American Tower case study: building a flexible and
affordable enterprise data warehouse with expressor
American Tower is a leading owner and operator of communications sites for the wireless and broadcast
industries, with more than 27,000 towers and 1,400 employees in the US, Mexico, Brazil and India. In October
2008, the company launched an ambitious, multi-year enterprise data warehouse program to consolidate more
than 50 single-purpose data marts and improve the accuracy and timeliness of its business reporting.
American Tower initially chose Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) as the ETL tool for this project,
but is replacing SSIS with the expressor semantic data integration systemtm to improve its data loading and
complex transformation performance.
challenges and goals
As a global organization that expanded through acquisition, American Tower’s reporting challenge was
complicated by a number of different currencies, languages, time zones and business processes. Its unique
business model, operating as a real estate company leasing space on its towers, required the company to heavily
customize its Oracle E-Business and .Net applications to accommodate as many as 100 tables per application.
And its outdated reporting environment was not very well documented, often “pulling” the same data multiple
times for different reports, which resulted in very long data extracts.
American Tower’s goals for its enterprise data warehouse program were to integrate all corporate data so it
could be reported on consistently from one place, increase the frequency of data warehouse updates to provide
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expressortm—redefining data integration
CASE STUDY
www.expressor-software.com
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expressortm—redefining data integration
www.expressor-software.com
up-to-date BI reporting, and to deploy a new and better reporting tool that empowers the business to more easily
create reports.
choosing tools
American Tower’s IT team conducted a rigorous vendor selection proce