InformationWeek

TCI Goes For Gold

Its reengineering project could result in one of the world's largest customer-service databases

By Mary E. Thyfault and Katherine Bull
Issue date: Sept. 18, 1995

For the past several weeks, John Malone, CEO of Tele-Communications Inc., has been in the middle of a multibillion-dollar deal. As the largest shareholder in Turner Broadcasting System, Malone has been actively involved in Time Warner's proposed $8 billion takeover of TBS.

But the Turner deal isn't the only thing on Malone's mind. TCI, the world's largest cable TV company, is i n the midst of a massive reengineering project that involves every key information technology resource within the company--from financial operations and human resources to billing and customer service.

The reengineering is designed to let TCI sell virtually instant access to the Internet, commercial online services, wireless communications, and other information sources.

How important is the effort to TCI's future in the increasingly competitive communications/media market? Malone doesn't mince words: "If it doesn't work, we're in deep shit."

The reengineering project, called Summit (Subscriber Media Management Technology), has been in the works at TCI for two years. When completed, it could result in one of the world's largest distributed databases.

While other cable TV and telephone companies still use mainframes and proprietary database systems to run their businesses, Summit's architecture will utilize all the benefits of client-server technology. "It's super-complex," says Rob Tholemeier, a VP at the Meta Group, a consulting firm in Stamford, Conn.

William Rierden, VP of subscriber systems at TCI in Englewood, Colo., expects the database to grow to 300 Gbytes in the next two years. "If you took the aggregate of the data of all our providers, there are several hundred gigabytes now," says Rierden. "We have to bring all that data together under one umbrella."

Branden Clausen, TCI's chief operating officer, first came up with the idea of Summit, according to Sadie Decker, TCI's chief information officer and head of the project. "TCI saw this as a strategic thing well before the rest of the telecommunications industry caught on," she says. Adds Malone, "We're the biggest. If anybody was going to do it, it had to be us."

CIO Decker expects to begin Summit's first pilot test in Greeley, Colo., in late October. It will consist of a six-week test of 40 users. If the trial is successful, TCI expects to roll out Summit nationwide by 1997.

When completed, Summit will allow some 6,000 TCI representatives around the country, using Power Macintoshes from Apple Computer, to quickly sell and deploy services or order repairs for its customers.

Summit will use a SQL Server 10 relational database from Sybase in Emeryville, Calif., with a common graphical user interface from Neuron Data Inc. in Palo Alto, Calif. But Summit will not be one centralized database. Instead, it will be structured as 16 Sybase Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) databases running on Sun Microsystems SparcCenter 100E servers at TCI's headquarters.

Each database will be assigned a specific application, such as customer service, bill fulfillment, accounts receivable, dispatch information, addressability, phone interfacing, and telephony applications. The servers will be interconnected to customer-service representatives by a combination of private and public wide area networks--the cable industry's largest--using a mix of 56-Kbps, 1.544-Mbps, and 45-Mbps lines and frame relay data packet switching, says Harold McFarla nd, TCI's VP and chief engineer.

In larger test cities, private networks will use some of TCI's 350,000 miles of fiber-optic cable, drastically reducing the amount TCI must pay the phone companies. TCI uses Sun's SunNet Manager for network management of both voice and data over the private networks.

Perfect Timing
TCI's timing for Summit couldn't be better. Congress is rewriting the rules for the communications industry, establishing a virtual free-for-all competition for cable, wired and wireless phone services, and new information services. Soon, cable TV companies such as TCI and phone companies such as US West and AT&T will compete in each other's businesses. "It's going to become wilder and crazier than it's ever been," says Todd Ashworth, a VP of American Management Systems in Fairfax, Va.

Others say using information technology to improve customer service has become crucial--even essential--to survival. "These billing and customer-care systems are the strategic weapon for c able companies," says Howard Anderson, a managing partner at the Yankee Group Inc., a consulting firm in Boston. "Companies that don't excel at this will be lunch meat."

TCI wouldn't be specific about the total cost of Summit, but it acknowledges that software expenses alone will run more than $100 million. Malone believes the investment is worthwhile. "Our vision of the future is to pack a large number of services into one-stop shopping packages," he says. That's quite a change for a company that now sells, supplies, and bills, only one product--cable TV service.

Anyone who's been put on hold by their local cable TV company can appreciate the change instant access will bring. "This will put us in almost interactive contact with our customers," says TCI's Rierden. "It will change our representatives from order-takers to sales and service people."

For CIO Decker, the true test will come with competition from the telcos. That will force TCI to offer rapid-fire deployment of whatever programming--fro m Internet access to custom news broadcasts--a customer wants.

