T-Mobile's business is subscription-based, and competition with other carriers has heated up tremendously in recent years, he said. "We're fighting to poach [their customers] and keep the ones we have."
In response, T-Mobile has seriously ramped up its targeted marketing efforts. The HANA system is helping T-Mobile's campaign-management employees understand the effectiveness of those campaigns much more rapidly, Wiggin said. It took hours to generate reports with another system, but now query times are down to seconds, he said.
As a result, workers have been able to be much more interactive with the data, Wiggin added. "They do a lot more back-and-forth analysis."
T-Mobile is satisfied with its investment in HANA, but SAP has more work to do, he said.
For one, there needs to be a greater supply of IT service providers with good knowledge of the HANA technology, he said. "As for the platform itself, we think there's room to go in performance improvement," he said. While T-Mobile got good results, "we had to work through a lot of performance tuning issues to get there."
HANA also remains "an expensive proposition," he said. However, "if we can impact that [customer] churn number, it pays for itself quite rapidly," Wiggin added.
T-Mobile is also running SAP ERP software. HANA's processing power could make a difference in some resource-intensive areas of ERP, such as profitability analysis, he said. However, it could be tougher to justify the cost, he added.
Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris's e-mail address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com
