REDWOOD CITY, USA: Informatica Corporation, the independent provider of data integration software and services, announced that Oi, the largest telecommunications company in Brazil, is using the Informatica data integration platform to simplify its IT infrastructure and help increase revenue, market share and customer loyalty.

Vera Helena de Ávila Duarte, enterprise IT manager, Oi, said: "Our competitive advantage is the ability to mix bundles, combining wire line, wireless, broadband, and television; this increases customer loyalty and reduces churn. But we needed a single view of the customer and near real-time updates to our enterprise data warehouse to support these programs."    

"Oi" is Portuguese for "Hi," and the company's tagline is "Oi, as simple as that." Seeking to maximise business agility and competitiveness. The Informatica Power Center platform now provides the underpinnings for Oi's right-time enterprise data warehouse, leveraged by management for timely business intelligence, and by sales and marketing for consolidated customer and household views to power marketing campaigns and fuel up-sell and cross-sell activities. Customer service also leverages these up-to-the-minute consolidated views to respond quickly and decisively to customer requests.

Additionally, Oi leverages the integration of its various disparate systems to help power competitive new product and service initiatives, including bringing advantageous new programs, plans and product bundles to market faster and supporting them effectively. For example, when the company launched a prepaid service plan called "Oi Control," it used Power Center to link its CRM, billing and in-house pre-paid systems.

The billing system flags customers eligible for a credit recharge, the recharge notice is validated against business rules in the CRM system, and the notice is sent over the pre-paid system to enable recharge for voice and data services. Consequently, Oi Controle customers are able to recharge their credits on schedule while the company has been able to respond to the ramping demand for recharging, thus helping to drive the on-going success of the Oi Controle program.

Robust, scalable infrastructure

Informatica has also provided Oi with a robust, scalable infrastructure to help sustain its business agility and growth. For example, the Power Center Pushdown Optimization option has enabled Oi to take advantage of the processing power of its Teradata data warehouse platform when running data integration and loading routines. This has allowed Oi to accelerate its warehousing loading process by a factor of 2x, which in turn has resulted in faster answers to sales and marketing queries and more rapid updates to customer views. Similarly, Oi is taking advantage of Informatica's Enterprise Grid option to help optimize both the performance and scalability of its data integration environment.

Oi is also using Informatica PowerExchange data access software to source difficult-to-access mainframe data for subsequent integration with other enterprise data.

Girish Pancha, general manager, Enterprise Data Integration, Informatica, said: "Oi's impressive post-merger growth underscores the value of the Informatica platform in making complex environments appear simple to internal data users and, ultimately, to customers. Encapsulating the former operations of well over a dozen separate enterprises, Oi now presents a single, responsive face to customers across South America's largest economy—a unified image anchored in the ability to integrate and deliver comprehensive, accurate data in right time across a widely divergent spectrum of information sources."