Big data in telecoms should not be a nightmare. It’s an opportunity. For instance, in the financial industry the pursuit of innovation will allow transactions to be completed 5 milliseconds faster – now that’s real time. Here, Edoardo Rizzi explains how CSPs can embrace a new paradigm and gear up to capture and manage this new, real-time opportunity.
The excitement today in the world of mobile communications is unsurpassed, and the ecosystem is more vibrant than ever. Smart devices are released at a fast pace and loaded with more innovation and features. Applications flood the market daily, although only a small percentage quickly becomes a vital part of our daily life, while the majority disappears unnoticed. OTT providers quietly enter the market but quickly gain attention, adoption and market share, thanks to their agility, customer focus and degree of innovation.
From traditional CSPs however, we mainly hear about declining revenues, profits and customer loyalty, and increasing churn and customer dissatisfaction. We also hear about cost cutting measures, the threat and impact of OTT providers and a need for further consolidation. All this happens at a time when network traffic is increasing at a staggering pace and the incumbent CSPs are left bearing the whole weight while getting little to no benefit from it. As a result, some CSPs will succumb or become utility providers, but for the others, the majority, the future presents unlimited opportunities. However, this will only be possible if they adopt a systematic approach focused on substantially increasing innovation, differentiation and customer experience, while drastically reducing costs. CSPs that embrace this discipline are more likely to achieve above-average profits and higher market share.
Stuck in neutral
The leading CSPs have already realised what lies ahead. They have started to make investments and changes to pave the way for what will be a major transformation. Over the last two years we have witnessed a steady increase in momentum around LTE and the converged architecture. Many CSPs have already launched LTE and some, arguably, have done so before deciding what to do differently with it, beyond merely delivering more bits at a lower price. The investment towards other enabling technologies have also gained significant momentum, those being SDN, SON, M2M, offloading, CEM, policy management and more. These will unquestionably deliver significant benefits and enable a whole new set of opportunities. LTE in particular is a major discontinuity and a departure from the traditional way of doing things. LTE drives telecoms to merge with IT and as a result IT principles start to be applied to telecoms.
Truth be told, CSPs have at best, barely scratched the surface of what is the full potential of these enabling technologies. There is also no indication that this is going to change soon. The question is why. What impedes this? Recently we met several CSPs and to our surprise, the vast majority of them acknowledge that they are facing new challenges and dealing with radically new technologies that require new solutions and concepts, yet when it comes to making decisions they are doing it the old way. We see a tendency that CSPs are moving forward with business as usual, partly because the current established vendors are not providing any alternative paths. As a result, CSPs are still wrestling with spiraling costs and seem to have fallen victim to big data instead of looking for new innovative ways to deal with it. We strongly believe that the industry is at an inflection point and CSPs should look further, demand more innovation, and challenge the current assumptions, both internal and external.
Real-time intelligence is key
When it comes to exploiting the full potential of the enabling technologies mentioned above, a fundamental shift has to happen in the mindset, culture and the way things are done inside the CSPs. These new enabling technologies drive new requirements, which if not properly addressed, as is the case today, will jeopardise the large investments being made and the business strategies that rely on them. Fundamentally, we believe that CSPs need to develop the ability to gain access to actionable insights in true real-time, at a much lower cost, more easily, and in a way that makes use of the broad variety and increasing amount of continuouslychanging data that they have available.
The reason is quite simple: LTE, SDN, SON, and policy management, in particular, promise to make assets more usable, efficient, and scalable, and to put CSPs in a position to innovate faster and at a much lower cost, in order to capture the short-lived monetisation opportunities that characterise future mobile communications services and networks and deliver a superior customer experience. In such an environment, real-time context awareness becomes key for the purpose of proactive Customer Experience Assurance and effective Asset Monetisation. In fact, in this new, real-time big data world where it becomes more difficult to predict what customers will do, where, when and how, intelligence becomes history within seconds and history is practically irrelevant. The ability to see and understand what happens now becomes paramount in order to detect key events as they happen and uncover correlations between events that are only visible during that time span or that are of much less value if detected later.
CSPs are quickly realising that traditional tools used for extracting intelligence from traffic and other data sources, and for collecting, mediating, correlating and analysing that intelligence are no longer scalable or financially viable, impede productivity, and provide less value as they lack true real-time capabilities. This is why we believe that CSPs need to look for, demand and embrace more innovation. Letting go of some of the established practices and being open to embracing a new paradigm is necessary. As L. Gordon Crovitz said in a recent Wall Street Journal article in reference to big data, “society will need to shed some of its obsessions for causality in exchange for simple correlation: not knowing why but only what.” In other words, it’s less about explaining the science behind the observed data, it’s about quickly identifying patterns and events that, statistically, are significantly relevant.
Revamp the engines
The good news is that there are vendors out there, Trendium being one of them, that are ready today to enable CSPs to address the new challenges in new innovative ways. CSPs that have, rightfully so, identified Customer Experience Assurance and Asset Monetisation as their top priorities, need to know that in this new big data world it is possible, financially and technically, to gain real-time access to actionable intelligence and insights about network, services and customers, in a way that is scalable, improves productivity, and with a fraction of the complexity, footprint and cost of traditional solutions. Based on our experience, we advise CSPs that are selecting their future real-time intelligence partners and solutions to assess them against the following criteria:
• cost
• real-time analysis capabilities and in-memory computing
• scalability and distributed computing
• ability to deal with structured and unstructured data
• ability to deal with large variety of data
• proven ability to integrate data from existing and third party sources
• ability to quickly adapt to changing data structures
• ability and willingness to feed real-time intelligence to third party applications
• advanced root-cause analysis capabilities
• visualisation effectiveness and flexibility
