Maxcom Telecomunicaciones Gets More Than They Bargained For With Vertica

Posted March 22, 2019 by Paige Roberts, Vertica Open Source Relations Manager

lady on cell phone with laptop computer

Maxcom Telecomunicaciones is a Mexican integrated telecommunications operator providing managed voice and data services. The Mexican federal regulations changed recently, requiring Maxcom to retain call detail record (CDR) data for two years, rather than two months. It also required them to answer queries on that data far faster, sometimes within an hour, any time of day, any day of the year. This was going to be a serious problem.



Their existing Oracle database was already struggling to keep up with two months’ worth of CDR data for their customers, who make over 25 million calls a day. And that data volume was only growing. It took eight hours just to do a standard query on two months’ worth of data at current levels. With the new laws, the old Oracle system absolutely would not work.

When they discovered that the same query that took eight hours on Oracle only took eight minutes on Vertica, they couldn’t believe it. Sixty times faster was beyond what they thought was possible.

With a local partner helping out with implementation, Maxcom got another pleasant shock. Vertica was up and running in production in three weeks. The new regulatory requirements were immediately met. Vertica had no problem answering even the longest queries on two years’ worth of CDR data well under the legal requirements. And it had plenty of room to scale up as their business grew.

Then Maxcom discovered Vertica had a lot more to offer.

In particular, fraud was costing Maxcom a lot every year. Using Vertica’s in-database machine learning, they reduced fraud related costs by 85% year over year.

“We started using Vertica data analytics to pinpoint the causes of fraud to close any loopholes and be more proactive in our fraud prevention approach. As a result, our fraud-related costs reduced by eighty-five  percent between 2017 and 2018.”
Alfonso Lara, IT Director

With regulatory compliance and fraud detection now under control, they’re turning their attention to a new project aimed at increasing customer satisfaction and reducing customer churn.

“Vertica also makes it easy for us to deploy in the cloud. We can scale elastically in an affordable and flexible infrastructure.”
Juan Nieto, Analytics Manager

They also upgraded recently to the newest version of Vertica to take advantage of the flexibility available in a Cloud deployment using Vertica in Eon Mode. Now, they can flex the computational capability as needed for the workload of the moment, and only pay for what they use.

“We initially chose Vertica because of its superior performance and query speed, but we now realize there is so much more we can do. Vertica’s machine learning capabilities will help us analyze network performance, predict capacity constraints, and ensure the best quality service to our customers.”
Alfonso Lara, IT Director


Read more about the Maxcom Telecommunicaciones story.