The world of communication service providers has seen unprecedented data growth in the last few years. The advent of smartphone and huge mobile data growth have all contributed to the data volumes.
Big data today is a reality. Service Providers, both fixed and mobile, that want to be innovative and maximize their revenue potential must have the right solution in place so that they can harness the volume, variety and velocity of data coming into their organization and leverage actionable insight from that data.
However, most service providers across the globe suffer from real-time decision-making challenges. Most operational decision is made manually, which tends to be subjective, sub-optimal and not necessarily compliant with corporate policies, or they are hardcoded within the BSS/OSS applications, which means they are not dynamic and cannot keep up with changing business environments. To this solve this problem, Service Providers need real-time actionable insight and a decision-making capability that can improve and streamline their business processes to not only help them achieve their holistic end goals of profitable growth, but also to help achieve secondary goals around customer experience and network efficiency, thereby reducing customer churn.
Today’s phenomenal growth of data requires that Service Providers not only understand big data to decipher the information that counts, but also and more importantly, the possibilities of what they can do with it using Advance Analytics. Service Providers are sitting on terabytes of data that are stored in siloes and scattered across the organization. In order to exploit the full potential of this stored data, service providers must have solutions that can help them correlate, process and decipher nuggets of actionable information. This is not possible without the use of intuitive predictive analytics solutions. For simpler and faster processing of only relevant data, service providers need search-based advanced analytics that will help them achieve timely and accurate insights using intuitive search for data mining and predictive analytics, forecasting and smart capex planning. Also they would need an optimization capability to continuously drive innovation and help service providers make the best possible decisions with not just ‘big data’ but ‘smart data’.
Service Providers face an uphill challenge when they need to deliver new, compelling, revenue generating services without overloading their networks and keeping their running costs (OPEX) under control. The market demands a new set of data management and analysis capabilities that can help service providers make accurate decisions by taking into account customer, network context and other critical aspects of their business. Most of these decisions must be made in real-time, placing additional pressure on the operators. Real-time predictive analytics can help leverage the data that resides in their multitude systems, make it immediately accessible via a search interface, and then help fuse those datasets together to generate insight that can help them drive their businesses forward.
The compelling market potential of use cases for advance analytics is wide and deep within the telecommunications domain. I have highlighted just a few key use cases that will yield substantial ROI when implemented, using an advanced analytics solution.
In This Post
Operational Efficiency
OPEX remains stubbornly high for most Service Providers, and it typically consumes 30-40% of revenue. Network operations account for 45% percent of this expenditure. The expansion of network footprints due to organic and inorganic growth has resulted in poor capacity utilization. Strategic utilization of advanced analytics can increase operational efficiency and significantly reduce OPEX to the order of 10-15%, as highlighted by recent research by Heavy Reading. Next generation customer care, planning and network performance solutions must be transformative. As such, harnessing service provider data effectively and utilizing it in a predictive, easy to consume manner, to provide actionable insight will be a critical attribute for service provider success.
Predictive Maintenance
Current mode of operations for Service Providers is to react based on events coming from the network. By using advance analytics, service providers can move away from reactive, manual processes to predictive maintenance algorithms that will provide a more proactive customer experience along with improved workforce productivity. The use of advance analytics will provide the maintenance team a window into possible anomalous trends and future operational failures: all prior to the event actually occurring in the network.
Intelligent Network Planning
Service Providers need to compliment current network planning tools with advanced analytics to combine and correlate information from multiple network data repositories, as well as sales forecasting systems (CRMs). This will provide operators with:
- To plan, predict and optimize their investment in network build and rollout, identify potential stress points
- To prioritize an optimal network investment plan based on service forecast demands
- To predict and implement necessary network change just ahead of the demand curve
Service Providers’ network planning systems must work collaboratively with advanced analytics and work closely with their OSS systems, such as network inventory, activation, network discovery, service modeling and more to accurately predict network resource exhaustion in a timely manner. This is much more than just providing ‘what-if’ scenarios. This is fusing together multiple disparate descriptive datasets and layering advanced analytics on top to provide a real-time, ever-learning view into smart capacity planning and capex spends.
Search-based Data Interactive Exploration
Having an advanced analytics solution that provides dynamic dashboards and reporting capability for different stakeholders within the organization can bring major benefits for operators. This capability needs to be coupled with the ability to easily mine data in a search-based context and then visualizing that data in an interactive, hierarchical report. This is going to be critical for Service Providers as they explore terabytes of data for actionable intelligence for different users/stakeholders. This search-driven functionality embedded within an analytics tool will be beneficial in processing complex queries in real-time and provide the system users the best actions to take, based on their search history and trends. This directly enables service providers to extract the monetary return from big data-lakes and other disparate datasets within their organization.
Converting the deluge of information into actionable real-time information is an arduous task that service providers must tackle, if they want to have a user-defined Telco IT architecture to dynamically meet their business objectives, that centers on accurate network planning, smart CAPEX spending, while providing pre-emptive service assurance and delivering superior customer experience. Real-time advanced analytics will play a key role in the success of operators, as they will not only provide operators with the ability to extract value from the massive amounts of data they possess but also help them maximize their revenue potential from a short wind of opportunity.
In the future, advance analytics will become a fundamental pillar of service and network strategy, and operators must start planning for them now!
Search-powered data intelligence platforms, such as Tellius, are helping Service Providers today by utilizing advanced analytics to solve real business problems. By combining disparate datasets seamlessly and delivering information in an easy-to-consume format through powerful vizualisations and predictive analytics, Telecom Operators can enjoy unprecedented access to key insights without requiring an information science degree to do so. For more information on how Tellius can help you make your data work for you, contact us at sales@www.tellius.com
