Mobile operators have vast stores of information about their customers’ demographics, buying habits and favorite websites ‘ but so do over-the-top players. Where the operators have the edge is in their ability to monitor users’ location, to a very precise level when small cells are implemented. If that tracking information is fed into a big data system in near-real time, it can provide a whole new dimension of understanding of consumer habits and behavior ‘ increasingly valuable at a time when emerging search and marketing services are deeply context-aware.
The most commonly touted commercial use for location pinpointing is to deliver targeted promotions or messages as soon as a relevant subscriber is in reach of a small cell, but as back end platforms build up a picture of a user’s movements over time, there will be new ways that an operator, or its customer, can analyze and use the resulting profiles.
A network element to deep analytics opens up new opportunities for big data companies to target telcos, and for network specialists to expand into analytics. Amdocs has been a frontrunner. It is drilling down from its traditional OSS/BSS base into the nitty-gritty of the network by buying two SON (self-optimizing network) companies, Actix and Celcite, and creating a united platform. Not only does that give it a play in a technology that will be an essential enabler of dense HetNets, but it enables it to feed SON information into its back end systems, providing OSS and analytics applications with more fine-grained understanding of how the network is behaving.
That can be used to improve customer experience ‘ for instance, when a cell on the network has suffered an outage, a subscriber in that cell can be proactively handed off to another, or contacted with an apology. It can also feed into big data applications, an area where Amdocs made its biggest move yet last week with the launch of what it calls the first end-to-end big data analytics portfolio which is specific to carriers.
It consists of the new Amdocs Insight Big Data Platform, plus applications and ‘data science as a service’ offerings. The platform does what Amdocs has been discussing for a couple of years – combining data from the network itself, from OSS/BSS and from external sources, particularly social media feeds for crowdsourced information. This shows Amdocs steadily asserting control of its whole offering, rather than sticking to its core products and relying on partners for the rest (IBM and SAS for analytics for instance). However, end-to-end strategies always bring the risk that a vendor is biting off more than it can chew, and Amdocs will have to work to build credibility in analytics, a very new area and one ‘ unlike the nascent SON space ‘ where there are powerful established players which are also keen to have the telco segment for themselves.
However, Amdocs’ VP for product and solutions marketing, Rebecca Prudhomme, did say the firm already has a tier one service provider using one key element of its new portfolio, Proactive Care, which was demonstrated last fall as a way to monitor social media and feed results into customer experience management. Now that is combined with TeraScale, the real time usage tracking software, plus business intelligence and data warehousing capabilities, and the SON tools.
These elements will be the engine behind various applications for specific use cases, some available and some under development ‘ in areas such as marketing, network operations, customer care and others, all managed from a single interface.
“Our vision is launching a carrier-grade big data analytics platform that will not only collect and manage data, but apply meaningful analytics to bring real time service value to the service provider business,” Prudhomme said in a statement. “We see the opportunity for Amdocs to inject real time analytics across our CES [customer experience systems] platform.”
And Amdocs is building on another acquisition, of ChangingWorlds in 2008, to launch DSaaS (data science as a service), a consulting service which teams data scientists with Amdocs marketing or network experts to suggest data strategies to operators.
But the big data specialists will be on Amdocs’ heels, although they have the reverse challenge to that faced by Amdocs – to gain real influence with the operators, they will need to gain ‘ by acquisition or partnership ‘ far deeper knowledge of how networks function, particularly as carriers start to converge their IT and network activities.
Carrier-focused big data firms like Guavus are not only focusing very keenly on cellcos, but are expanding their platforms beyond merely processing and storing masses of data, and are applying network analytics to it, to trigger useful actions in near-real time. At TM Forum Live this week, Guavus said it was joining forces with SON vendor Reverb Networks to help operators create granular policies around video optimization, bandwidth allocation, and interference reduction from deeper within the network.
The partners have created a joint platform, called InteliSON, integrating Reverb’s centralized SON system with Guavus’s Reflex operational intelligence offering. It claims to give visibility from the device to the RAN to the OSS, to support operator decisions in areas such as network resource allocation. Ben Parker, Guavus principal technologist, said the partnership showed the firm moving closer to the radio, as the breadth and granularity of the network analytics it collects becomes greater.
“Operators have to be able to make those granular requirement decisions based on their business objectives,” he said. “It’s a powerful combination we’re anxious to go to more operators with.”
This echoes Amdocs’s philosophy, and was also the focus of the recent acquisition of predictive analytics specialist InsightsOne by API management firm Apigee. That will enable Apigee to wrap a layer of analytics around the masses of data it can track, crossing the network at API level. CEO Chet Kapoor said: ‘Predictive is clearly the killer app of big data.” Rather than just understanding what is happening on their networks, and to their users, operators can predict and prevent network outages or subscriber churn, or tailor promotions to individual customer behavior.
Oracle, of course, wants a big piece of this convergence between big data, SDN and analytics and has stretched its hand into the carrier network with the purchases of IP equipment providers Tekelec and Acme Packet, with their Diameter signalling routers and session border controllers. The database giant has made other telco-focused buys, such as network virtualization specialist Xsigo and, most recently Corente, whose flagship product is a cloud services exchange for distributing applications over networks, and which has been active in carrier SDN.
And Ericsson is in the game too. At TM Forum Live it announced Expert Analytics, a real time, big data analytics platform that enables operators to gain insights from data and turn them into relevant actions in real time. Expert Analytics is a fully configurable, horizontal platform that can support a wide variety of use cases for marketing, customer care, operations and network, based on fresh data from network nodes, OSS/BSS, probes, terminals, social media and other sources.