It’s common knowledge that a focus on customer service will yield significant, tangible results. How significant? Consider the success story of Ultra Mobile, a nationwide mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) that is focused on offering the best quality international voice communications at the lowest possible cost, delivered with outstanding customer service and dealer support. In 2015, Ultra Mobile achieved 100,849% growth over three years and was listed on Inc. Magazine’s Inc. 5000 as the fastest growing private company in the United States.
Growing Pains
Unfortunately, this rapid growth put a strain on the Ultra Mobile’s BI infrastructure, hindering the company’s ability to answer basic questions about the health of the business and how best to retain customers. “We’re in a hyper-competitive industry,” explains Kalpesh Vyas, Ultra Mobile’s director of analytics. “To generate our subscriber base, we need to continuously deliver new products and services. But with all of our new data sources getting populated with massive amounts of data, performance was beginning to suffer. But we still needed to provide information to executive leadership as quickly as we possibly could.”
A Modernized BI Infrastructure
Ultra Mobile designed and implemented a new BI infrastructure built around the data virtualization capabilities of the Denodo Platform. With these capabilities, the new infrastructure can integrate data from multiple disparate data sources, in real time, without physically moving any data. “With the Denodo Platform’s real-time capabilities,” says Vyas, “We can easily consume all data from a single data virtualization layer in real time, to populate our dashboards and applications, irrespective of any particular visualization tool that we happen to use, and without having to get the data from multiple data sources.”
A Powerful Transformation
Within four months after implementing the Denodo Platform, Ultra Mobile transformed from relying on siloed, spreadsheet-based reports, with very little data-lineage control, to a process-driven, governed, consistent view of the data, blended seamlessly, and in real-time, from MySQL, SQL Server, Excel, and Cloudera databases. It is now possible to pass billions of rows of business and consumer data through online dashboards that operate at close to the speed of thought. BI feeds that used to take weeks can now be released in just a few hours.
The Denodo Platform was instrumental in improving Ultra Mobile’s business agility. Ultra Mobile can now proactively detect and correct process inefficiencies and quality-of-service issues and as a result has improved quality-of-service by as much as 22% in some international destinations.
“The data virtualization layer enables users to see the results of changes in real time,” says Vyas, “whether they’re executives who want to make slight changes in a dashboard, or they’re analysts who want to dig deeper into the results.”
Vyas has no regrets about Ultra Mobile’s decision to deploy the Denodo Platform. “One of the most significant factors that influenced our decision to select the Denodo Platform was the performance improvements that we realized through our end-user-facing applications,” Says Vyas. “Another factor was simply ease of use. It was very easy to establish the views that then populate the data that gets fed into our end-user applications.”
Watch as Kalpesh Vyas tells the Ultra Mobile story of leveraging the Denodo Platform:
For more information about Ultra Mobile’s use of data virtualization, see Ultra Mobile’s Case Study. To learn more about how forward-thinking companies are leveraging data virtualization across numerous industries, see the collection of Denodo case studies.
