BT Group picks Ab Initio to enable smart data management

BT Group’s Digital Unit is working with Ab Initio, an enterprise data platform provider, to provide strategic, smart automated data management at scale for the group.

Ab Initio will support the real-time automation of rules, policies, frameworks and interconnects between its core data, its applications and the processes and people who rely on the data.

This will boost productivity, drive efficiency, improve the accuracy of data and the value of the insight to BT Group and its customers, whilst tightening data governance, ensuring the safe, secure, responsible use of data on demand.

All of this work is vital to delivering impact from the Group’s 29 petabyte data estate efficiently, forecast to be worth an aggregate £500m in internal value to the Group over the next five years. This value will come from analysis of internal and external datasets, to deliver improved customer and colleague outcomes, as well as operational efficiency and sales insights.

“Ab Initio will help us securely and effectively get our critical data into our data platform at pace, whilst also allowing us to understand the origins, quality and context of our data, making it dramatically more useful. Coupled with automated governance, the new ‘data products’ we deliver will boost the quality of our insights and our productivity, driving real value to the Group without compromising our data standards,” comments Adrian Joseph, Managing Director, Data & AI in BT Group’s Digital unit.

Ab Initio will support the orchestration of data between BT Group’s applications across its estate and its data platform, built on Google Cloud. It will also provide dynamic understanding of different data types, providing the crucial metadata that allows data scientists and artificial intelligence software to make use of them. This in turn will allow for the creation of re-usable data products, for example containing location or blackspot data, customer interactions insights, etc., which can be re-used in a range of contexts. This supports BT Group’s “Inner Source” ambitions, to make data (as well as code, design and documentation) as re-usable as possible, minimising duplication of efforts and boosting productivity.

With this deal BT Group can extend and augment Ab Initio’s existing capacity, which has driven value across the business in the past. Ab Initio has worked on multiple programmes across BT Group, including the complex event processing of 10+ billion events across our networks. It supports BT Group’s Mobile Network Data Analytics platform and Active Intelligence service, helping the Group derive insights from the data generated from tens of millions of mobile devices in a secure, privacy friendly and efficient manner. Ab Initio has also processed data for the EE Data Warehouse for over a decade, delivering data for business intelligence and analytical use-cases, helping it better understand its customers, their network experiences, and provide personalised offers that are tailored to fit their needs.

“BT Group’s approach – using Ab-initio to support orchestration, automation, metadata intelligence, governance and controls around its core data platform – will get it up to 88.2 miles per hour in no time at all. It’s a short cut to the future of the AI-led enterprise, unlocking agility without compromise, against a robust ethical framework,” comments Alan Parker, who heads Ab Initio’s international operations.

Ab Initio Software is a privately-held global software company headquartered in Lexington, Massachusetts, US, with regional offices in London, Paris, Munich, Rome, Johannesburg, Istanbul, Warsaw, Tokyo, Sydney, Jakarta, and Singapore.

Ab Initio was founded in 1995 and for more than 25 years, Ab Initio has worked with the largest and most sophisticated organizations in financial services, telecom, healthcare, retail, high-tech, transportation, manufacturing and government, among others, to assure their business success.

Ab Initio products are designed, from the beginning, to provide a single, cohesive technology platform for scalable, high performance across the full spectrum of commercial data processing activities — from real-time operational systems to batch processing analytic systems, from data warehouses to transactional systems, from data governance to data fabric.