Our Hour
It now takes about a month for TCI to offer its nationwide subscribers a service. With Summit, it will take about an hour. "This is their product development platform," says analyst Ashworth. "Every new service they offer will be implemented through billing and customer care."

With Summit, each time a customer calls one of TCI's service representatives, a customer profile will appear on the rep's computer screen. The TCI rep will then add products and services or update information on the customer's profile. Once the call is completed, the information will be sent to Denver, which will handle the processing and billing of the new product request. TCI customers will receive one bill each month detailing all the products ordered from TCI.

For service repair jobs, TCI is extending its dispatch network wirelessly in a system that Decker compares to the one operated by Federal Express. TCI is partnering with Arrowsmith Technologies Inc. in Austin, Texas, for a satellite global positioning system to dispatch its technicians. When a customer orders a converter, for instance, the system will send the information to a local dispatch server that will automatically route that information based on technicians' schedules.

That's a far cry from the present system: Today, TCI technicians stop by the dispatch center to pick up work orders. The Arrowsmith system will save each technician an hour a day, or 300 labor-hours daily in a city like Denver, where TCI dispatches 300 trucks.

Redundancy of the network and database are especially critical. Says McFarland, "If I lose the network [and access to Summit], that's lost revenue."

Five of Summit's database servers are actually Sybase Replication Servers dedicated to creating a mirror image of Summit's primary Denver database in Dallas. Those sites are connected by their own separate routers and redundant links. "The primary site for Summit is Denver," Rierden says. "But, if we have a failure in the databases at that site, we'll have a completely updated database in Dallas to work with."

Major call centers will have redundant links all the way from the telephone switch to the data centers. "Nothing can fail without it being able to reconfigure itself," says McFarland. Even the smallest sites will be able to dial into the network if a dedicated line fails.

Also, TCI isn't taking any chances with its data. Any database failures will be handled manually by TCI support staff until the system is stable and reliable. TCI executives also stress that even though Summit may be the first of its kind in architecture and scope, TCI won't take unnecessary risks. For instance, Summit will use Sybase's two-year-old SQL Server 10 database and in the short term won't switch to Sybase's newer version, SQL Server 11. "Stability is what we're interested in," asserts CIO Decker. "We want to deploy the system on a proven baseline technology and worry about migrating to the newer technology la ter. We're not going to be the first to do anything and risk jeopardizing our system."

That's not a vote of confidence for Sybase's latest technology, but it is an endorsement for Sybase as a supplier. Sybase has taken some financial hits in the last six months because it was late getting SQL Server 11 out the door.

"TCI is putting a lot of faith and confidence that Sybase can get itself off the ropes," says David Benhaim, VP at Keystone Investments Inc., a financial services firm in Boston. "It says that Sybase is a long-term player in the database industry."

TCI VP Rierden says Sybase was selected over Oracle because its SQL Server product "fit the distributed architecture. The whole data model and distribution scheme was designed by Sybase." Price was also a factor, he adds. Although neither TCI nor Sybase would reveal the dollar amount of the Sybase contract, industry sources put it in the range of $4 million to $5 million.

Summit will also provide TCI with detailed information about custo mer purchasing trends. TCI is in the early stages of planning a decision-support data warehouse that will hold key customer trend information and enable TCI to better market and sell its products.

The cable TV company has not yet selected a vendor for its data warehouse. Rierden says Sybase, Oracle, and Red Brick Systems are under consideration. "Before we make a decision, we need to get a handle on what our decision support requirements are going to be," he explains.

The major technology challenges Decker faces include tightly integrating the increasingly wide variety of new TCI products into Summit while continuing to provide a customer-friendly bill. "We're not just selling basic television services anymore," she notes.

Summit has its skeptics, including Tholemeier of Meta Group. "Due to the size of the database and that everything has to be kept updated, it makes it a complicated proposition for TCI," he says. "Building this kind of a system may not only be practically impossible but theoreti cally impossible as well. Keeping all that information in sync is a nightmare. If TCI can do it, I would be surprised."

By 1997, TCI will begin offering digital television. This will allow service providers to compress up to eight channels into the same space needed for one analog channel, giving customers far more programming to chose from. Information garnered about digital TV customers also will go into the Summit database.

This year, TCI is expected to acquire Viacom. If that happens, it would add 3 million subscribers to TCI's 12 million customer base and make it hard for McFarland to keep track of just how many sites TCI needs to connect via Summit. Just as important, TCI will have to recruit hundreds of software engineers to support Summit.

Malone says there's really no alternative: "If this doesn't work, we won't be able to buy [other companies]. At least we wouldn't be able to manage them after we did."

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