CKDelta, part of the CK Hutchison Group, turns massive volumes of telco mobility data into valuable insights for industries like retail, advertising and utilities. One standout use case is helping utility companies determine the best locations for electric vehicle (EV) charging stations. To handle and analyze more than 12 billion mobility signals daily across multiple countries, CKDelta relies on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. Databricks allows the team to streamline data ingestion, modeling and delivery in a unified environment, accelerating innovation and enabling scalable, high-impact products like ∆Power. This data-driven approach has helped CKDelta boost revenue potential by up to 20x through smarter EV charger placement.
Turning telco data into actionable intelligence
CKDelta was created to help CK Hutchison extract more value from their vast international data footprint. One of CKDelta’s core objectives is monetizing telco data by transforming billions of daily network events into actionable insights received from 7 OpCos in Ireland, UK, Denmark, Austria, Italy, Sweden and Hong Kong. These insights serve a wide range of external customers such as tourist boards looking to understand visitor flows, retailers seeking catchment analysis, banks analyzing foot traffic, ad agencies measuring billboard exposure and utility companies optimizing EV charger placement.
But as demand for data-driven insights grew, CKDelta’s existing Teradata environment couldn’t keep up. Despite the relatively small amount of data at the time, it was still too large to process efficiently or with sophistication. Data pipelines were slow, analysis was limited in complexity and costs ballooned as usage scaled. Additionally, different clients had wildly different needs — some wanted raw data, while others needed full dashboards. Meeting both added engineering overhead and made repeatability difficult.
Will Thurley, Senior Data Scientist at CKDelta, explained, “We are completely product-focused, so we don’t want to be building bespoke pieces of analysis for individual companies with different requirement levels.” To overcome these challenges, CKDelta needed a platform that could handle massive scale, simplify infrastructure, support productization and accelerate time to insights.
Simplifying infrastructure to accelerate product innovation
CKDelta selected the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to unify data engineering, data science and analytics across their telco operations. First adopted by the data science team for model development and geospatial analysis, Databricks quickly demonstrated its value and was rolled out organization-wide. It is now the standard data ingestion, processing, modeling and delivery platform.
With mobility data streaming in from telcos across Europe and Asia, totaling 12 billion rows daily, Databricks enables CKDelta to consolidate different back-end systems into a single, consistent environment. This unified data layer supports a common product architecture and allows models and pipelines to be reused across markets. “One of our key success points is getting data from all those diverse back-end systems and centralizing it in a common dataset,” Fernando Ayuso, Director of Data Science and Data Engineering at CKDelta, said. “All the algorithms we’ve developed can work in any country, making it a lot more scalable.”
Databricks supports CKDelta’s product-driven approach with two critical capabilities — APIs for customer self-service and replicable UIs that streamline delivery. CKDelta can now integrate new customer needs directly into their core products, further improving scalability and efficient product development.
CKDelta uses Unity Catalog as a step toward serverless compute, allowing teams to automatically scale jobs without provisioning infrastructure. With serverless, teams eliminated the need for a 24/7 relational database, simplified cluster management and cost-effectively enabled more efficient development workflows. CKDelta’s utility and retail teams use MLflow to manage model development, versioning and experimentation. This ensures consistent practices for tracking inputs, comparing results and maintaining reproducibility across data science teams. With this combination of native tools on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, CKDelta is confidently delivering the robust data products they sought to create.
Enabling data monetization with automated infrastructure and scalable insights
With the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, CKDelta processes over 12 billion rows of telco data daily across seven countries, turning mobility signals into high-impact products for cities, retailers, utilities and advertisers. One such product, ∆Power, helps utility clients determine the optimal locations for EV charging stations, delivering up to 20 times more revenue when properly optimized.
Tourism boards use CKDelta’s insights to track visitor flows, while banks and retailers analyze foot traffic. Advertisers measure billboard exposure, and retailers leverage origin-destination models for smarter site planning — all delivered through scalable APIs and dashboards.
Databricks serverless compute has significantly boosted performance. Jobs that once ran for 4–5 hours now complete in just 20 minutes, thanks to right-sized clusters and reduced data transfer overhead. Next, CKDelta plans to forecast tourism trends, refine mobility prediction by transportation mode and layer generative AI into their products, making insights even more accessible via intelligent conversation interfaces.
Thurley concluded, “Switching to Databricks completely broadened our horizons in terms of what we could achieve, and it enables us to dream much bigger in terms of the challenges that our clients pose to us.”