BANGALORE: HDFC Bank has created a data warehouse which is expected to go up to one terabyte of data within its first year of existence, using Microsoft’s SQL Server 2000 and Windows 2000 advanced server with i-Flex's Reveleus. The data warehouse has been created to address HDFC Bank's need for a business intelligence solution, to enable effective decision making within the organization. This solution will enable HDFC Bank to provide better service and cross-sell high value products across their customer base of 3.25 million. This is the largest known SQL Server-based data warehouse in India.

"The success of our Data Warehousing solution on SQL Server 2000 is reflected in the fact that analysis queries coming in from business managers today have increased manifold - they're obviously deriving a lot of value" said CN Ram, Head - IT, HDFC Bank. "Customer relationships today are extremely sensitive. We are all aware that the cost of acquiring a new customer is much higher than maintaining and strengthening an existing relationship. Therefore, figuring out new ways and means of keeping existing customers satisfied is of prime importance."

Microsoft along with Intel, HP and i-Flex carried an exercise simulating a load of 100 million transactions, 50 million customer accounts and 30 million customers. Besides enhancing customer relationships, the data warehouse application has improved integration between business groups and led to an increase in employee productivity and efficiency. The analysis tools in the data warehousing solution bring together customer usage data across products and channels and turn that data into intelligence for effective decision-making. It also accesses information from different customer interface channels the bank offers, centralizes them into a single database and then applies Reveleus to offer OLAP analysis. i-Flex uses SQL Server's Meta Data Repository to help do this.