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Company Profile

FiberTower Corporation (NASDAQ:FTWR)is the first company to recognize and treat wireless backhaul as part of a mission critical network by delivering a service that promotes growth, scalability and service quality in wireless networks. FiberTower delivers groundbreaking improvements in backhaul performance and opens new market opportunities.Customer Case Description

• FiberTower Sales Operations is responsible for tracking wireless telecom capacity, backhaul performance, and for determining cell tower site selection across the U.S. Its customers include some of the largest wireless carriers in the industry including Sprint and Cingular Wireless.
• The primary challenge was to find and implement an application that simplified the analysis of optimal capital investments. Specifically, FiberTower’s sales operation team was charged with determining optimal locations for deploying mobile telecommunications infrastructure.

Determining optimal locations required:

Visualizing the locations of current and projected towers

Drilling into the financial and physical attributes of towers

Visualizing potential FiberTower networks, based on alternate investment scenarios

Presenting investment recommendations to senior management

The combination of these capabilities would enable the analysis team to investigate thousands of potential cell tower sites and make better investment decisions. This meant that the application had to be flexible for quick iteration and it had to enable the team members to find the key insights efficiently. Also, the product had to be easy to learn by sales operations professionals.

The Solution

• FiberTower selected Tableau Professional.
• Tableau’s "visual analysis" enables Sales Operations to find the important trends, relationships, and outliers in large quantities of cell site data. Since changes can be made "on the fly" and results are immediate, people can focus on the analysis process and achieve higher productivity.

"Five minutes into using Tableau we knew we had found a mission critical product. Today, Tableau helps us visualize endless data, perform real time and value adding sensitivity analysis, and determine where we will invest substantial operation capital. We are able to look at 3x- 4x the number of scenarios than we were able to previously. The return on our investment in Tableau occurred during our first project investment." David Leeds, VP, Sales Operations