MCI

"EMC provided the storage capabilities that we needed and Solid Data delivered the performance."

Steve Otto,
MCI

Overview
MCI, a Midwest-based long distance carrier and Internet Service Provider (ISP), was facing one of the challenges of business growth-supporting more subscribers at a lower cost per subscriber. The growth of their customer base was being limited due to two main issues. First, increasing the size of the customer base would increase the time required to process bills, which would result in higher costs to the company. Second, growing their customer base would result in slower response times and degraded customer service.

MCI's competitive edge was due to reasonable rates and excellent customer service. As they continued to grow, the key to maintaining their competitive edge was to increase scalability of their billing system while lowering costs related to processing bills. To do this, they needed to reduce the time for running stored procedures (which presently required 72 hours) to less than one day, because it was already beginning to negatively impact customer service by resulting in slower response times. MCI also needed to significantly reduce the subscriber-billing process from its current span of five days.

By moving their temp database file and transaction logs onto two Solid Data solid-state disk systems, the company met its objectives. "We've realized a 70 percent increase in performance. Prior to implementing the Solid Data solution, stored procedures took up to 72 hours to run; they now take only 8 hours. It was exactly the solution we were looking for," said Steve Otto of MCI. "I was amazed to see how much of a performance gain we received." Otto also found that billing application response time was greatly enhanced and the time required to process billing was decreased from five days to just two days. This lowered the cost of producing bills and immediately afforded MCI the opportunity to add additional subscribers. Otto concluded, "The time that we've saved since implementing the Solid Data solid-state disk solution has already paid off in a cost savings benefit from our original investment. It's clear that this product made an impact on our bottom line."

Summary
The growth of MCI's customer base was being limited due to the time required to process bills and concerns about potential slower response times causing degraded customer service. MCI needed to reduce the runtime for stored procedures from three days (72 hours) to less than one day and greatly reduce their subscriber-billing process, which currently required five days. By installing Solid Data solid-state disk systems, MCI met their objectives. The runtime for stored procedures has been reduced from three days to only eight hours and the billing process now takes just two days rather than five. The performance increases have had a significant positive impact on the company's bottom line-MCI has realized a 30 percent decrease in subscriber billing costs and a 50 percent increase in the company's revenue opportunity.

MCI Case Study PDF: 19 KB (mci.pdf)