EDA Keeps the Data Lines Open at New Brunswick Telephone

Snapshot

Organization New Brunswick Telephone (NBTel)

Profile Telecommunications company providing innovative communications services

Headquarters Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada.

The Challenge To streamline and standardize the loan origination process

The Results Mainframe to PC connectivity simplifies access to disparate legacy data and provides full complement of customer service information to sales and marketing

Information Builders Tool EDA (Now part of iWay Software's product suite)

With new computing technologies such as client/server and the Web dominating industry news, the huge amount of information processing that still takes place on mainframe computers is often overlooked. At many large firms, host-based production systems remain at the core of the business.

But on the two-way street connecting users with production data, the mainframe terminal has gone the way of the Edsel. These days it's on the PC that users are doing data management and reporting, which has challenged IT pros to provide open access to mainframe resources. Networking protocols such as TCP/IP have pretty well eliminated the connectivity issues, but it's still a struggle to sort out the differences among all the various data types.

When New Brunswick Telephone (NBTel), a telecommunications firm serving the Canadian province of New Brunswick, wanted to improve customer service, their IT organization focused on giving the ever-growing number of customer service reps direct access to billing information. "The widening chasm between PCs and mainframes has made free information access a continual challenge," notes John Hodgson, Systems Manager of Information Provisioning for NBTel. "The problem becomes especially acute when users need simultaneous access to more than one legacy database."

NBTel is a wholly owned subsidiary of Bruncor Inc., a management company focused on electronic services integration. NBTel is a front-runner in providing a wide range of innovative communication services, including the creation of the VideoActive Network, a hybrid fiber/coax system which will carry ATM voice and data services to customers in the province. With a combination of fiber optics and coax cable, the company is offering 10 megabyte, two-way interactive service in and out of the home.

Ringing for Customer Service

Even as NBTel is forging ahead with the latest multimedia and interactive technologies, it recognizes its basic business systems as the foundation of its customer service operation. "We still rely on the fundamentals that got us here," says Gary Lund, General Manager of Future Services at NBTel. "Our workhorse IT systems on the mainframe are what keep things up and running."

An integral part of NBTel's commitment to customer satisfaction is a software application called WINTEL, a corporate information delivery system that gives customer service reps a complete view of billing, service problems, and service charges for each customer.

Initiated in 1993, WINTEL was developed incrementally over time. "The system grew along with user demand," notes Hodgson. "The crying need at the outset was for middleware that would allow online access to our mainframe databases. We wanted to get reports back in minutes, instead of the weeks it was taking us."

Arlene Holt, Systems Analyst for NBTel's Customer Information Group, concurs with Hodgson. "Before WINTEL, there were huge volumes of standard monthly reports issuing from Financial and Budget Groups. These had to be interpreted and then re-entered into individual spreadsheets. All the reports came from the mainframe. If end users wanted custom reports, they had to develop them on an ad hoc basis. There was no consistent way to get at this important customer account data."

EDA Connects

Live querying of mainframe data was the answer. Developers created a technology palette consisting of Visual Basic reporting tools accessing mainframe data through the EDA* and EDA/Link technologies. "Information Builders' EDA middleware was the logical choice," says Charlie Cook, WINTEL Technical Architect. "It was the only middleware at the time that could handle our heterogeneous database environment, which includes DB2, IMS, IDMS, and VSAM."

EDA remains the only middleware product that offers a complete, enterprise-wide solution, with direct access to more than 70 proprietary database managers and file systems, both relational and nonrelational. EDA's open, integrated architecture lets enterprises build their information framework incrementally with best-of-breed components. This reduces the complexity of network computing by letting business needs, not legacy software, determine how an organization sets up its information systems.

EDA offers six different database APIs, so virtually any application and more than 1,000 desktop tools can seamlessly operate with EDA servers. The EDA server can reach most nonrelational databases and file systems through its SQL translation engine.

Making a Call With EDA

Architecturally, WINTEL consists of a Visual Basic reporting tool that uses SQL statements and FOCUS stored procedure services to execute IMS/TM transactions and to retrieve IMS data. Reports, displayed in spreadsheet format via Microsoft Excel, contain competitive analysis; revenue by customer, area, and features; market analysis; customer profiles; and billing information.

For example, a PC user might want to obtain a report that provides detail on all new Internet accounts within his or her region over the previous 60 days. Through WINTEL's graphical user interface, that user could set in motion an EDA stored procedure which then is interpreted by the EDA server and translated into SQL. These requests are passed on to the DB2 database and the information is passed back to the user.

An EDA server resides on NBTel's corporate mainframe, with drivers for DB/2 and IMS transactions. EDA/Link for Windows runs on each of the IBM-compatible PCs, which are connected via Banyan Vines local-area network software and the TCP/IP communications protocol.

This architecture is designed with one primary goal in mind: give NBTel's sales and marketing representatives fast access to customer information. "We can access information by service level or account level," says Holt, "providing Sales Account Representatives with all kinds of detailed reports: revenue information, tools' costs, product services detail, and so on. WINTEL is a sales-driven application, and they mostly need raw analysis of data."

WINTEL currently has about 500 users, primarily in Sales and Marketing. One NBTel Account Manager says that WINTEL now provides 80 percent of the information that three years ago had to be requested on an ad hoc basis. Another account manager says his group could not make effective business decisions without WINTEL.

EDA Frees the Lines

Users access this treasure trove of customer data through a point-and-click Visual Basic interface. But behind the scenes, there's a complex software infrastructure that makes it all possible, especially the EDA component.

"This system wouldn't work without EDA," Hodgson stresses. "EDA is a highly effective solution for any company that has a lot of mainframe data they want to make available to the PC world. With EDA, we can concentrate on best-of-breed applications like Visual Basic or Excel and not worry about how we're going to get the data to them."

NBTel continues to move into the fast lanes of the telecom industry, with its mainframe systems as a solid foundation. Recently NBTel was able to resell WINTEL as part of a bundle of systems to three other telecommunications firms serving the Atlantic Provinces: MT&T, NewTel, and IslandTel.

"What is telecommunications about today?" Lund asks rhetorically. "It's about new ways to bring entertainment into the home without having to walk down to the video store. It's about how to interface with people and businesses down the street or around the world. We want to put the consumers in the driver's seat, giving them services that make them more capable."

Of course, there is still plenty to learn. "Everything is up for grabs in the telecom industry these days," Lund stresses. "Whatever technologies dominate will become clear sooner or later. What's more important, in our view, is to understand consumer behavior. What do our customers need to make their everyday lives better? That's the question we're most interested in answering."

And that's why fast access to customer service data remains essential, putting WINTEL in a progressively more strategic role at NBTel. "We're out to transform ourselves into a growth-oriented company," Lund concludes. "We don't want to be just a phone company anymore. That has become a very slippery slope."

(*Note: EDA is now part of iWay Software's product suite)