VanillaPlus February-March 2015 by Prestige Media

February / March 2015 Volume 17 Issue 1 ISSN 1745-1736

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DATA ANALYTICS

ANALYST REPORT

Heavy Reading analyst details how strategic analytics will help CSPs ■

TALKING HEADS

Lucas Skoczkowski explains why virtualisation is a business enabler ■

Is there a pot of gold at the end of CSPs' data repositories?

BIG DATA ANALYTICS

Does focusing on revenue today impede profit tomorrow?

PLUS: Teradata buys Appoxee to enhance integrated marketing ■ Synchronoss Mobile Content Transfer exceeds one million devices ■ AsiaInfo Hungary for success with new delivery centre opening ■ Location platform revenues to reach €470m by 2020 ■ Regional taxation issues addressed with update to CTI Group Analysis e-billing product ■ SingTel chooses Amdocs billing and customer care apps ■ Comverse to implement rich services and modernise messaging at Telekom Srbija ■ Read the lastest news, opinion, blogs and features at www.vanillaplus.com

YOU READ MINDS AND MAKE WISHES COME TRUE You use Ericsson Expert Analytics to monitor, prioritize and improve the customer experience in real time. You use the insights gained to give customers what they want, when they want it. You personalize services according to their usage data in real time with Ericsson Charging System. You put them in control with Ericsson Multiscreen Self-Care, so they can see all of their account balances and make changes to their service preferences. You are an Agile Operator, powered by the Ericsson Agility Suite. And you are changing whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s possible in telecom.

YOU ARE THE AGILE OPERATOR.

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C O N T E N T S

IN THIS ISSUE Lucas Skoczkowski says virtualisation isn’t a buzzword anymore

Is there a pot of gold at the end of CSPs’ data repositories?

4 EDITOR’S COMMENT The names may have changed but some things remain the same for UK mobile operators, writes George Malim 5 INDUSTRY NEWS Teradata acquires Appoxee, VOSS and Soft-ex bring billing analysis together with unified communications management 6 MARKET NEWS AsiaInfo opens new delivery centre in Hungary, Synchronoss celebrates one million devices for Mobile Content Transfer

36 DATA ANALYTICS

7 PRODUCT NEWS CTI Group product to solve regional taxation issues 8 CONTRACT NEWS SingTel selects Amdocs billing and care apps, Comverse modernises messaging at Telekom Srbija

42 BIG DATA VALUE

10 THE CONTRACT HOT LIST The latest vendor deals listed 11 PEOPLE NEWS Who’s on the move 12 TALKING HEADS Redknee’s Lucas Skoczkowski explains why virtualisation is a business enabler 16 EXPERT OPINION Chad Dunavant details a new proposition for digital service providers from CSG 19 VANILLAPLUS DATA ANALYTICS INSIGHT Our VanillaPlus Data Analytics Insight reports starts here with 28 pages exploring how big data is maturing to the point at which CSPs are starting to generate value from data analytics.

47 EXPERT OPINION

The Insight contains a VanillaPlus-commissioned report from analyst firm Heavy Reading and includes features and interviews to help you gain a wider understanding of what happens with your data now the collection question has been addressed 47 EXPERT OPINION Mathias Liebe explains why it’s important that BSS as well as the network and other software becomes virtualised 48 EXPERT OPINION Justin Paul explores the hybrid reality CSPs will experience as they deploy NFV CLOCKING OFF!

51 DIARY Where to go and what to see

52 CLOCKING OFF! Nick Booth wonders if data has become too big

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY / MARCH 2015

C O M M E N T

Mobile’s branding merrygo-round highlights that CSP’s real value is network and service performance The question of brand value is always an interesting one because the pace of mergers and acquisitions in telecoms sees branding occur with sometimes bewildering frequency, writes George Malim

f you were a UK mobile subscriber in the late 1990s you had a choice of joining BT Cellnet, One2One, Vodafone or newcomer Orange. Only one of those brands still fully exists with Orange poised to disappear from the high street as a UK operator brand.

Oddly, though, for the customer of the late 2010s, the companies behind the brands of 20 years ago will be largely unchanged. BT is in the process of re-entering the mobile market with an acquisition of EE, the Deutsche Telekom and Orange joint venture that brought T-Mobile UK – formerly One2One – together with Orange, the UK mobile operator. O2 UK, the former BT Cellnet operation, is likely to be sold to Hutchison Whampoa and merged with Hutchison’s Three UK operation. All this washes over me because I have never changed mobile operator. I’m too lazy to assess the options, I’ve never had an experience so terrible that I feel the need to change and I assume all mobile operators are pretty much the same anyway. In spite of my laziness, this year will see me join my fourth operator.

My mobile history began at One2One in 1997 which was Cable & Wireless owned. By 2000 that brand was replaced by Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile brand. I wasn’t a fan of the pink and grey colour scheme but I still stuck with it. Now I’m in the two green circles of EE and poised to end up, probably early next year, on BT’s newly-branded mobile operator, which, looking at their domestic service branding, I expect to be called Infinite Infinity and have a fetching electric blue palette. Confusion is forgivable. BT will own the businesses that were One2One and Orange, Hutchison will own the business that was BT Cellnet as well as it’s own operator, Three. Only Vodafone remains unchanged in its ownership and branding from 20 years ago and rumours persist regarding a potential break-up of that business. This all runs against the continued exhortations of the vendor community for CSPs to protect their brands by providing excellent customer experience management, to use advanced analytics to deliver a premium brand experience and to target users with brand-oriented offerings to generate new revenue from new propositions. The point of

these brand building activities is hard to grasp when the brand, by the current pattern, seems likely to be a competitor’s brand in a few years anyway. Two schools of thought are George Malim, emerging surrounding this. editor, VanillaPlus One is that this convoluted swapping of brands among mobile operators is simply a shuffling of the deckchairs on the sinking ship of the mobile operator sector. The other is that it’s not actually the brand that’s important. Mobile users are savvy and extremely willing to switch provider when their contract is up. The challenge then, isn’t to have a slick brand, it’s to provide an excellent experience that takes all thought of churn out of the user’s mind. Enjoy the magazine! George Malim

EDITORIAL ADVISORS

What’s on www.vanillaplus.com this month Highlights on www.vanillaplus.com this month include our new NFV Hub which hosts our recent NFV roundtable discussion as well as a series of articles and opinions. In addition, George Fraser, the vice president for Europe, Middle East and Africa at CSG International is the subject of our executive snapshot. We also have new additions to our Troubleticket series of comment articles and, as usual, all the latest news.

EDITOR George Malim Tel: +44 (0) 1225 319 566 george@vanillaplus.com DIGITAL EDITOR Nathalie Bisnar Tel: +44 (0) 1732 808690 nathalie@vanillaplus.com BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR Cherisse Jameson Tel: +44 (0) 1732 807410 cherisse@vanillaplus.com

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER Mark Bridges Tel: +44 (0) 1732 807412 mark@vanillaplus.com OPERATIONS DIRECTOR Charlie Bisnar Tel: +44 (0) 1732 807411 charlie@vanillaplus.com PUBLISHER Jeremy Cowan Tel: +44 (0) 1420 588638 jc@vanillaplus.com

DISTRIBUTION UKP Worldwide Tel: +44 (0) 8456 444137

Andreas Freund, VP Marketing, Orga Systems GmbH

Louis Hall, chief executive, Cerillion Technologies

David Heaps, senior vice president, strategy, CSG International

Simon Muderack, senior vice president for marketing and alliances, Sigma Systems

Chris Yeadon, director of Product Marketing, Ericsson

Dr Reinhard Zuba, CMO, Vipnet (Telekom Austria)

DESIGN Jason Appleby Ark Design Consultancy Ltd Tel: +44 (0) 1787 881623

CIRCULATION Circdata Tel: +44 (0) 1635 869868 PUBLISHED BY Prestige Media Ltd. Suite 138, 70 Churchill Square Kings Hill, West Malling Kent ME19 4YU, UK Tel: +44 (0) 1732 807412

VanillaPlus is distributed free to selected named individuals worldwide who meet the Publisher's terms of Circulation Control. If you would like to apply for a regular free copy supplied at the Publisher's discretion visit www.vanillaplus.com If you do not qualify for a free subscription, paid subscriptions can be obtained. Subscriptions for 6 issues cost £99.00 worldwide (or US$150 / EUR125) including post and packing. VanillaPlus magazine is published 6 times per year.

