The following is an excerpt from the book, "Data Juice: 101 Real-World Stories of How Organizations Are Squeezing Value From Available Data Assets."

Aircel Limited, a leading provider of innovative communications and mobile services in India, understood the significance of big data for generating accurate business forecasts and making well-informed decisions. Aircel required an efficient solution to improve database performance, increase scalability, and analyze structured data with an annual growth rate of 10 to 15 percent.

To meet these requirements, Aircel selected the Vertica Analytics Platform, which offered a more efficient system designed to handle multiple workloads, complex processes, and faster queries despite its larger database size. Vertica enabled Aircel to gather and acquire intelligent insights from structured data, resulting in a 10 to 15 percent decrease in total cost of ownership and annual data growth.

In addition, the platform's support for a large customer base allowed Aircel to analyze up to 200 GB of summarized data every day. Business Intelligence Head of Aircel Limited, Sanjeev Chaudhary, stated, "We chose Vertica as our short-term and long-term solution as we scale. This big data platform is vital to our ability to innovate and solve business problems."

The Vertica Analytics Platform produced tangible results, including increased speed, decreased ownership costs, and simplified management tasks. These outcomes could go a long way toward promoting data democratization in the organization, allowing every Aircel employee to gain a greater understanding of the power of data to solve business problems.

To remain competitive, however, businesses must begin to leverage the insights derived from unstructured and semi-structured data, such as email, social media, video, voice, and the Internet of Things. As the size of these types of data dwarfs that of structured data, storage and scalability become crucial. Aircel could become a data powerhouse in the telecom industry by mastering these less structured data types.

Aircel's implementation of the Vertica Analytics Platform has enabled the company to gain insightful, intelligent, and data-driven insights from structured data while simultaneously reducing total cost of ownership and annual data growth. To maintain a competitive advantage in the telecom industry, organizations must investigate the insights that can be gleaned from unstructured and semi-structured data types. Adoption of effective big data analytics tools is essential for organizations to generate accurate business forecasts, well-informed decisions, and innovation.