Extract, Transform, and Load processes (ETL) collect data from several sources, cleanse and unify them, and feed them to a database, data warehouse or another process for analysis. Today the evolution of digital-related processes, enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management systems all challenge ETL processes because the necessary processing power has increased and the time needed to treat the data records and convert them into useful business information must be shrunk beyond what the implemented IT-infrastructure can handle.

Grid technology is the solution to saturated ETL and other telecommunications processes. Generally, the data managed by ETL processes lies in discrete, independent, and self-contained units. When these are not inter-dependent, the complex transformation rules can be applied separately and computed in parallel among existing resources. This greatly reduces the time and cost.

Grid Technology can also be used in network planning and management, data mining and data warehousing, CDR and EDR analysis, fraud detection, or audio and video format conversions.

Grid solutions provide better performance, are more robust, efficient and profitable for volume-growing processes, the ROI is higher and a Grid-enabled process is guaranteed to be finished in time, survive execution errors, use all available resources and be cheaper than other solutions.

Telecom Italia developed a series of applications to manage Call Data Records (CDR) from the public phone network. However, their business needs demanded a solution with scalability, resilience and better performance. They opted for an IG V because its service-oriented architecture allows them to abstract applications from the physical resource layers and thereby improve manageability and performance.

With a Grid-enabled version of the application the Telecom Italia process was much faster and scalable with significant cost reduction. As a bonus, the process is now more reliable as it does not depend on one, but many machines and the CPU is no longer a bottleneck.

As they said themselves:
"The grid platform has resulted in a more flexible, integrable, and scalable solution. Grid Systems has the most elegant architecture for simple application virtualisation, easy management and optimal resource utilization. Additionally, it has produced a significant decrease in management costs, an 85% performance improvement and an 83% hardware costs reduction"