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY / MARCH 2015

I N D U S T R Y

N E W S

Teradata acquires Appoxee to add to integrated marketing offering Teradata has acquired Appoxee, a mobile marketing Software-as-a-Service provider. The addition of Appoxee to the Teradata Integrated Marketing Cloud is expected to complement Teradata’s strategy to provide marketing solutions that help data-driven businesses deliver more individualised information and communications to their customers, based on the type of brand engagement experience those customers want and expect. Terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed and Appoxee’s solutions will be integrated into the Teradata Integrated Marketing Cloud beginning immediately, and quickly integrated with Teradata Digital Marketing Center. Appoxee will accelerate Teradata Marketing Applications’ growth in the digital

marketing space by providing a full range of mobile capabilities, particularly in the area of omnichannel marketing and realtime customer interaction. Teradata Digital Marketing Center customers will now be able to use a single solution to manage customer communications across email, landing pages, SMS, social media and mobile push. Teradata will also provide robust multi-channel campaign management and real-time decisioning for mobile as well as mobile marketing analytics. Future integration plans extend to Teradata Customer Interaction Manager and Teradata Real-Time Interaction Manager. “By adding Appoxee’s mobile marketing solutions, we’re further helping our customers use data to know more about their customers’ true preferences, and do

more to realize the benefits of individualised data-driven marketing,” said Darryl McDonald, the president for Teradata Marketing Applications. “This investment underscores our commitment to continuously expand our capabilities in individualised digital marketing to benefit Teradata Marketing Applications customers throughout the world.” Itay Levy, the founder and CEO of Appoxee, said: “Marketers have recognised the strategic importance of delivering optimised customer experiences across channels, enabled by a comprehensive view of the customer, a centralised communication hub and coordinated messaging technologies. By joining forces with Teradata, we’re helping marketers worldwide deliver the best customer experiences possible.”

VOSS and Soft-ex launch global strategic partnership to couple billing analysis with unified communications management WidePoint, a provider of managed mobility services that specialises in cybersecurity and telecoms lifecycle management (TLM) systems, has announced that its subsidiary Soft-ex, a supplier of analytics and billing systems, and VOSS Solutions, a supplier of unified communication (UC) management platforms, have entered into a strategic partnership to integrate the Soft-ex Optimiser and VOSS UC management solutions into a platform offering.

that the Soft-ex solution can offer our customers. We believe the Soft-ex technology can lead to real cost-savings, and it has already led to a number of exploratory discussions with some of our larger service provider customers.”

The combined expertise of Soft-ex and VOSS is set to deliver granular visibility and billing insight, providing significant cost savings and improved efficiencies on infrastructure and performance to customers that use the VOSS UC management platform.

The Soft-ex and VOSS alliance will be of particular interest to organisations that have the VOSS UC management platform in place either as a direct customer of VOSS or embedded in the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) under the name of Cisco UCDM. The Soft-ex Optimiser solution collects call detail records from Cisco HCS and inventory data from the VOSS UC management platform to generate key invoice data analytics and intelligence.

Mike Frayne, the chief executive of VOSS, said: “There are over 100 large global enterprises that are currently using the VOSS UC management platform, and we are very excited about the additional value

Ian Sparling, the chief executive of Soft-ex, added: “We are delighted to be partnering with VOSS and delivering a stronger combined proposition and value-add to our joint customers. By taking the VOSS output,

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we can now provide HCS users and resellers with much more data intelligence, and we can also provide a billing platform leading to a better customer experience.”

Mike Frayne: Soft-ex technology can lead to real cost savings

www.csgi.com 5

M A R K E T

N E W S

Synchronoss Mobile Content Transfer passes one million devices

Stephen Waldis: Users view ondevice content as more important than device itself

Synchronoss Technologies’ Mobile Content Transfer (MCT), a wireless content transfer system, has successfully transferred data for more than one million devices since its debut in June 2014, the company reports.

Synchronoss MCT is enhancing the user experience by providing an easy to use, peer-to-peer and cloud-based system that enables mobile customers to wirelessly transfer data and content such as contacts, photos, videos, messages (SMS/MMS), call records, music, and documents from one device to another

quickly and securely. Synchronoss MCT also works across networks and operating systems, allowing customers to easily switch their content between iOS and Android devices. Synchronoss MCT will also soon support both Blackberry and Windows Phone devices. Synchronoss MCT enables mobile operators around the world to give customers an intuitive, branded experience that migrates important content from one device to another in a fraction of the time of hard-wired solutions. The Synchronoss MCT solution also features a cloud-based version of the solution that requires no additional hardware or wired connection for successful operation. When purchasing a

new mobile device or re-activating an existing device to a new network, consumers can start and complete a full data migration anywhere safely and quickly with just a Wi-Fi connection. “Today, wireless consumers are upgrading to new devices faster than ever before and view the content on their devices as more important than the device itself,” said Stephen Waldis, the founder, chairman and chief executive of Synchronoss. “Synchronoss MCT is giving CSPs improved service offerings while giving their customers the freedom and confidence to take their content with them to new devices regardless of the operating system or device type.”

AsiaInfo opens delivery centre in Hungary to support Telenor Hungary and other CSP projects AsiaInfo has opened its new European Nearshore Delivery Center (NDC). The NDC – which will support AsiaInfo’s increasing presence in Europe as the company begins a major joint project with Telenor Hungary – will be co-located within Telenor Hungary’s Törökbálint HQ near Budapest. The company plans for the NDC to be providing support services for up to eight European CSP projects by 2016.

Announcing the opening of the NDC, AsiaInfo’s European managing director, Alex Hawker, said: “Little more than one year after announcing our first major European project, we are now embarking on our second one, and at the same time opening up a major new delivery centre to support our customers and our expanding business.” At the ceremony to mark the official opening of the NDC, Christopher Laska, the chief executive of Telenor Hungary, said: “Last

year we celebrated our 20th anniversary, now we are preparing ourselves for the next 20 years: our new partner AsiaInfo will help us further improve the Telenor customer experience. AsiaInfo will employ dozens of Hungarian developers, thus keeping local IT talents in Hungary and contributing to the growth of value-adding industries. I am particularly pleased that they are moving into the Telenor House in Törökbálint, further raising our profile as a centre for excellence in telecoms.”

NEWS IN BRIEF

Location platform revenues will grow to €470m worldwide in 2020 According to a new research report from analyst firm Berg Insight, the global market for mobile location platforms will show steady growth in the next few years. Total location platform revenues are expected to grow at a CAGR of nearly 11.5% between 2013 and 2020, reaching €470 million at the end of the forecast period. Much of the growth is expected to come from the emerging commercial indoor location segment, while the market for location platforms deployed by mobile operators is maturing. Annual revenues for

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CommScope continues to explore new opportunities to support enterprise network infrastructure needs in the UK, their wealth of experience and in-depth understanding of their customers will be invaluable.”

