February 3, 2005
Talk America, a phone service provider with operations mostly in Michigan,
is well advanced in its migration to an Oracle implementation,
including the 10G database and application server.
The immediate driver of the shift, says Talk America CIO Tim Leonard, was cost. "We don't need to replicate data over to other systems," he explains. "With our old [Informix] architecture, that was an issue we had to resolve by replicating data, and that's expensive."
In the old days, Talk America had to enter into this expense to e.g. simultaneously support long-running queries (of the kind needed for data mining and decision support information that subsequently turned up on dashboards) and high-volume online transaction processing.
"With the new 10g architecture, data is accessible through other machines or other nodes," says Leonard. So, for example, "People can do queries off another node without interrupting transaction processing."
The business upshot is that the new Oracle architecture, layered atop other components like HP hardware and BMC storage, makes it possible for Talk America to handle a whole bunch of front- and back-office e-business transactions (e.g. e-commerce, service center support, queries, data mining, etc.) at the same time.
Furthermore, the higher degree of automation over which Leonard presides (for example, storage systems that no longer need systems experts to prepare disks) have it made it possible for Talk America's IT organization to provider higher value-added services to the business.
"We do analyses of requirements and put them out into a relational format," he says. "It's more in touch with what the business wants."
Source: Line 56
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