Pakistan is a vibrant, highly competitive, mobile industry. Ufone works with a variety of vendors, one of which is Oracle. Ufone's primary work with Oracle has been on the Database side and the hardware platform, Exadata. Moving forward, Ufone's goal to enhance and increase customer experience are well aligned with this year's Oracle World announcements and the CIOs presence here will result in some key takeaways.

One of the key challenges for Ufone, as would be the case for any service provider in a competitive industry, would be to manage the churn. As an industry, the cellular industry in Pakistan experiences approximately 3% churn a month, which is a relatively large number for  a market size like Pakistan. Enhancing customer experience will be key in to reduce the churn and retain existing customers to get more value from the product offerings.

Ufone turned to Oracle Exadata to help consolidate its data, reduce its data footprint by a factor of 4 and experience an increase in overall server performance. "The pricing on Exadata is highly competitive from Oracle which is one very strong proposition to go on the hardware," explains Faisal. "A lot of times the performance problems we experience are because of bad configuration. Since Exadata comes pre-configured box, with the right compute power, memory and storage, all those things help the system to perform well."

Talking about Social announcements made during Oracle World, the Ufone CIO agrees that social media will play an important role in the company's own strategy to help give customers a better overall experience with Ufone.