Airtel moves customer data on an open source platform

NEW DELHI: Telecom major Bharti Airtel today said it has selected IT data management and analytics company Cloudera to move its customer data on the latter's platform.

"Now, we are able to gain an even greater technical edge, empowering our marketers with intelligent data and analytics to make better decisions and improve the entire customer lifecycle with customised offerings," Bharti Airtel Group CIO Harmeen Mehta said in a statement.

The platform is built on open source technology Apache Hadoop. Cloudera offers data management and analytics platform built on Apache Hadoop and open source technologies.

"With over 265 million customers across its India operations, Airtel faced the immense task of making sense of and leveraging huge volumes of customer and network data they collect on a daily basis, which was previously stored in multiple traditional systems built over a period of time," the statement said.

The open source softwares come at less cost or free compared to proprietary technology based IT solutions. However, companies which customise open source software as per need of user charge money for their services.

Airtel customer base in India include wireless and fixed services, mobile commerce, high speed DSL broadband, IPTV, DTH, and national and international long distance services to carriers.