BT - British Telecommunications plc

BT is one of Europe's leading providers of telecommunications services. Its principal activities include local, national and international telecommunications services, higher-value broadband and internet products and services, and IT solutions. In the UK, BT serves over 21 million corporate and residential customers with more than 28 million exchange lines, as well as providing network services to other licensed operators. Its IT and network technologies business, BT Exact, develops, maintains and operates the key IT systems on which BT's business depends.

Cogito and BT
Cogito's relationship with BT dates back to the mid-1980's, even predating the founding of Cogito in 1989. Two of Cogito's directors were formerly employed by Cullinet Software from whom BT purchased the IDMS database product on which the BT flag-ship Customer Services System (CSS) is based. Since its formation in 1989, Cogito have had close links with BT both as a software and consultancy client. Several tools, which subsequently were made generally available to the CA-IDMS community at large, were developed by Cogito to meet BT's specific needs. Cogito have also provided CA-IDMS consultancy and support on an ongoing basis since its formation in 1989.

CA-IDMS
One of BT's largest IT systems, the Customer Service System (CSS) that underpins the company's transactions with its customers, is based upon the CA-IDMS database. According to Winter Corporation's Very Large Database Survey information (see http://www.wintercorp.com/vldb/2003_TopTen_Survey/TopTenWinners.asp) in 2003, the system had at its heart 11.6 TB of data, ranking it number two in all the OLTP databases surveyed on any platform. The volume of data stored is still growing.

Cogito have been closely linked with CSS since its development in 1985. Various Cogito tools for CA-IDMS have been an essential part of the CSS implementation, in particular in the area of non-stop (24x7) processing. For example, BT would incur excessive down time when undertaking essential reorganisations of very large areas of the CSS database without the EZ-Reorg (online database reorganisation) product which allows databases to be reorganised with minimal interruption to update processing, and EZ-SoftQuiesce allows database backups to be taken with no interruption to online processing.

In the performance area, EZ-Synchro allows BT to split operation of the CSS application processing across multiple CA-IDMS central versions with full buffer coherency, and EZ-Megabuf Sequential is used to accelerate batch processing including many CA-IDMS utilities.

EZ-Image is used for development/testing and training purposes, saving BT hundreds of gigabytes of DASD by providing virtual test databases. Apart from the software tools, Cogito have also provided BT Exact, BT's IT and network technologies business, with consultancy and CA-IDMS support to assist in development and maintenance of the system on an ongoing basis since 1989.

DB2
Other major BT IT systems are implemented on DB2. BT owns a patent, licensed to Cogito, on which the EZ-XOP Index Optimizer product is based. BT is now a major user of the EZ-DB2 products from Cogito. EZ-DB2 includes the EZ-Tracer component that provides a detailed analysis of a DB2 workload. .

"I've not seen any other tool which gives such a detailed report of the actual cost to your system of each SQL statement in the application." - Mike Holmans, senior DB2 DBA, BT Exact

Further information about BT and BT Exact can be found at www.bt.com and www.btexact.com.