Supernova Award Category

Data to Decisions

The Problem

Ultra Mobile was named the fastest growing private company in America in 2015. However, rapid growth presented challenges. Their BI process was built around emailing Excel files back and forth, which was primitive at best. Though initially successful in sharing information, the reports started flooding in boxes and falling victim to management by mail rules. Ultra Mobile implemented a data warehousing platform built on Hadoop, but this modern infrastructure was still unable keep pace with the business because their IT team could build application-specific capabilities faster than the BI team could build the structures to analyze the data. Ultra Mobile’s leadership understood the value of data based decision making and challenged their BI team to come up with a practical, sustainable architecture that would improve both the speed and the coverage of information asset delivery. The business demanded that the new infrastructure would yield insight into the path to profitability and the continued 20% year-over-year growth of their customer base. Mid fiscal year management decided to leverage the budget allocation for new hires and apply those resources to implement a new solution. Approval was given to the team August 2016 with a budget of $76,000 through the end of the year.

The Solution

The BI team established four use cases to test various solutions. First, the solution needed to establish a governance layer that would allow data SMEs to present a cultured business data model to the organization. Second, the solution needed to accelerate the migration to a Cloudera data warehouse for data staging. Third, the solution needed to accelerate the performance of the Impala queries against the Hive structures in the data warehouse. Fourth, the solution needed to present data in a consistent, single view as the blending of data in the BI tool was not mature. The team settled on a combination of the Denodo Platform for data virtualization and Looker as the business semantic/exploration/delivery layer. While there was some overlap in the modeling capabilities between the Denodo and Looker products, the team quickly discovered the best pattern and established a governance process that surfaced the right data, at the right time, with the right confidence and performance.

The results

Ultra Mobile's business was evolving much too quickly to build fact and dimension tables in the data warehouse. Querying the data for actionable insights often required multiple-page SQL queries that only a few data SMEs had the patience, skill, and knowledge to construct. The project’s business objective was to enable data driven decision making off the 14TB of data the business had generated in four years of operation. The team was given USD $76,000 and five months to execute. The BI team leveraged the first-year investment of USD $128,000 (which covers Denodo and Looker licenses and hardware) to deliver a solution that is projected to generate USD $2.6 million in revenue the first year with no growth in BI headcount. By the end of 2017, the BI team is poised to move from a cost center to a profit center, as data insights continue to drive data monetization. The business impact of having a stable, consistent dataset with which all stakeholders can collaborate has been stunning, and led to the discovery of many opportunities that had been hidden in the weeds of the data swamp. This has been most evident in the areas of net revenue  and quality of service. Since implementation, Ultra Mobile has improved net revenue across their calling plans, and the company’s quality of service delivery has improved as much as 22% in some international destinations.

Metrics

In three months, the team’s implementation of the Denodo and Looker Platforms enabled the company to move from siloed spreadsheet-based reports, with little data lineage, to a process-driven, governed, consistent and online view of data. This ‘freeing of the data was transformational:

- Ultra Mobile discovered quality-of-service issues and corrected them, stopping customer exodus.

- Ultra Mobile could now audit TBs of transaction data, leading to profitable resolution of billing errors.

- Ultra Mobile identified and corrected our inefficient processes, contributing to  in first-ever profitable quarter that continues to trend upwards.

The democratization of information through cultured data virtualization (Denodo) and self-service through Looker has enabled a first-year total investment of USD $128,000 to return a projected USD $2.6 million in revenue by the end of the year.  The value of transforming data from a liability to an asset, all without an increase in staffing, is priceless.

The Technology

Looker and Denodo Platforms

Disruptive Factor

One of the highlights of this project is the speed at which change has been effected. During the POC stage, Ultra Mobile spent approximately two weeks installing, configuring, and optimizing the Denodo and Looker Platforms. Although the team has continued to build upon those initial processes, the core system remains largely unchanged from the initial deployment during the POC and has enabled business value from day one. Governance processes have matured - as new information opportunities surface, the governance team quickly assesses the enterprise impact of the new assets. If there is perceived value throughout the organization, the data is modeled in the Denodo Platform, security is assigned, and performance is optimized through the available caching options. The data is then presented to Looker for consumption. Ultra Mobile made the decision to embed security at the virtualization layer, unencumbering databases from the security processes.  Looker is integrated with their active directory and manages the user groups. All of their business users now consume data through the data virtualization and Looker BI layer, which changes the status quo and enhances data architecture. The data virtualization layer abstracts business users from the complexity and Looker provides the proper business context, which is what really sets this solution apart from other technologies.

Shining Moment

The time to market improvement in delivery of BI assets through the Denodo and Looker platforms has been outstanding. Ultra Mobile received very positive feedback from their product managers and the business impact of releases is now based on fact, not speculation. Additionally, Ultra Mobile was recognized as 2017 Best Practices Awards winner in the Emerging Technologies and Methods Category by TDWI.