Aria Networks appoints new CEO Aria Networks has appointed Steve Newton as chief executive. Newton has already been in an executive role at the company for the past 12 Steve Newton: months. He brings more Applications and than 25 years’ experience software defined in the telecoms sector. He network services will enable Aria to was part of a management grow rapidly team that steered billing software specialist Geneva Technology from product launch through rapid growth to an exit for $700m. “Aria Networks is already working with many of the largest internet companies in the world,” Newton said. “As user demand for data continues to grow exponentially, the software solutions provided by Aria Networks become ever more relevant to internet service providers, network and cloud operators. I am delighted to lead the company into a new era where our applications and software defined network services will enable Aria to rapidly scale.” Previous chief executive, Tony Fallows, is leaving Aria Networks to pursue a new opportunity, with the best wishes of the company.

New facility means new jobs at AsiaInfo in Europe AsiaInfo has said it expected to employ about 180 staff at its new Törökbálint centre in Hungary within two years and is planning to recruit more than half the workforce locally, working alongside experts relocating from China. The first local engineers have already been recruited for the new centre, which will be headed by AsiaInfo senior director, Chen Huaping. Prior to joining AsiaInfo, Chen was chief solution architect in the telecoms business unit of Hewlett Packard. He has extensive experience of both telecoms business and technical architecture with a track record of success in delivering major projects.

www.csgi.com

TA L K I N G H E A D S

Virtualisation isn’t a buzzword, it’s a business enabler

anillaPlus: Virtualisation is the buzzword of the moment. What is its impact on BSS and how will virtualised BSS deliver the flexibility CSPs need?

Lucas Skoczkowski: To me, virtualisation became a buzzword within the last year, but we’ve been engaged in this space for at least five years. For us, virtualisation is a reality and it addresses so many of the issues CSPs face. One of the benefits of virtualisation is that it has the ability to keep capital spending in line with revenue and it provides the flexibility to add or reduce computing capacity as needed, helping to serve customers well and keep costs in check. In addition, from an operational perspective, virtualisation allows a vendor like Redknee to continue upgrading our customers with the latest version of our software. In telecoms, software upgrades have traditionally been slow and somewhat painful. But with virtualisation, if you choose to get upgrades continuously – for instance, every month or so – you can do so without a huge operational impact on your business.

Virtualisation is also great for smaller CSPs because of the cost benefits it provides and the flexibility it can deliver. It also has huge relevance for larger CSPs. In the last 12 months, Redknee customers such as Oi and Vodafone have used virtualised solutions to address their large, high value subscriber base. In short, virtualisation is for all types of CSPs. It’s not just a buzzword, it’s a business enabler. VP: How is the Internet of Things (IoT) changing the market for CSPs and placing new demands on their BSS? LS: The Internet of Things, as with everything in telecoms, is probably over-hyped for where we are right now, but in the coming years, we will see the business cases emerge. There are definitely more and more things becoming connected. For instance, at the CES show this year, Samsung said that all of its domestic appliances will be able to connect to the internet. The barrier now is really about human adoption, so I think the business-tobusiness market will be where we see the most growth in IoT and where we will see the initial return on investment. From a CSP perspective, they have a choice. They can be a fundamental pillar in the IoT ecosystem or just a passive connector. Many CSPs we engage with today want to play a role beyond the bit-pipe provider and offer a platform for business interconnections. The increased

Another benefit, from a business perspective, is that the CSP can go after new business opportunities without the heavy lifting that has been required from traditional BSS. Many of our customers have opted to use a software-asa-service (SaaS) approach with their enterprise customers, utilising more agile BSS systems to enable new capabilities, such as energy rating, or to provide loyalty systems for retailers. That becomes very exciting

and different, enabling CSPs to think outside their traditional businesses.

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY / MARCH 2015

Lucas Skoczkowski is chief executive of Redknee, having founded the company in 1999. In his years at Redknee, he has led the development of the company’s product portfolio and created a global organisation. In addition, he has overseen the purchase of the BSS business of Nokia Siemens Networks. A former Nortel executive, Skoczkowski continues to drive the company’s development of real-time BSS systems, for both onpremises and the virtualised telecoms environment as well as technology for companies in adjacent markets. Here, he tells VanillaPlus that virtualisation is a reality, the Internet of Things is an approaching opportunity and in a real-time, on-demand world there are attractive, new possibilities for communications service providers (CSPs)

deployment of platforms and sensors in IoT will create a plethora of new business models for the future. The IoT drives tremendous volumes of data and CSPs have the capability and systems to process this data, so there’s a natural role for them in IoT - if they want it. There is an impact on BSS as well, because IoT drives the need for enormous configurability and a more product-oriented approach. In contrast to legacy BSS, systems will need to be more agile and real-time. VP: Why is real-time agility so important to billing? We've got this far without it, so why does it matter now? LS: Real-time provides a lot more flexibility in terms of how CSPs can address the market. They need the flexibility and agility that real-time charging provides because OTT services are deployed much faster than CSP services. We’re now seeing CSPs use real-time charging to interact with businesses and subscribers to improve the targeting of campaigns and create more automation in how businesses and consumers are experiencing a service.

Real-time allows you to respond directly to your customers in the moment, when it matters, while also using business tools to provide a constant feedback loop so

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY / MARCH 2015

TA L K I N G H E A D S

Redknee continues to spend significantly on research and development – the R&D team is 60% of our organisation

you can be efficient in how you deliver services to different constituencies within your customer base. Without the agility of real-time capabilities, the industry has to spend large amounts of money and time creating customised solutions to achieve the same end; now, with real-time BSS, it’s slowly coming together. We have seen that some LTE launches have been the catalyst to accelerate the move to real-time.

Lucas Skoczkowski, chief executive of Redknee

VP: Customers interact with their providers across many different platforms and through many different channels. What challenges do CSPs face in enabling consistency and how is the industry making progress towards the connected customer experience? LS: It has been an evolving challenge and one that will continue to be prevalent. As CSPs provide connectivity to more and more devices, the consistency of how the services are experienced across different platforms will become a greater challenge. We see big data becoming increasingly critical in this area, but actionable data will be even more important. As CSPs move beyond traditional communications, we see them partnering and delivering new services and working to create a better customer experience. One example is retail loyalty programmes, which use a points/rewards system across devices, businesses and platforms. This consistently creates more value for the consumer, but it relies on end-to-end systems to correlate all this data into actionable events or rewards points, and makes it available in real-time to the end-user. Traditional BSS systems have historically lived in a more fractured or siloed environment, but integrated cloudbased systems are becoming available. CSPs can provide more interconnections using BSS systems that are open – and we will see that these are capable of far more than the monolithic systems of the past. I’m really excited about moving service expectations beyond what has been a typical response/react situation, to taking more of a proactive approach to what can be offered to customers.

www.redknee.com

VP: How will Redknee develop to address these changed and continually evolving needs over the next five years?

LS: I continue to be excited about the opportunities I see. Redknee has a strong technology core that we’ve developed over the last 15 years. We’ve created this in order to address complex real-time needs in charging, policy and analytics, and we continue to build on this as we see the market evolve. At Redknee, we see CSPs planning for their new roles in the digital ecosystem and we see our customers continuing to diversify. We’re working with non-telecoms industry customers, as well as CSPs, and have done quite a lot of work to understand the requirements of other organisations. Redknee continues to spend significantly on research and development – the R&D team is 60% of our organisation. I also understand the growing importance of business partnerships and see a real need to continue to improve how we approach and grow in this area. You can also expect to see us acquire companies that will help shape our organisation to be more responsive to where the CSPs will be in the future. In five years, I believe Redknee’s customer base will be comprised of 80% CSPs and 20% across other verticals, and we’ll certainly be seen as one of the top three software platforms in the market. At the same time, we’ll continue to build awareness so that we can be the platform of choice for connected businesses that use IoT platforms. This goal puts significant demands on us as a company and ensures that we don’t rest and sit back on our laurels. We’ve recently completed a deployment at Vodafone India, which was one of the most complex and demanding projects in the history of Vodafone Global. This was a challenging and daunting engagement, but it’s really exciting to serve a CSP of that size - with over 170 million users. I envision in the next five years that we will have built a business that is approaching US$1 billion in revenue, and I believe we’ll achieve this in great part through our virtualisation and cloud offerings. It will be a tall task, but we have the energy and the passion to get there, and to help our customers along their journeys to be successful. There’s lots to do.

