded Arvind Rajagopalan.

Metrics

Attunity Replicate captures and translates data from a complex SAP format and easily exports it via an intuitive user interface 10 times faster than Verizon’s previously tried alternatives.

The Technology

Attunity Replicate

Disruptive Factor

In general, integrating all of the data from various systems, including Oracle and SAP HANA, requires ‘heavy lift’ capabilities and comes with a lot of complexity due to SAP’s proprietary architecture. The Verizon team had tried various tools and none of them worked effectively. Until Attunity Replicate. The Attunity solution is a disruptive technology because it not only works well, but it enabled a streamlined data replication process that resulted in a 10x faster, more productive process. The Verizon IT team loves it and is using it across the board because it is easy to set up and use. They are now able to get analytic insights they didn’t have previously which gives them a competitive advantage over the competition.

Shining Moment

N/A