All Change At Intelsat
Global satellite communications leader Intelsat has implemented the KALIDO® enterprise data warehousing software application suite (KALIDO) to power its Business Intelligence (BI) Initiative.
Designed to support the company’s transformation from intergovernmental entity to private organization, Intelsat’s BI Initiative is helping executives not only to manage performance throughout the change process, but to also provide a key role in helping the company achieve its collective corporate goal of greater profitability.Executives anticipated that the analysis needs of the company would evolve continually over time, just as the corporation would adapt to changing market needs. The BI Initiative creates significant competitive advantages by enabling executives to accurately and completely capture and analyze financial, customer and network data in order to make improved business decisions.Through the BI Initiative, Intelsat has identified several business opportunities and efficiencies, including an additional $150 million in potential salable satellite capacity on the existing communications network, as well as $3 million in immediate revenue through improved billing and customer receivable processes.The KALIDO software creates and manages enterprise data warehouses designed to align IT and business by increasing IT’s ability to respond to business change through greater automation and adaptability.
This lifecycle management approach to enterprise data warehousing has helped Intelsat strengthen the collaboration between its business users and IT architects.
Unlike a traditional custom-built data warehouse, KALIDO enterprise data warehouses do not require business models or reporting structures to be hard-wired, and so massively reduces the cost and time overheads of managing business change. As a result, the application improves Intelsat’s ability to adapt cost-effectively to the needs of its customers.This data warehousing flexibility is proving crucial to the success of Intelsat’s change management.
It has already enabled Intelsat to produce performance reports in a new organizational structure in just one week, and to see the business benefits of an acquisition in just one month.
Two giant leaps…
Since its creation in 1964, Intelsat has been at the forefront of global communications. With a fleet of 30 geosynchronous satellites and a worldwide terrestrial infrastructure, the organization provides telephony, corporate network, video, government and Internet solutions to its clients around the globe.
These include telecommunications carriers, Internet service providers, network integrators and broadcasting companies in more than 200 countries and territories. Intelsat broadcasted the video signals of Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon and has transmitted the events of every Olympics since 1968 to ever-larger global television audiences.Since privatization, Intelsat has been undergoing a radical and rapid transformation to become a commercial company that provides network connectivity to businesses by utilizing a global network of satellites, fiber and teleports. The company is moving into new markets and delivering managed services into a challenging telecommunications economy while acquiring new customers and reshaping the way in which it operates.Ordinarily, a consistently changing business environment would pose a significant hurdle to the IT department, requiring considerable changes in IT architecture, particularly in the data warehouse.
This would create a massive backlog of change requests, leading to a significant discrepancy between business reality and the outdated information from which executives made their decisions.In order to overcome this common dilemma, Intelsat has implemented a company-wide Business Intelligence (BI) Initiative with the change-resilient architecture of KALIDO enterprise data warehousing software application suite (KALIDO) as its backbone.Says Peggy Slye, head of corporate performance management: “With our KALIDO enterprise data warehouse we have been able to obtain far richer business intelligence and performance management information throughout change. This is vital for supporting our global communications business, which is undergoing rapid transformation from an intergovernmental agency setting to operating in the private sector.”
Adapting seamlessly to change
Unlike traditional data warehousing, the UK-patented technology of the KALIDO enterprise data warehousing software ensures that business users have access to consistent information no matter how often organizational structures change.Early in the project, Intelsat had to implement a company-wide reorganization, which fundamentally changed the sales organization and the classification of product offerings.
Due to the adaptive nature of KALIDO, executives were able to evaluate the impact of this change in just one week. Traditionally, this kind of reorganization would have taken months to implement.Subsequently, Intelsat acquired the assets of Loral Space & Communications Corporation, integrated key information from the acquired company and measured the business benefit of the acquisition within one month using KALIDO. Executives could more quickly determine next steps to ensure the organization remained on the right growth path because they were able to view the near immediate corporate impact of their decisions.Furthermore, KALIDO has allowed Intelsat to compare performance at any point in time despite differing business models.
KALIDO has also enabled Intelsat business users to construct and test what-if scenarios, and to view the effects of subtle strategic alternatives in virtual real time.Says Pradip Sitaram, director, business and operational support systems: “Intelsat is undergoing perhaps the most fundamental change that a business could ever experience, so being able to maintain a clear view with KALIDO is an enormous benefit to us. The enterprise data warehouse creation and management software allows us to adapt our BI infrastructure to bring it in line with our rapid business evolution.”
Global view with granular detail
As the company made the transition to private entity, Intelsat’s corporate infrastructure also needed to transition to address details and components that were previously unnecessary.Pradip Sitaram and his team were chartered with developing a Business Intelligence Initiative to address the newfound need for both high-level and highly detailed analysis of business activities. Adam Levy, senior manager of business intelligence and financial systems, drove the identification and implementation of the BI solution, with KALIDO at its heart.
The KALIDO enterprise data warehouse provides Intelsat with a global view of the business with granular detail. It enables business users to obtain top-level views of key performance indicators (KPIs) across multiple systems. Customer segmentation can now be achieved more rapidly while using fewer resources than were previously required and the application also reduces the time taken to generate sales forecasts. In the future, Intelsat plan to use the BI system to track supplier information and to monitor performance and spending.The KALIDO-powered BI Initiative has reduced by 50% the time required to report monthly revenues. Intelsat now has a 98%+ monthly accuracy of transponder capacity used compared to revenue generated, an advantage which helps focus attention on revenue assurance for the remaining 1-2% of revenue each month.
As well as global views of information, the KALIDO enterprise data warehouse provides highly detailed views of data, such as transponder capacity and profitability. It can show the revenue generated by each individual satellite or sub-section of a satellite, and enables sales to be broken down by business unit, sales department and sales person. Future sales and capacity projections can be viewed in full detail, and order statuses can be tracked more easily and accurately. This includes generating consolidated views of key business information, such as available network capacity, network profitability, sales, customers, service and suppliers across all internal systems.