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY / MARCH 2015

Redknee UniďŹ ed brings service providers the power to differentiate in an era where mobile users are more connected, and demand to be in control, informed and always on. Be ready to charge for new digital services across industries and partners, and connect with your customers in a more personalized way. From mobile services to the Internet-of-Things, Redknee UniďŹ ed provides the flexibility and speed you need to monetize our growing digital world.

Visit www.redknee.com to ďŹ nd out more about our solutions.

From back office to front of store – welcome to digital commerce At Mobile World Congress 2015, CSG International will announce an innovative digital commerce platform that will help CSPs to capitalise on the next generation of digital services and digital service provision. Here, Chad Dunavant tells VanillaPlus about the new CSG proposition and approach “We’ve seen a steady untethering of the way content is being delivered to consumers”

cross the industry mobile operators are becoming media companies, and cable companies are becoming mobile providers and providers of content. They’ve become partners rather than rivals with over-the-top (OTT) providers and it’s not just communications service providers (CSPs) that want to win a slice of the digital services value chain.

“We’ve seen a steady untethering of the way content is being delivered to consumers,” explains Chad Dunavant, the vice president of product management at CSG International. “Cable providers, for example, have needed to enable access to content across a number of devices, not just the set top box. Services have to be delivered to different devices and different members of the household, maintaining a level of device ubiquity and access that is unmatched by OTT rivals.” The customer experience has to compete with those offered by web companies and CSG has been working

That makes it hard to pin down what digital services and digital service providers (DSPs) are. Digital services are not defined by, or necessarily integrated with physical networks. A DSP doesn’t need to own a physical network to deliver its service – anyone with a service or product that is defined and delivered digitally can be a DSP.

So why is CSG International, with its extensive heritage serving telecoms operators and cable providers, targeting this emerging market with a new proposition?

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY / MARCH 2015

to help all types of organisation rise to that challenge. What they’ve come up with is an enabling platform for a new breed of DSP rather than an upgraded idea of a traditional CSP’s back office. “It’s not just about the traditional service offering or traditional service providers any more,” confirms Dunavant. “We’re seeing business transformations happen across all industries. For example, we’ve worked with the Cineplex chain of movie theatres to help them transform the experience users have. For their customers, going to watch a movie is no longer just a one-time experience. You go to the theatre but when the movie is released to buy, you can download it and access additional content.” Dunavant says the experience enables the theatre chain to extend the relationship with its customers beyond the one-time event. “It’s not just about capturing the long tail though, it’s about defending the existing business,” he adds. “For people that might have waited until the movie was released to download it, and not gone to the theatre at all, there’s now another option as today’s theatre ticket becomes tomorrow’s redemption token.” He adds that CSG has more than 20 tangible examples of helping companies in many different industries become digital service providers. A lot of that functionality is applicable to CSG’s traditional customer base. For instance, a cable operator that wants to provide customers with the opportunity to buy content instead of rent it. However, the relevance extends far beyond CSPs. CSG’s new proposition, which will be unveiled at MWC 2015, encapsulates the concept of a digital commerce platform – bringing together a new digital back office and a consumer monetisation strategy – and draws some of its functionality from its widely used billing, charging and settlement products. However, this is far from a repurposing or a marketing wrap for the company’s telecoms systems. “That will be clear when we launch the solution at the show” says Dunavant. “We’re not rebranding Singleview, this is a new platform we’ve been

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY / MARCH 2015

building and executing on over the last five years. We’ve now added it to our BSS assets to create a new proposition.” “We recognised that it can’t always be about full-scale BSS transformation so we created the concept of an integrated digital overlay to an organisation’s existing systems,” adds Dunavant. “This lets DSPs experiment with many new services easily and, as important, see them succeed or fail quickly, unencumbered by the need to invest for two years in developing billing for that unproven new service.” For CSPs and others, CSG is bringing a tactical proposition which has long-term strategic potential. CSPs can initially invest in an overlay to their existing systems that will include subscriber portals, a federated e-wallet that can integrate into existing order and billing platforms, functionality to support new device ecosystems, and an identity and rights management model, all delivered as a service from the cloud, and use this new platform to grow their digital businesses. They can avoid the cost, delay and upheaval of customising existing systems and enter new markets rapidly with the potential to extend their investment for future services and businesses. “The challenge facing CSPs is how to monetise the digital experience and highly variable new digital services” explains Dunavant. “If you go back to a traditional billing approach, it could take six to 12 months of customisation work to address each new service. That’s too slow.”

Chad Dunavant, We’re launching an enabling platform for digital service providers at Mobile World Congress

With the CSP market splitting into two groups, Dunavant sees great potential ahead. “It’s clear that there are two paths open to CSPs,” he says. “They can become a utility and, if a CSP wants to go that way, we’ve got great technology to help them run leanly and efficiently. “With our new proposition, though, we’re focused on the rest of the market,” he explains. “CSPs that want to take an alternative path and monetise a new suite of products and services will need a more nimble approach. We believe we can help them gain access to that DSP tier and we’re looking forward to sharing our ideas at Mobile World Congress 2015.”

www.csgi.com

DATA ANALYTICS Is there a pot of gold at the end of CSPs' data repositories?

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VanillaPlus Insight February/March 2015

CONTENTS 22

TALKING HEADS: BIG DATA ANALYTICS ENABLES CSPs TO ACHIEVE EXPERIENCE-BASED MARKETING Ericssonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Ray Baroso tells Vanilla Plus that big data and analytics are nothing new for communications service providers (CSPs). What is new is that the volumes of data involved have become far greater

DATA ANALYTICS ANALYST REPORT Our specially-commissioned analyst report, authored by Ari Banerjee, the principal analyst at Heavy Reading

EXPERT OPINION Mikko Jarva warns the amount of structured and unstructured data generated in CSP operation is only going to continue to rise

DATA ANALYTICS Jonny Evans explores how business cases can be constructed that enable short-terms gains and position CSPs for the long-term

EXPERT OPINION CSPs can handle data in motion to gain actionable insights, write Linda Austin and Neil Lilley

EXPERT OPINION Thomas Vasen says CSPs are done with being passive. Proactive subscriber management is the answer

BIG DATA VALUE Nick Booth cautions that CSPs should guard against being swept away in the big data gold rush

EXPERT OPINION Robert Eriksson says CSPs must capitalise fully on the surge of big data from new services, such as VoLTE

22 INTERVIEW

Ray Baroso

36 DATA ANALYTICS

40 EXPERT OPINION

42 BIG DATA VALUE

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY / MARCH 2015

LEAD INTERVIEW

Ray Bariso is vice president of Ericsson’s OSS/BSS business in North America – including strategy, marketing, solution and offer development and business management. He also leads Ericsson’s OSS/BSS Global Engagement Practice Community. Prior to joining Ericsson, Bariso was responsible for managing Telcordia’s Global Operations Solutions and Utility solutions business. Here he tells Vanilla Plus that big data and analytics are nothing new for communications service providers (CSPs). What is new is that the volumes of data involved have become far greater. The good news within that volume is that CSPs can now use analytics to trigger changes in the network or systems to affect the experience that is in progress or to proactively engage the customer as a result of a previous experience. That is creating the capability to perform experience-based marketing.

