Verizon modernizes the Yellow Pages with Oracle BI |
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By Robert Westervelt, News Writer
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SAN FRANCISCO -- The future of the Yellow Pages is unclear, admits Peter Johnson, director of
decision support systems at Verizon Communication Inc.'s information services group.
Johnson himself doesn't use the Yellow Pages as much as he once did to find a phone number and
address. Like Johnson, Verizon's customers are turning to online sources for the information, and
the company would like to steer them to its SuperPages Web site.
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Making the electronic side work to be as profitable as the print
side is where the trick is and that begs for all kinds of analysis.
Peter Johnson,
director of decision support systemsVerizon Communication Inc. |
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The New York-based company is turning to Oracle Corp. to help it find some clarity.
Oracle unveiled Business Intelligence 10g at its OpenWorld users conference this week. The
product, now offered independently from the application server, provides query, reporting and
analysis, dashboards, data integration and BI application development.
Verizon began using the beta version of Business Intelligence 10g to replace a legacy Oracle
Express application it inherited from the merger of Bell Atlantic, Nynex and GTE, Johnson said.
Johnson manages a group of analysts and support teams that gathers customer, sales, marketing,
distribution and publishing data for the entire company. The data is used to perform analytics and
produce reports for Verizon's executives who then use that information to make decisions.
"A lot of our customers are trading in their print product," Johnson said. "Making the
electronic side work to be as profitable as the print side is where the trick is and that begs for
all kinds of analysis."
Verizon chose Oracle several years ago to streamline its disparate systems. Consolidation in the
telecommunications industry in the '90s left Verizon with multiple systems, and it was difficult to
combine the information to perform the right analysis, Johnson said.
While bundling the BI tools and adding functionality to its Discoverer product is a positive
step forward for Oracle, it is unclear what the software vendor plans to do with its development
suite or its warehouse builder products, which perform similar BI functions, said Mike Schiff, vice
president of data warehousing and business intelligence at Sterling, Va.-based Current
Analysis.
"This opens up the BI tools to Oracle database shops that don't use the application server and
that is positive," Schiff said. "But Oracle hasn't released pricing on the product, and they aren't
letting us know what they're doing with their other BI tools."
As a beta customer, Verizon is testing all of the functionality in Business Intelligence 10g.
Johnson said he's been impressed with the product, emphasizing the use of Oracle's BI Beans feature
and the update to Oracle Discoverer, which adds query, reporting and analysis with dashboard
features for end users.
BI Beans allows developers to build custom business intelligence applications that use Online
Analytical Processing (OLAP) functionality in the Oracle database. BI Beans is integrated into
Oracle JDeveloper and enables developers to write in calculation builders, graphs and cross
tabs.
"With the BI Beans interface and the other tools available, we're able to give information to
analysts who can sit down for a couple of hours and answer a lot of questions," Johnson said. "In
one session they can easily serve themselves with 25 or 30 questions answered."
The analysis has resulted in some changes to Verizon's strategy. The company restructured its
SuperPages.com Web site to give advertisers the option of signing up for Web-search ad campaigns
through provider FindWhat.com.
At the same time, the company formed a partnership with eBay and launched new shopping tools on
the Web site.
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