Virgin Mobile Data Migration

Virgin Mobile is now established as the most successful virtual network operator in the world, and is the UK's fifth network. Since its launch in November 1999 it has attracted over 3 million customers, making it one of the fastest growing mobile phone companies in history.

Redwood Systems Limited worked in conjunction with the Virgin Mobile Data Migration teams to successfully migrate 2.5 million customers and related data from the legacy systems to the new target Billing and CRM platforms.

Redwood Scope

Working with the Virgin teams Redwood carried out gap analysis, data mapping, specification and development of all extract and transformation code. The Target Application's proprietary APIs were used to load the target system, Redwood was responsible for the updates to the live point CRM system and provisioning repository.

This migration was quite complex for a number of reasons:

• In a standard data migration each data entity is mastered in only one legacy system. Virgin Mobile was different in that the account structure on the target system was dependant on data from the billing system and the CRM system. Complex migration rules were designed to deal with the many scenarios where the Billing and CRM systems were not in sync.
• Dealing with the large data volumes was in itself quite a challenge. The extract from source and load to the ETL environment alone took 20 hours with an overall migration timescale of 1 week. The extract was split into two streams splitting out data from the critical path on the first run. The migration was designed to run while the live systems remained active albeit in a reduced capacity. This enabled the systems down window to be reduced to 18 hours.
• As the legacy systems were not directly linked there was considerable data cleanse involved at source and during the transformation phase of the migration to enable the migration to achieve the migration targets.