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY / MARCH 2015

Big data analytics enables CSPs to achieve experience-based marketing to the benefit of customers and the bottom line VanillaPlus: With the tremendous amount of focus on analytics today across all industries, are communications service providers (CSPs) behind relative to IT providers and enterprises with regards to big data and analytics? Ray Bariso: Actually, the truth is that CSPs and their suppliers have been utilising big data since the industry’s inception. Certainly the definition of big has changed dramatically, but CSPs have always used a tremendous amount of data to manage their assets, secure their networks, meet SLA requirements, and perform other functions. Telecoms has used big data and analytics long before it was trendy – it was simply what was needed to provide network services. The big difference now is that CSPs can drive innovation and more value for their customers faster than ever before. VP: Why do you think that is? RB: It’s because CSPs can become well positioned to monetise all that data traversing their networks. Big data has become much bigger. The communications industry has always led in terms of the volume of data that had to be managed, and that will continue. Instead of communications networks managing and generating gigabytes and terabytes, they’re now required to manage and handle petabytes, exabytes and zettabytes. Given the innovation that is happening in the Networked Society, I wouldn’t expect it to stop there either. So – the stepfunction increase in volume is a significant change and must be addressed by more capable tools and processes.

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY / MARCH 2015

“...the truth is that CSPs and their suppliers have been utilising big data since the industry’s

VP: You mentioned that more capable tools and processes will be needed to address these changes – can you be more specific?

inception”

RB: Sure – let’s hit them one at a time. First, the tsunami of data must be managed as efficiently and utilised as effectively as possible. Costs for storing and processing must be optimised, business processes must be agile to quickly assess which data is important, and actions must be triggered based on data while it is still relevant – the clock will be ticking. Next, the platform and its tools must be able to ingest and process free flowing, unformatted data. Finally, in addition to the typical data at rest that we’re accustomed to, an analytics platform must be able to capture and process streaming data and drive appropriate action through the integration of policy and OSS, within both physical and virtual infrastructure environments. VP: So what are the characteristics of an analytical platform that CSPs should consider? RB: I would say that first and foremost, an analytical platform serving the needs of today’s highly connected mobile society must operate in real-time – in terms of capturing, processing and responding to the data. The platform also must be horizontal to cut across the typical vertical silos of network, IT and marketing data, and enable automated business processes at the

Other key differences are the format and sources of the data traversing communications networks. Data is no longer solely structured in rows and columns inside a relational database and stored in a data warehouse, but rather also comes in as unstructured data generated from

social media and other interactive sources. The sources are also very different now – it’s on the move. We’re in a highly connected – mobile – society, and all of these mobile devices that we have are generating tons of rich data that can tell us so much more about how to better serve the end user and better utilise our networks. This rich data is in motion – and that adds much more complexity to capturing, storing and understanding that data.

LEAD INTERVIEW

“CSPs can set themselves apart if they can capture, manage and use both the data traversing their networks and the systems powering those networks better than their competitors”

organisational level, and not just the departmental level. It will also need to be open not only to accommodate varying sources of data, but also multiple vendors who understand what data is important and how to interpret it.

time analytics are integrated with real-time charging, policy, self-care and a centralised catalogue – this vision of experience based marketing becomes possible – and offers the operator the last remaining opportunity for differentiation – the customer’s experience.

VP: How are CSPs responding today? RB: We work with lots of different CSPs around the globe. Some offer many communications services to both enterprises and consumers, while others focus on a single service to one particular segment, so there is a lot of variation in terms of their needs and responses. In general, CSPs are surveying their existing analytical assets and capabilities, and evaluating what will serve them in the future. As I mentioned earlier, CSPs have been using analytics since the beginning, but these solutions were typically deployed to fulfill a specific purpose in a specific department, resulting in vertical stacks of business intelligence. CSPs understand that to best serve their customers they’ll need to bring the data within those vertical silos together along with new sources of data into a horizontal platform so it can be utilised by the entire organisation efficiently and with as much automation as possible. So we’re starting to see a transition away from analytical solutions that no longer fit the purpose either because they don’t have real-time capabilities, they aren’t horizontally integrated or they involve using older tools and technologies that are more expensive than what’s available today. VanillaPlus: What are the key use cases that are driving CSPs to enhance their big data and analytics capabilities? RB: The typical use cases are network planning and optimisation of course, but they are moving way beyond that into using analytics for proactive care and for what we call experience-based marketing, including personalised offer recommendations in real-time. VP: What do you mean by experience-based marketing for CSPs?

www.ericsson.com

RB: A simple definition is the use of analytics to trigger changes in the network or systems to affect the experience that is in progress or to proactively engage the customer as a result of a previous experience. When real-

CSPs can set themselves apart if they can capture, manage and use both the data traversing their networks and the systems powering those networks better than their competitors. Add to that a deep customer understanding of what is valued in a communications experience – and create business rules that drive automated action to deliver that value profitably. The heavy lifting is in uncovering what customers truly value, and defining those automated business processes; you can’t get that just by deploying a tool or a platform. This is the type of proprietary intellectual property that will differentiate CSPs. All competitors have access to the same tools, platforms and technologies – they’re only limited by their budget. The long-term sustainable differentiation comes in the form of how they put them to work. We think experience-based marketing is a vision for how to put them to work. In fact, there was a study done by McKinsey in 2012 that found that more than 50% of service providers that employed customer level marketing achieved 10% or more improvement in their EBITDA performance. VP: What’s the future of big data and analytics? RB: Do you mean after service providers have realized the vision and benefits of experience based marketing? Well – I’m not sure, since things are moving so fast. As our industry has in the past, this leap in capability will make us innovate the next cycle of capability even faster. I do think that another area for the future of big data and analytics is the ease of use and accessibility – to the point where an everyday person is accessing an analytical engine to perform a task as they go through their day without even thinking about it. Concepts around visualisation of data and voice querying of data sets will make the insights more accessible to more people, driving even more innovation. Analytics has always been and will always be the lifeblood of communications networks – in the end, the more it is used by more people, the more growth there will be.

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY / MARCH 2015

ANALYST REPORT

Introduction

ig data today is a reality. Communications service providers (CSPs) that want to be innovative and maximise 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 organisation and generate actionable insights from that data Today's phenomenal growth of data requires that CSPs not only understand big data to decipher the information that counts, but also – more importantly – the possibilities of what they can do with it using big data analytics. CSPs are sitting on terabytes of data that are stored in siloes and scattered across the organisation. 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 big data and advanced analytics. For simpler and faster processing of only the relevant data, service providers need an advanced analytics driven big data solution that will help them to achieve timely and accurate insights using data mining and predictive analytics, text mining, forecasting and optimisation capability to continuously drive innovation and help CSPs make the best possible decisions. Heavy Reading’s conclusion is that CSPs are well aware that they must effectively manage and extract the value out of their big data and are planning on significant investments to do so.

Key findings The world of communications has seen unprecedented data growth in the last few years. The advent of smartphones, mobile broadband, peer-to-peer traffic,

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY / MARCH 2015

growth in mobile data volumes, social media chatter and the increase in video-based services have all contributed to the data volume. Smartphones like the Apple iPhone, Android devices, the Samsung Galaxy and others have vastly improved the web surfing experience and increased consumption of media and content-based services. The result is a significant increase in data usage, as well as explosive growth in bandwidth consumption. Heavy Reading's research believes that what we are witnessing is only the beginning and just the tip of the iceberg.

