Brightspeed, a new internet provider founded in 2021, provides fast and reliable internet to homes across America. With a focus on building infrastructure, Brightspeed aims to provide millions of homes with uninterrupted internet access for streaming, gaming, and working. Having achieved $2 billion in revenue, the company is headquartered in Charlotte, NC, emphasizing a commitment to overcoming limitations and enhancing the online experience for users nationwide
Recently our team embarked on a short proof of concept project with the Brightspeed guiding and helping them validate the Reference Architectures highlighted in the SAP-Google Partnership, such as the data federation with Google BigQuery for Advanced Operational Analytics using SAP Analytics Cloud and harmonization of data using the Replication Flows or real-time Analytics in Google Cloud. This blog helps to outline how Brightspeed, as one of the early adopters, was successful in addressing their challenges using SAP Datasphere.
The current challenge:
- Brightspeed’s IT team was plagued with the challenge of ingesting massive volumes of Billing Data from SAP S/4HANA and SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management (around 40M Billing records per month) for real-time Enterprise Analytics in Google Big Query. The current process was manual and time consuming which involved replicating tables to table without semantics and then modeling in Google Big Query followed by creation of custom Queries which was time consuming. Any change in table structure would require considerable efforts to replicate , remap and re-join data.
- Efficient operation reporting wasn’t possible without the availability of real-time data .
The Solution:
1. SAP Datasphere’s Replication Flows are used to replicate billions of Billing data from S/4HANA into Google BigQuery with changes captured via Change Data Capture in near real-time.
Replication flows help keep the semantics and context intact and send curated results to Google BigQuery which could be made readily for use with Enterprise Analytics in Google BigQuery (for over 200+ users) cutting down on the need for any further processing.
2. SAP Datasphere’s data federation architecture helps make operational reports for finance in real-time possible in SAP Analytics Cloud , with data federated live from Google BigQuery, via the semantic Analytical Models.
The Process:
Our team was involved over a short engagement period of 4 weeks (over weekly touchpoints) to help provide procedural guidance and technical assistance (including, but not limited to, doing architectural reviews, helping with set up of replication flows, helping enablement of delta capture and extraction for custom CDS views and help provide best practice recommendations on data federation architectures).
Brightspeed proceeded to go live with the implementation following the initial validations.
Some Metrics:
Replication Volume: 175 CDS views across 300 tables totaling 40M records per month)
Data Volume : 540 GB of data per month
Percentage change in accuracy of revenue recognition and payments/ disputes : 76% Increase
Optimization change metric for delta load and replication : 3X optimized
Manual effort saved: 2000 Manual hours every year.
Some Success measurements:
- Real-Time Analytics - Some of Brightspeed’s end-of-day reports have now been enhanced to near real-time reports, such as the payment reports with data made available for Analytics with changes captured in real-time.
- Reduction of manual processes – The existing manual task-laden ETL process using SLT with the Google add-on component that required continuous monitoring, is now completely replaced with automated re-trigger mechanisms that ensure SAP Datasphere Replication flows transfer any changes to Google BigQuery in near real-time, automatically without manual intervention.
- Cost Effective: Because of the above reason, Brightspeed will see cost savings of 2 FTE(80 hrs) man days every week.
Brightspeed’s innovative solution for data harmonization featuring SAP Datasphere, complementing its Google Partnership, was nominated for Innovation Awards by the customer.
Credits
The above project success comes from contributions from both SAP and Brightspeed. We would like to thank the following SAP colleagues for their efforts : Prasana Ravichandran and Glen Leslie; and Sivakumar.N , Jason Yeung , Rahul Tiwari, and Christian Thisgaard for their valuable support and guidance.
And special thanks to the following Brightspeed members for their collaboration: Venkateswaran Krishnamurthy, Saravanan Sethumurugan, and Smitha Babu.
For any questions, feel free to reach out to paa@sap.com
- SAP Managed Tags:
