Warid Telecom is part of the billion dollar Abu Dhabi group. For over ten years Warid has the reputation for providing best in class voice and data services in Pakistan as one of the big 5 mobile service provicers. Its large post paid customer base not only gets superior voice quality but also lightning fast 4G LTE data services.

Warid’s is a robust challenger in the crowded Pakistan market.. To increase uptake of Value Added Services, provide superior customer service and react quickly to market opportunities it had to know its customers intimately. The IT infrastructure sourced for superior voice offerings was struggling to enable this and to keep up with demands of new business strategies in the 4G era.

Campaign management had lots of issues, as customer data was not formalized. Strategies for stopping customer churn were increasingly ineffective because relevant data could not be trusted or sliced and diced as needed. Querying for a report meant you would get it next business day. While on one end increasing data was putting pressure on the storage infrastructure, on the other hand targeted marketing was impossible because data was simply not usable for profiling.

InfoTech consultants got engaged with Warid in response to an RFP requesting a relevant campaign management solution. InfoTech was able to convince Warid that in the VAS era it was essential that whatever solution was proposed was highly flexible yet scalable across the infrastructure and application stack. In theory a business intelligence implementation yields a level of complexity that takes it away from business users. InfoTech promised a solution that would be simple by design yet carrier grade in robustness.

InfoTech came up with a solution that had the bleeding edge IBM PureData System for Analytics powered by Netezza technology at its core. This was one of the most powerful highly optimized business intelligence engineered integrated systems in the world. Fully redundant at all levels with deduplication built in it was perfect for mission critical workloads. The ETL tool was built in which extracted relevant data and fed it to Netezza an embedded purpose built advanced analytics format. Built in powerful Cognos allows for complete, unified, consistent and accurate information that gave highly customized reports per function.

This was not just an IT solution. It was a pivotal piece in moving Warid from a voice driven organization to a data driven one. After the PureData Netezza Cognos solution Warid moved the needle from being data rich and information poor, to insight driven based on actionable intelligence gathered from data it could now trust.

Now marketing gets the information they need which is actionable. This allows them to run targeted highly effective marketing campaigns with superior segmentation and targeting. The most profitable customers are identified and retention strategies enabled allowing for customer churn to go down. Reporting is now near-real time contributing to a telecom provider, which despite its large size is agile in its ability to react to the market.

InfoTech’s ability to understand Warid’s pain points at both the technology and business levels was key to InfoTech being selected for this project. InfoTech understood that emerging market telecoms are subjected to uncertainty levels from regulators, markets, geo political and security events and an unpredictable VAS scenario. This is why its solution, which was built on powerful architectural foundations but was simple to use and flexible to adapt to any market dynamic, struck a chord with Warid.