L.A. Cellular operates more than 40 retail stores in Southern Calif., and it uses BusinessObjects to gain business intelligence from its customer billing information and call detail records. Employees in the company's customer care, marketing, sales, financial planning, and accounting departments currently use BusinessObjects as their query, reporting, and analysis tool for data stored in Microsoft SQL Server databases.
In query benchmark testing, L.A. Cellular has seen the time needed to perform four sample business intelligence queries drop from 42 minutes to 9 minutes, slashing computing time by nearly 80 percent. Testing of several administration functions -- including database backup, insertion of eight million rows, and reindexing -- showed a nearly 50 percent drop in computing time with SQL 7.0 OLAP Services over SQL 6.5.
Ron Martinez, senior manager of decision support systems at L.A. Cellular, described the performance of BusinessObjects running against its Microsoft OLAP Services cube as "lightning fast. Navigation through almost 20 million rows of data is almost instantaneous."
"Our finance department managed the creation of our decision support solution, so return on investment was a driving factor in putting together our business intelligence system," Martinez added. "With BusinessObjects and SQL Server, the system has paid for itself after only a few months. We`ve already been able to identify and resolve thousands of dollars worth of billing discrepancies."
Announced earlier this month, BusinessObjects 5.0 introduces analytical reporting, which integrates enterprise reporting functions such as robust report distribution and management, with traditional decision support system (DSS) functions such as ad-hoc access to corporate data, report creation, and OLAP functions such as slice-and-dice and drill, thus providing users with an unprecedented breadth of functionality.
"Microsoft designed SQL Server 7.0 to help make data warehouses and data marts easier to build, manage, and use," said Jim Ewel, director, SQL Server product management of Microsoft Corp. "In working with SQL Server 7.0, BusinessObjects 5.0 builds upon our ease-of-use standard with an integrated system for enterprise analytical reporting."
"By including OLAP functionality with SQL Server 7.0, we expect Microsoft will help supply powerful analytical applications to a new range of customers who have never before used decision support software," said Dave Kellogg, vice president of corporate marketing at Business Objects. "We look forward to working with joint customers such as L.A. Cellular to deliver high-performance DSS with BusinessObjects 5.0 and SQL Server 7.0."
Editors Note
About L.A. Cellular
L.A. Cellular is Southern California's premier provider of wireless telecommunications services. Headquartered in Southern California, L.A. Cellular is a California general partnership owned by AT&T Wireless Services, Inc., the nation's leading cellular entity, and BellSouth Cellular Corporation, an international telecommunications company with 100 years of Bell System tradition. Learn more about L.A. Cellular by visiting L.A. Cellular on the world wide web at www.lacellular.com.
About Business Objects
Business Objects is the world's leading provider of integrated enterprise decision support tools. Business Objects products provide non-technical business users with access to information stored in data warehouses, data marts, and packaged business applications. Business Objects provides a complete suite of decision support tools including query, reporting, online analytical processing, data mining, and DSS administration for both client/server and internet environments. Business Objects has sold more than 955 000 licenses to over 7 000 organizations in more than 60 countries worldwide.
Business Objects may be reached by phone at (011) 807-0777 or on the world wide web at http://www.businessobjects.com. The Company's stock is publicly traded under the ticker symbol BOBJY.
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