Vic Bozzo is senior vice president of worldwide sales and marketing at Telarix. Here he tells VanillaPlus that consumer big data projects are not the only means by which CSPs can benefit from business intelligence. By sharing data on peering, roaming and bilateral deals amongst themselves, they can streamline the process of working together and ensure they are getting the optimum out of their relationships. Critically, as the value chain diversifies and retailers, OTTs and other third parties become more enmeshed in the CSP value chain, such relationships will proliferate and greater insights will be required. Ultimately, success will come from creating business-to-business platforms that deliver real business intelligence to companies across the market.
VanillaPlus: How are you seeing the development of big data analytics approaches within the CSP sector? Are you seeing greater emphasis on business intelligence and the outcomes it can achieve?
Vic Bozzo: We’re certainly seeing our customers looking to mine their data more. They’re looking for a greater understanding of their business because the margin pressures they are under are such that they need to uncover new opportunities. On one side they need to do this to protect themselves from arbitrage in their core markets and create an insurance policy. That insurance is analytics.
From another perspective, we are firm believers that who has the most data – and who can do the most with it – wins. Big data is making its way into the advertising world and into the consumer and wireless markets. In more general terms, people are mining their data more and more although much of the activity and excitement is focused on the consumer market.
The telecoms industry has been focused on mining data for many years but there is now a change infocus from understanding your own data to understanding the data of your customers and suppliers as well.
That enables negotiation of roaming agreements or bilaterals armed with knowledge. For example, we’re offering a simulation to enable CSPs to run ‘what if?’ scenarios when they’re assessing whether to do a deal. We’re doing that by extracting data directly for them and giving them interfaces to really analyse their own data.
VP: That’s quite a significant change in CSP attitude. To what extent is it an improvement on what has happened previously?
VB: It’s true that shared data between partners is not always the first place that CSPs have looked. They often looked to a third party such as Telegeography to understand where the market is but they can now use their own data to make better buying and selling decisions. That’s particularly so in wholesale but also true in the consumer market. For example, I’ve seen a CSP package international calling within its domestic offering. It has taken off like wildfire because they know their demographic. One question we asked was how did they know they were buying or routing in the correct way because that’s how the bottom line is affected?
It’s easy to overlook that when a hot new service is taking off and we expect the market will see this more and more as OTT bundled services accelerate. CSPs will need to continue to understand what the downstream effect of such bundling is.
VP: Can you provide some detail on Telarix’ SMART Links product and how it relates to cross-corporate intelligence that can be mined to deliver value?
VB: What we’ve been doing for a long time is allowing invoices among themselves. We normalise the format so data on either side fits into back offices and downstream systems to give the user a view of what buying and selling at. CSPs to exchange information such as rates and invoices among themselves. We normalise the format so data on either side fits into back offices and downstream systems to give the user a view of what buying and selling at.
As we begin to add business intelligence into the model we get to a point where a CSP can analyse their data and see not just what’s coming in and going out but what’s available. That enables a CSP that is looking for a service to be matched with a CSP offering the service. They can just exchange information without lots of personnel being required. We’re basically saying that, with like-minded systems CSPs can make matches with each other, automatically generate offers and agree them.
Companies of all types need to get more efficient and more automated but to do that you need to have the big data mart sitting behind you.
VP: How do you bring this concept to market?
VB: One thing we’ve done to help is make an ROI calculator available to our customers and prospects so they can model the benefits. It is a pretty complex model but generally we can demonstrate ROI of about 8-10%. Generally there are cost savings and revenue opportunities to be achieved.
VP: How have approaches changed from relying on third parties to perform analysis to generating business intelligence from all the data in CSP systems?
VB: I don’t think people will necessarily move away from using third parties’ data because they will always need validation. There used to be spot market exchanges in telecoms that you could go to but that model did not take off. What we’re saying is that if you’re a large CSP and you’re getting 500-600 offers and months and sending out 500-600 offers yourself, the data frankly is such that you have your own spot market.
Third parties will be used to validate decisions. Retailers and OTTs and wireless providers in a lot of cases don’t have the time or desire to build a wholesale organisation but they do want control of this side of their businesses.
It is practical now to put up a SaaS model or a licence model very rapidly and monetise the data very quickly. We’re offering an in-sourced model as opposed to an outsourced one and that provides the control and visibility that service providers want.
We certainly see opportunities in cost control but at the same time, if there’s a niche or a deal to be done, an outsourced approach sometimes doesn’t identify it or bring it through the chain.
We’re providing a lot of managed services now where we’ll put our system in the cloud and help you manage that so, if you do uncover an opportunity there’s a chance to share the upside. In the past, telecoms expense management companies have not always shared the upside.
VP: What are the key business intelligence metrics that CSPs are targeting to extract value from?
VB: There’s a lot of peering going on now and lot of ownership of the last mile. If you can get directly to the last mile and have a last mile to last mile proposition, you can do settling – even if it’s just bill and keep. You’re cutting out layers and layers of incremental cost.
Everybody wants the big data sizzle story which is why people are saying look at your subscribers and look at your web traffic but these are real opportunities.
From a pure B2B perspective this transcends telecoms. When you look at all forms of communications services, all will be packaged together at some point so CSPs will need to know the optimal way to sell those bundles and what the optimal upside is.
We’re seeing a lot of demand at OTTs and next generation wireless providers and we’re starting to see these federations blossom as a result.
VP: How is business intelligence being applied to enable CSPs to buy, sell and peer better and maximise network utilisation?
VB: The crux of this is that CSPs are managing better because they know in advance what they need and what price they want to buy at. They also need to assess what’s on offer. The cheapest offer could affect their QoS or commitments.
VP: How do you see Telarix’ portfolio developing as business intelligence concepts mature?
VB: Today we’re seeing strong traction in SMS and MMS, for example. Those have traditionally been different environments but that is changing and a lot of application to application (A2A) environments are emerging that ultimately are being merged into telecoms.
There are 3-4,000 carriers that are left out there to bring into the fold so the potential is enormous. In addition, we’re seeing new app providers enter the market every day. Telarix is agnostic to which media, we’ll address anything that can be routed, billed or settled or bilaterally traded. Right now, our platform is capable of handling that.
Today, people have a strict mindset of what big data is and that is traditionally focused on the consumer market and the monetisation of traffic. We see a huge business to business big data play in the telecoms market which we focus on. There are so many intraindustry deals being done and the insights we can collect provide real business intelligence and ultimately significant value to CSPs.
