BT Group’s Openreach: Democratizing Data to Drive Business Results

BT Group’s Openreach runs the UK’s digital network, connecting homes and businesses, large and small, to the rest of the world. With the pressure on to rollout Broadband Britain—an ambitious initiative to build full-fibre connections to 20 million premises by the mid to late 2020s—the Openreach team was running into several challenges they knew would delay their ability to deliver. A lack of data availability led to Inaccurate reporting and analysis and inefficiency in resource allocation among other issues with their data integration infrastructure.

With data scattered everywhere and on-premises, they needed to make data sets available for analysis in a seamless and automated way. More than that, they wanted to deliver a democratized data platform that would serve everyone from technical data engineers to business end users. The BT technology team and their partner TCS migrated their on-premises infrastructure to a cloud data lake to create “one true data source.”

They used StreamSets to migrate data from on-premises to AWS – and then add Google Cloud Platform as a destination without rebuilding or duplicating pipelines. Not only did they democratize data access, but easy access got business users excited about building their own data pipelines. Bonus: it served perfectly as the basis of their DataOps practice.