The author, Ari Banerjee, is principal analyst at Heavy Reading

The internet has changed how we communicate and consume services. The explosion of data will be primarily driven by consumer demand for low-latency services that are more video intensive, integrated and interactive. Quite simply, an increase in network performance – accompanied by the availability of devices, services and applications to take advantage of that performance – will result in dramatic growth in data traffic. CSPs do not have a dearth of subscriber data; they collect usage transactions, network performance data, cell site data, device information and other information spread across network and back office systems. In spite of this treasure trove of information on customer behaviour, most CSPs do not have the real-time, endto-end view of their subscribers that can help maximise their revenue potential from each subscriber. The reasons for this are manifold:

ANALYST REPORT

• Most of the data is collected in silos by various departments, spread across the organisation. Correlating a 360-degree view from fragments of customer data is a complex endeavour that consumes significant time and effort. • The quality of data is suspect and needs significant massaging, de-duplication and cleansing before it can be used effectively. • There are significant political and organisational barriers that impede a free flow of information across departments and business units. As CSPs try to become more than just bit pipe providers, their ability to use and exploit customer data becomes a key competitive advantage. What strategies can they pursue to shore up their capabilities to monitor, manage and monetise customer data effectively? This report examines scenarios and best practices that demonstrate the value of big data and advanced analytics in telecoms. This report forecasts the global market for big data and advanced analytics. Key findings include: CSPs view real-time analytics as critical to the success of their businesses. Our research shows that the majority of global respondents believe that real-time analytics is critical to CSP success. CSPs are planning for most application areas within the year. All the application areas are in respondents' plans for 2014-15, including network planning and optimisation, personalised tariffs and offers, real-time or location-based marketing and business intelligence and reporting. CSPs are planning big data and advanced analytics initiatives with the customer in mind. Our research shows that most global CSPs plan to utilise their usage traffic information for each of the listed use cases, including segmenting the customer, predicting or preventing churn and optimising network experience. CSPs are looking to fully implement big data and analytics initiatives in the next two years. The majority of global respondents report they plan to fully implement their big data and analytics initiatives by the end of 2015. CSPs expect increased revenue as a result of their big data and analytics planning. The majority of global respondents predict that it will take one to two years for their company to see increased revenue from its big data and analytics. CSPs report that big data and advanced analytics will continue to be critical. A large majority (87%) of global respondents report that big data and advanced analytics will be either "critical" or "very important" to their company in the next 12 to 24 months.

CSPs are looking to big data and analytics solutions to help them with customer-centric pain points. The most critical pain points and priorities that global respondents believe can be resolved by big data and advanced analytics in the next 12 to 24 months include targeted offer and campaign management, churn predic-tion and proactive customer care.

Evolving from legacy to advanced analytics Heavy Reading believes that customer centricity and profitability hinge on three key pillars: efficiency, insight and performance. Profitability, customer churn reduction and increase in wallet share hinges upon obtaining a coherent, current and actionable view of a CSP’s entire business. In a world where more and more customers interact online via Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other channels, and talk about their experiences and issues online, CSPs must have a proactive social strategy through collecting data and analysing the data to take action on customer retention and offer attractive services. However, dealing with social media means dealing with unstructured data, which is complex as it does not always fit into neat tables of columns and rows. The advent of these new data types that can be both structured and unstructured means they must be pre-processed to yield insight into a business or condition. Data from Twitter feeds, blogs, call detail reports, network data, video cameras and equipment sensors is not stored directly in a data warehouse until it is pre-processed to correlate and normalise the data to detect basic trends and associations. It is a costeffective mechanism to structure the unstructured data part, load that data into data warehouses for comparison and then use that data with other collected data to run advanced analytics processes on it. There is a need for solutions that can combine customer usage and subscription data with insight into the network, cost, customer mood and customer preference data to trigger specific actions, which helps enhance customer experience. CSPs have no dearth of data at their disposal, but they are missing actionable insights from that data. The fact that data passes through the network does not mean that actionable, correlated information is available to the company. Service providers must find efficient ways to bring together, normalise and correlate all data sources, which poses a serious challenge. As shown in Figure 1, Heavy Reading's survey identifies integration of data sources as a primary operational challenge for CSPs. A big data advanced analytics solution that effectively utilises structured and unstructured data to improve decision-making will be the silver bullet that CSPs need to alleviate their business

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY / MARCH 2015

Figure 1: Top operational challenges that are a priority for CSPs

Figure 2 illustrates the key differences between the realities of yesterday's analytics infrastructure and our expectations for today's advanced analytics infrastructure.

Ability to intergrate all necessary data sources

2.67

Ability to create ad hoc reports for business users

2.67

Availability of advanced analytics capabilities

2.67

Meeting batch window for data consolidation & loading

2.67

Meeting batch window for standard reports

2.67

1.2

1.4

1.6

1.8

2.0

2.2

2.4

(1 = least important, 2 = important, 3 = most important)

problems. Big data is definitely an industry-wide buzzword, and there are several competing definitions circulating in the market. Heavy Reading defines big data and advanced analytics as the utilisation of hardware and software solutions to process large volumes of data – in the range of hundreds of terabytes – to unearth actionable insight. Big data is a combination of both structured and unstructured data coming from text, social media, video and others. As such, real-time streaming technology and complex event processing technologies are part and parcel of big data solutions. Figure 2: Legacy Analytics vs. Advanced Analytics Infrastructure LEGACY ANALYTICS

ADVANCED ANALYTICS

Storage Cost

High

Low

Analytics

Offline

Real-time

Utilising Hadoop

Yes

Data Loading Speed

Low

High

Data Loading Time

Long

Average 50%-60% faster

Data Discovery

Minimal

Critical

Data Variety

Structured

Unstructured

Volume

Gigabyte, terabyte

Petabyte, exabyte, zettabyte

Velocity

Batch

Real-time

Administration Time

Long

Average 60% faster

Complex Query Response Time

Hours/days

Minutes

Data Compression Technique

Not matured

Average 40%-60% more compression

Support Cost

High

Low

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY / MARCH 2015

2.6

2.8

Figure 2 highlights how using big data and advanced analytics can provide measurable return on investment benefits for CSPs. An advanced analytics infrastructure is not a replacement for the traditional analytics infrastructure; rather, it is an add-on to fill in the gaps and create data collections that can provide richer information. As such, information is requested and consumed either to make better decisions or to create new products or applications, and the overall infrastructure evolves to better serve the demand. This evolution creates an organic relationship between a CSP’s business, network and IT territories, gradually effacing the infamous silos.

Key savings and operational efficiency benefits that CSPs will obtain include: • Reduction in data compression, maintenance cost and support cost • Increase in data loading speed • Reduction in administration cost • Reduced time to run queries and real-time response for ad hoc queries by hundreds of concurrent users • Easy implementation of any data model from any data source with no changes needed and no additional response time with data growth • Saving in storage space because of advanced compression techniques • Utilisation of complementary technologies such as Hadoop and Map-Reduce with existing RDBMS and data warehouse technologies • Usage of commodity hardware

The advanced analytics market opportunity Simplifying business operations is a big endeavour for CSPs that have organisational and IT implications. CSPs are trying to be operationally lean and are in the process of simplifying their business operations by adapting best practice methodology, becoming more collaborative and breaking their silos in order to reduce opex and become more competitive. CSPs are looking for the next big thing to differentiate themselves

ANALYST REPORT

Figure 3: Key decision-makers for advanced analytics initiatives

Figure 4: Agreement on advanced analytics initiatives among lines of business

from their competitors. When every CSP has similar networks and services, they can only separate themselves from the pack by offering a superior customer experience. The company that does so can be more efficient, more proactive and ultimately more innovative than its competitors. CSPsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; customer experience strategy must be transformative and should be able to anticipate, contextualise and preempt customer complaints and queries, as well as effectively address subscribers' challenges. CSPs believe that big data and advanced analytics will play a critical role in helping them meet their business objectives. In a recent Heavy Reading survey global respondents report that their CIO (44%) and CEO (42%) are the key deci-sion-makers that sign off on funding for big data and analytics initiatives (see Figure 3). Respondents from all regions report that their lines of business are mostly in agreement on whether big data and analytics are critical to the company's overall revenue strategy. Notably, 44% of Asia/Pacific respondents say their lines of business are in complete agreement (see Figure 4).

