Major Communications Corporation
Toronto, Ontario

Acentrix software has been installed since 2001 at a major communications corporation based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

The Need
Our initial contact was with the marketing IT department. When we first visited them they described the concerns that they had accessing their extremely large and very busy Oracle warehouse database. The Marketing staff needed to be able to find out what mix of products and services was being used under specific circumstances. Some of the factors that were looked at were products and product groups, geographical area, date of commencement, type of payment, connected and disconnected customers, and churn. Queries were usually very complex and covered many fields and different values.

The Problem
Under their existing Oracle data ware house and mainframe system they typically had to write a program to extract the information required. These programs could be extremely complex due to the large mix of search matches that were required. Writing, modifying and running these programs took a considerable amount of valuable IT staff time and resources. Often the results obtained were not exactly what the marketing personnel were looking for and the program would have to be modified and re-submitted. Typical turn-around time for these queries was anywhere from overnight to several days, depending upon complexity and system availability.

The Solution
Acentrix listened to the requests and came up with a design that met all the criteria specified by the customer. The criteria included fast turnaround time, data no less than 24 hours old, a methodology that freed up the programming time being spent by valuable IT personnel, no replication of customers selected within a single multi-level query and a method of extracting the data once the queries had been successfully completed.

The resulting product has evolved into Acentrix and is composed of a rich windows client, powerful server-based engine, and the Acentrix Enterprise Manager.

Acentrix Client
The client is designed to provide the user with an uncomplicated view of the data marts and allows the inclusion and exclusion of different fields and field values in order to build queries that can range from simple to complex, depending upon the requirements of the customer.

Acentrix Server
The server component processes all projects and target lists created by the users, executing the queries and returning the results.

Acentrix Enterprise Manager
The enterprise manager provides the Acentrix administrator with the ability to manage the data marts as well as the users security access rights to each of the data marts down to the field level.

The Results
The product was initially implemented on a small test box (Dual 800MHz, 512MB RAM) with five users in 2001. The initial end user demand exceeded expectations and soon the box was running with over 55 users, 2 million customers and 20 million customer product records. A typical query runs in under 2 minutes. A year later the hardware was upgraded to a production box (Quad 1.2GHz, 4G RAM) and queries where running in under 30 seconds.

The customer is extremely happy with the performance of the product and the vast reduction in IT resources previously committed to running marketing product combination queries. Many of the marketing people are now running their own queries. Some of the far-reaching effects of the product have been the ability to quickly reconcile customer and product counts, fast queries on potential marketing campaigns and the ability to put solid data in front of the president and senior vice presidents in under 30 minutes of the verbal request being placed.

Conclusion
Acentrix has been designed to be an extremely simple, flexible and, if required, customizable solution. The data mart, table and field structure is initially determined at installation time but can easily be changed even when the product is fully implemented. Acentrix can handle one or multiple data marts depending upon customer requirements. Product installation assistance and any required customization is available from Acentrix. Training time for end users is typically about half a day to a day depending upon familiarity with Windows-based products and can be done by the customer once the key personnel have been trained.