Case Study: AT&T achieves $3.4M in savings, faster backups, and improved database performance with Informatica Data Archive

Improve Performance, Increase User Productivity, and Reduce Costs with Database Archiving

AT&T Wireless, which serves some 87 million customers, was struggling with rapidly growing Oracle ERP and customer-analysis (Mercury) databases that drove up storage costs, lengthened backups beyond nightly windows, and degraded application performance. An in‑house archiving solution proved unmanageable, and the company needed to reduce storage and provisioning time while preserving high levels of internal and external service.

AT&T implemented Informatica Data Archive to purge and transparently archive inactive data, keeping Mercury under the 16 TB backup threshold (10.8 TB archived) and its ERP system at ~9 TB (2.4 TB archived). The change boosted ERP performance ~30%, avoided about 3.5 hours of downtime per month, saved ~40 hours/month in backup effort, and delivered $3.4M in cumulative benefits over five years (including $582,594 in production storage savings), with a 276% ROI and a 5.8‑month payback.

AT&T

Bryon Rickey

Director of Production Operations