Figure 5: Importance of real-time data analytics for capitalising on big data

Asia and Latin America report that real-time analytics is critical to CSP success, except for 60% of Europe and Middle East/Africa respondents who answered that real-time analytics provides some value, but not as much as conventional enterprise analytics (see Figure 5). When asked about capabilities regarding analysing usage traffic, global respondents seem most confident that they are able to determine customer segments such as heavy video users or heavy social media users (70%). 42% of global respondents plan to fully implement their big data and analytics initiatives in 2015 (Figure 6). A large majority (87%) of global respondents report that big data and advanced analytics will be either critical or very important to their company in the next 12 to 24 months (see Figure 7). 46% of global respondents find proactive customer care to be the most critical pain point that can be

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY / MARCH 2015

Figure 6: Timeline for fully implementing advanced analytics initiatives When do you expect your company to fully implement its planned big data and analytics initiatives?

resolved by big data and advanced analytics, followed by targeted offer and campaign management (46%) and churn prediction (45%) (see Figure 8).

Advanced analytics is critical for CEM

Figure 7: Importance of advanced analytics in next 12-24 months Targeted offer & campaign management

46%

Chum prediction

45% 43%

Proactive customer care 40% Location-based services & personalised ads 33% Social network analysis

32%

Revenue assurance & fraud minimisation

28% 26%

Preemptive service assurance

25%

Customer profitability analysis

24%

Subscribers are becoming increasingly demanding, expecting personalised offerings, ubiquitous access, broad choices and a reliable, seamless experience. Meeting these needs will require a fundamental rethink of CSP customer experience management (CEM) infrastructure. Today, most CSPs use off-line data analysis for reporting, planning and CEM purposes. Their current analytics infrastructure does not provide the kind of real-time analytics capabilities that can help them continuously monitor and respond to VIP customer issues in real time, engage in personalised marketing in real-time, conduct sophisticated network planning and proactively detect and prevent fraud.

Package design for specific OTT services 22% Dynamic profiling & customer segmentation

17%

Data exposure & API enablement

16% 0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

Figure 8: Pain points advanced analytics can resolve in next 12-24 months Which of the following critical pain points and priorities do you think can be resolved by big data and advanced analytics in the next 12 to 24 months?

The analytics solution's underlying smart data infrastructure must be able to efficiently support the data volumes, concurrency and query complexities involved, along with a streaming analytics engine that supports complex event processing. While the data infrastructure is key, this must be surrounded by an information management environment that feeds it clean, trusted information. Critical services in this environment include data integration, data quality, data profiling and master data management. The final component is an advanced smart analytics environment that allows both interactive users and automated processes to efficiently access and derive insight from the data at a granular level to drive optimised decisions. For CSPs, understanding business process inefficiencies and being able to create cause-andeffect mapping of processes and dependencies to help drive optimum decision-making for their most valuable customers will prove vital to achieve their vision of delivering on optimum customer

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY / MARCH 2015

ANALYST REPORT

experience. To transform customer experience via continuous improvement of business processes, it is also critical that the underlying solution be dynamic in nature and able to absorb and contextualise data from the environment constantly.

Figure 9: Advanced analytics market in telecoms

Big Data & Analytics Market Size 25000

Simplifying business operations is a big endeavour for CSPs that have organisational and IT implications. CSPs are trying to be operationally lean and are in the process of simplifying their business operations by adapting best-practice methodology, becoming more collaborative and breaking their silos in order to reduce opex and become more competitive.

US$ Millions

20000

RCAG

15000

26%

10000

5000

0 2013

2014

2015

2016

Total Big Data Analytics Market in Telecom

2017 Software

2018

2019

Hardware

2020 Services

Investment priorities for advanced analytics

Figure 10: Advanced analytics market size in telecom by region

Big Data & Analytics Market Size

Heavy Reading's study of big data technology usage in telecoms indicates widespread adoption of big data and analytics in the telecoms industry. Our primary research conducted with major global CSPs suggests a fast growing multi-billion market potential that will provide opportunities for both hardware and software vendors. Some of the key findings from our forecast include:

11000 9000

US$ Millions

7000 5000 3000 1000 -1000 2013

2014

NAR

We believe that a CSP's CEM strategy must be transformative and should be able to anticipate, contextualise and pre-empt customer complaints and queries for their VIP customers. Smart data management and advanced analytics will be a critical component of next-generation CEM solutions and will play a pivotal role in helping them meet their business objectives.

2015

2016

CALA

2017

EMEA

2018

APAC

2019

2020

Heavy Reading expects the big data technology and services market to grow from US$1.95 billion in 2013 to US$9.83 billion in 2020, as shown in Figure 9. This represents a total compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 26%. Breakout CAGR growth between software, hardware and services are: software will grow at 29.3% CAGR; hardware will grow at 22.8% CAGR; and services will grow at 26.8% CAGR.

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY / MARCH 2015

Of the five identified business application categories, we believe customer experience enhancement will grow the most, from $546 million in 2013 to $3.57 billion in 2020, at 30.8% CAGR. The precise marketing category will increase from $273 million in 2013 to $1.6 billion in 2020, at 28.5% CAGR. Operational efficiency improvement will increase from $449 million in 2013 to $1.7 billion in 2020, at 23% CAGR, followed by the innovative business model category, which we predict will grow from $332 million in 2013 to $1.3 billion, at 22.4% CAGR between 2013 and 2020, and realtime analysis and decision-making from $351 million in 2013 to $1.4 billion in 2020, at 21.9% CAGR. North America continues to be the biggest spender on big data and advanced analytics, as shown in Figure 10. We expect spending in this region to grow from $936 million in 2013 to $4.37 billion in 2020 (24.6% CAGR). EMEA is next, with a spending of $565.5 million in 2013, estimated to grow to $2.97 billion in 2020 (28% CAGR). Asia/Pacific follows with $292.5 million in 2013, growing to $1.6 billion in 2020 (26.8% CAGR). Central/Latin America accounted for $156 million in 2013, which will grow to $874.7 million in 2020 (27.9% CAGR).

Conclusion Converting the deluge of information into actionable real-time information is an arduous task that CSPs must tackle if they want to have a user-defined CSP IT architecture to dynamically meet their business objectives that centres on accurate network planning, providing pre-emptive service assurance and delivering

superior customer experience. Real-time analytics will play a key role in the success of CSPs as they will not only provide them with real-time intelligence, but also help them to maximise their revenue potential from a short window of opportunity. The challenges of taming big data in order to achieve actionable insight lies in the CSP's ability to collect all data generated and analyse those data collected cost effectively. Unstructured, nonstandard, incomplete and inaccurate data makes the task all the more complex. Overall, the complexity surrounding big data is that it is expensive to manage and difficult to extract value out of it. However, big data used effectively has the potential to revolutionise the way CSPs build, run and market their services. CSPs can use advanced analytics to effectively manage and monetise their big data. They can use advanced analytics for more innovative business models that can offer more targeted campaigns based on specific customer segmentations, as well as location. These more personalised offerings not only increase revenue, but ultimately reduce churn. CSPs can use advanced analytics for pre-emptive service assurance and customer care by correlating the information about the customer from various systems, which can trigger certain actions to prevent problems before they occur. Strategic big data and advanced analytics implementation can enable CSPs to do all of the above. In the future, big data and advanced analytics implementation will become a fundamental pillar of service and network strategy, and CSPs must start planning for them now.

