Empowering Telcos with a Semantic Layer: How AtScale Supports Data Democratization

The telecommunications industry is undergoing rapid transformation, fueled by the massive growth of data and an increasing demand for data-driven decision-making. However, many organizations still face challenges in equipping their teams with the right tools and infrastructure to leverage this data fully. This blog explores how AtScale’s Semantic Layer helped a leading Canadian telecommunications provider overcome operational and performance barriers in their legacy infrastructure. This solution enabled them to achieve data democratization, unlock the full potential of their data, reduce costs, and scale efficiently.

The Challenge: Centralized Data Management Creating Bottlenecks

Telecom providers often rely on centralized teams to manage datasets and queries, leading to operational inefficiencies. In this case, the company’s data infrastructure team, responsible for tools like Splunk, also had to handle raw and transformed data, creating a bottleneck. As a result, departments lacked the autonomy to create their own dashboards or generate insights. Self-service capabilities were limited to what the central team had prebuilt, leading to several challenges:

• Limited Self-Service and Scalability: Teams couldn’t independently create dashboards, limiting business intelligence capabilities.
• Siloed Data Models: Sharing datasets across departments was a manual and labor-intensive process, reinforcing data silos.
• Performance Constraints: Creating KPIs required substantial manual effort due to the limitations of existing tools, impacting performance.

The Solution: AtScale’s Semantic Layer

To tackle these challenges, the company implemented AtScale’s Universal Semantic Layer, transforming its data infrastructure into a scalable and democratized system. Here’s how it worked:

• Decoupling Data from Consumption: AtScale allowed departments to securely access datasets via the semantic layer without constant support from the central team. This shift enabled the data infrastructure team to focus on data provisioning and semantic modeling instead of dashboard creation.
• Seamless Model Development and Sharing: With AtScale’s Python connector, the company automated the creation and sharing of data models, which were then published and made available to various BI tools, including Looker and custom-built applications for network performance monitoring.
• Improved Query Performance: AtScale automatically created and managed aggregates, reducing query costs and enhancing performance.

The ROI: Empowering Teams and Maximizing Impact

Implementing AtScale didn’t just streamline operations; it catalyzed a wave of transformative change across the organization. Here’s how the transformation played out:

• Operational Efficiency: Instead of growing the data infrastructure team to meet increasing demand, the company streamlined operations, enabling the existing team to manage a growing data load without bottlenecks. With departments now self-sufficient in generating insights, the central team could focus on more strategic initiatives, unlocking time and energy for higher-value tasks.
• Cost Efficiency: The organization realized significant cost savings by cutting back on reliance on expensive tools like Splunk and optimizing BigQuery usage. AtScale’s data architecture helped the company eliminate inefficiencies, offering a long-term solution to managing data at scale.
• Governance and Security: With AtScale’s role-based access control, the company ensured that every department had the right level of data access while keeping everything secure and compliant. The result? A balance between autonomy and control that empowers teams without sacrificing data integrity.
• Faster Decision-Making: AtScale’s Semantic Layer accelerated the time it took to build and share data models, cutting the lag between data ingestion and actionable insights. With teams empowered to make decisions faster, the company gained a competitive edge by responding to business needs with greater agility.

AtScale’s Semantic Layer wasn’t just a solution but the catalyst for a data-driven transformation. By simplifying data access, improving scalability, and unlocking valuable insights, the telecommunications provider no longer struggled with the limitations of legacy infrastructure. Instead, they built a foundation for sustained growth and data democratization that empowered their teams and drove business value. This shift positioned them for success today and set them up for a future where data is an ever-present driver of innovation.