Grameenphone

Introduction

Grameenphone is the number 1 and largest telecom company in Bangladesh with close to 48% market share and 80 million subscribers. They are also the largest tax paying company in the country with a revenue of US $1.7 billion (FY22).

Serving both rural and urban customers across Bangladesh, where mobile telephony is a major driver of socioeconomic development, Grameenphone provides the power of digital communication, through which many freelancers earn their livelihood by providing services to local and international clients. It is estimated that the revenue generated by these freelancers contributes more than US $1 billion to the Bangladesh economy.

Strong market execution, innovation and modernization are core to Grameenphone in providing customer-oriented services through advanced mobile technology. One such app that sits on the Grameenphone platform is MyGP, which is the largest local app in Bangladesh with 14 million customers. The other is Cockpit, an app used by ‘Mom & Pop’ stores to streamline their daily sales activities, including order processing, invoicing, and payment collection. Cockpit provides real-time updates on inventory, sales, and customer data, allowing salesmen to make informed decisions on the spot. Currently, Cockpit is used at more than 350,000 sales points.

Challenge

Prior to implementing Denodo, Grameenphone was using multiple independent databases to run their Cockpit and MyGP mobile apps. The development team faced multiple challenges in not only maintaining security protocols and authorizations for users accessing the customer data, but also the complexities around creating multiple copies of the same data. Even though Grameenphone now uses a data lake for all their transactional data, these apps were initially excluded at the time when the new data lake was being deployed, leading to a disjointed data landscape.

To address these challenges, Grameenphone's Data and Analytics team took on the task of simplifying this landscape, integrating the disparate databases into a single, cohesive framework which would give them the flexibility to scale and apply best practices. The critical need for near real-time data made this synchronization even more crucial.

The major hurdle for Grameenphone’s data team was to ensure zero downtime during this migration given the nature of these apps while consolidating data into a single data lake. With the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) implemented in Oracle, all customer metadata resided there. The challenge was to synchronize this data across the data lake clusters, a process that was complex and resource-intensive due to ETL processes running in Oracle EDW.

Solution

With Denodo’s Data as a Service capability delivered through its APIs using data virtualization, Grameenphone was able to find an efficient path forward to provide near real-time data to its users. The approach eliminated the need for migrating metadata sets and allowed for the seamless provision of Data as a Service across many applications sitting above the data virtualization layer, radically simplifying their data integration process. Denodo’s governance and security features ensure sensitive information remains protected and compliant with regulations. This minimizes the risk of data breaches and strengthens the organization's security posture.

Benefits

Key outcomes of implementing Denodo for Grameenphone include:

• Data Management and Cost Savings: Denodo's logical data management approach and Data as a Service capability have streamlined Grameenphone's data operations, leading to direct cost savings. Real-time data exposure to various applications via APIs has enhanced operational efficiency.
• Easier Migration with Flexibility: Denodo's data virtualization capability simplifies Grameenphone's data warehouse migration, offering flexibility to revert to previous solutions quickly in minutes in case of data issues, ensuring uninterrupted day-to-day operations.
• Improved Data Quality and Consistency: With data sourced from a unified platform, teams face fewer quality issues, easing the workload on customer service as both end-users and internal staff access the same reliable data.