Intelsat: Using Talend to enable operation of a globalised network

Datalytyx expertise and Talend’s integration tools enable cutting-edge satellite communications provider to operate a globalized network. This provides thousands of organizations who are serving billions of people with truly global connectivity.

Intelsat operates the world’s first truly globalized network, combining the largest satellite fleet with terrestrial infrastructure, managed services and an open, interoperable architecture. The globalized network provides thousands of organizations serving billions of people with truly global connectivity. The introduction of Intelsat’s advanced Epic NG technology vastly increased the possibilities for expanded mobility product offerings, and Intelsat took the strategic decision to partner with the industry leader in satellite network platforms, iDirect. As an early adopter of iDirect’s technology, Intelsat were looking for a way to get new products to market faster. As Intelsat’s Application Development Director Nina Podorovskaya explained, “we knew we needed a robust, scalable solution to accurately collect network usage and performance data for a multitude of uses – the challenge was how quickly could it be built?”

Why Datalytyx?

Nina says Datalytyx were chosen primarily for the strength of their partnerships – “we’d already selected Talend as our data integration tool, planned to use Tableau, and we are a big Microsoft shop. When we learned Datalytyx had a relationship and relevant experience with iDirect, that offered a huge advantage. Further, Datalytyx offered options for several levels of ongoing support which gave us confidence in taking on the new technologies with existing staffing levels”.

Development approach

The Datalytyx team held a series of on-site and remote sessions with the Intelsat team to confirm requirements and test them against the proposed design for the required complex solution. The proposal was a flexible and extendible architecture, coordinated and controlled by Talend, that provided a pattern for future data integrations, as opposed to a point solution to address only Intelsat’s immediate needs.

The Datalytyx engagement ran concurrently with the engineering design of the new network platform. As issues that are inevitable when implementing new technology emerged, Datalytyx used agile techniques to adjust the solution as needed. Their recommendation of a 4-layer approach – Ingestion, Curation, Calculation and Consumption — has proven to be durable. Talend proved highly effective at creating the necessary data flows between these layers, delivering far greater efficiency in coding the solution, saving time and money.

In addition to designing and implementing the calculations to support Intelsat’s SLA reporting needs, Datalytyx created insightful dashboards of customer metrics and performance data using Tableau.

Datalytyx used the Agile development method, which allowed Intelsat to monitor progress and see concrete results as the solution was built. The Intelsat team were kept in the loop on all aspects of the implementation, giving them confidence in the build and that it would meet their business requirements.

Benefits Realised

The broad experience Datalytyx has built with “big data” across many industry segments on multiple platforms gave Intelsat the confidence to focus their in-house resources on the aspects of the solution that were unique to Intelsat. The partnership resulted in a fully functional, extendable solution which cut Intelsat initial timelines and avoided many potential pitfalls that could have resulted from a lack of system experience. The resulting curated data lake serves as the source for multiple critical functions. The Intelsat revenue department has a controlled and audible data feed from which they can generate usage-based service invoices, and respond to SLA concerns. The network planning team has validated historical and real-time usage detail which they can analyze in countless ways for management, trending and sizing purposes.