Heavy Reading, the research division of Light Reading, offers deep analysis of emerging telecoms trends to communications service providers, technology suppliers and investors. Its product portfolio includes in-depth reports that address critical next-generation technology and service issues, market trackers that focus on the telecoms industry's most critical technology sectors, exclusive worldwide surveys of network operator decision-makers that identify future purchasing and deployment plans, and a rich array of custom and consulting services that give clients the market intelligence needed to compete successfully in the global telecom industry. www.heavyreading.com

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY / MARCH 2015

COMPANY PROFILES

Company summary Comptel perfects digital moments by transforming the way CSPs serve, meet and respond to the needs of cloud generation customers. The company’s solutions allow CSPs to innovate rich communications services instantly, master the orchestration of service and order flows, capture data-in-motion and refine their decision-making. Nearly 300 service providers across 90 countries have trusted Comptel to put what it calls ‘Generation Cloud’ at the heart of their business and perfect customers’ digital moments.

Big data and advanced analytics credentials Comptel acquired Finland-based advanced analytics company Xtract in 2012, which empowers CSPs with advanced intelligence and highly accurate predictions to reduce friction in their business. Data Fastermind embeds artificial intelligence, anomaly detection, predictive analytics and machine-learning capabilities on top of Comptel’s solutions. Comptel will introduce a cloud-based advanced analytics service for the Internet of Things (IoT) at Mobile World Congress, taking place 2-5 March 2015. With Comptel’s advanced analytics and machine-learning technology, customers have achieved the following outcomes: • 25% reduction in churn and 75% of potential churners identified by targeting the top 10% of the customer base • 14 times higher hit-rate in a product marketing campaign and faster campaigning cycles, from monthly to weekly campaigning • 93% of failing network elements found at the top 10% to improve problem identification

Key differentiation Comptel provides CSPs with a fast analytics layer that automatically enriches data streams from every potential source in real-time. Comptel’s analytics solution also has machine learning capability, which enables in-stream pattern matching, anomaly detection and predictions, to drive the right actions, at the right times and through the right channels. Comptel’s advanced analytics capabilities seamlessly integrate with Comptel EventLink, its big data mediation technology. The company has also productised use cases, to speed up analytics deployments and to ensure quicker business results and time-to-revenue.

Company summary Ericsson, a world leader in communications technology and services, has a growing, well-defined big data and analytics practice, with a strong product portfolio centred around Ericsson Expert Analytics (EEA).

Big data and advanced analytics credentials EEA is a real time, end-to-end, configurable, analytics solution that turns big data into actionable insights addressing CSPs’ customer experience and customer behaviour requirements. Based on algorithms developed by Ericsson Research and validated by Ericsson ConsumerLabs, EEA capitalises on Ericsson’s domain knowledge and network expertise to deliver CSP-ready use cases for marketing, operations and customer care that help CSPs achieve improved net promoter score (NPS), better retention and loyalty, increased ARPU, and operational savings. Integration with product catalogue, self-care and policy allow EEA to turn insights into actions, such as directly improving the customer experience, or selecting and delivering targeted retention or upsell offers.

Key differentiation Ericsson’s portfolio also includes other robust and established analytics solutions covering network optimisation and planning, BSS insights, and cloud analytics. This portfolio is complemented with a best-of-breed partner ecosystem and a growing services organisation of more than 200 plus big data practitioners spread across the globe.

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY / MARCH 2015

COMPANY PROFILES

Company summary Polystar enables CSPs to achieve excellence in CEM, big data analytics, service assurance, network monitoring and highperformance testing. More than 110 CSP customers in more than 50 countries depend on Polystar’s solutions. With expertise built on 30 years’ of experience, Polystar has its headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden and offices around the world.

Big data and advanced analytics credentials Polystar offers award-winning, innovative analytics solutions that enable CSPs to unlock the value of big data and monetise assets more effectively. The solutions include network analytics and network monitoring platforms, as well as a customer insight solution with its Subscriber Analytics and Marketing Analytics modules. With Polystar, CSPs can understand their customers better, help them become faster and more efficient and design personalised offers that fit their needs. Polystar’s solutions can be deployed as stand-alone analytics solutions with their own easy-to-use user interface, or integrated into big data systems from other providers. The information Polystar delivers enriches that from other sources to create new insights into both network and customer behaviour.

Key differentiation Polystar has developed a single, integrated solution that delivers data adapted to suit the needs of different stakeholders in the CSP organisation. It is specifically tailored to the needs of departments, such as customer care, product management, operations and more, and backed by drill-down capabilities enabling more data to be exposed as required.

Company summary Procera Networks calls itself a global subscriber experience company, and is working to revolutionise the way CSPs and vendors monitor, manage and monetise their network traffic.

Big data and advanced analytics credentials CSPs have realised the need for smart data and actionable intelligence in real-time. Mass collection of raw data and storing them into Hadoop platforms is relevant for data scientists. In telecoms, where data is inherently structured, the need is to detect trends and deviations quickly. Procera does just that. By understanding the raw data, through signature definitions, metrics and performance measurements can immediately be extracted. Data is correlated to add perspectives and send forward to analytics applications. Either data is inserted in Procera’s Insights engine for immediate action and visualisation, or it can be forwarded with industry standard interfaces like IP-FIX to third party solutions. Advanced analytics needs to understand the traffic and its performance, segment it and enhance the data to put it in perspectives. The key to success is understanding the utilisation of contextual information such as location, subscriber and other information. This needs to be done in real-time because it’s only by taking action that the CSPs can enhance the subscribers’ experience.

Key differentiation Procera’s subscriber experience systems are based on best in class deep packet inspection technology, complemented with intelligence gathered from Procera’s Perspectives products, which address RAN, video, subscriber, device, routing, traffic, content and topology. Results are displayed in real-time using Dynamic LiveView or streamed using IPFix, and then stored in the PacketLogic Intelligence Center for visualisation in the Insights product family, in an external big data solution, or directly put into action using the inline congestion management, advanced traffic steering or policy solutions.

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Intelligent, fast data to fulfill every need is what nexterday mediation will look like Whether you’re a car manufacturer, a utility company or a communications service provider (CSP), one thing is for sure: the amount of structured and unstructured data generated in your operations is only going to continue to rise dramatically. That data represents a great opportunity, writes Mikko Jarva

isco estimates that mobile data traffic will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 61% from 2013 to 2018, reaching 15.9 exabytes per month. A significant contributor to this traffic growth is the Internet of Things (IoT); forecasts say that there will be 50 billion connected devices by 2020.

The author, Mikko Jarva, is chief technology officer for Intelligent Data at Comptel

The growing amount of data and its inherent insights presents an opportunity, but right now a lot of that information is not being utilised to its full potential. Research from TeleTech shows that 95% of CSP businesses collect and store multi-dimensional customer information, but only 60% are able to transform it into usable form. In addition, while 30% are able to regularly identify value generation opportunities from it, only 20% are able to turn the opportunities into action. If data isn’t integrated, analysed and acted upon across all sources, companies will never be able to unlock the true

example, someone who is about to hit a bandwidth cap while watching a movie will be more willing to top up their data quota at that exact time rather than three days later. CSPs need to make sure they don’t miss out on that potential revenue. To fully monetise data, organisations need to be able to have unfiltered access to it and be able to refine and analyse it in real-time. As customers’ digital behaviours get more sophisticated, so too must the systems that process all of their transactions and interactions. Comptel’s vision of Operation Nexterday will help bring this sophistication into companies’ systems, so they align with and best serve, meet and respond to the needs of the cloud generation.

Intelligent, automated analytics Gartner predicts that advanced, pervasive and invisible analytics will be one of the top ten technology trends of 2015. As data floods back-end systems, in order to reduce manual work, analytics-driven enrichment and automated decision-making will have to become the cornerstone for operations, customer experience and business growth. Managing the expansive growth in information complexity, volume and speed requires that intelligent machine-learning algorithms are employed and automated. Machine learning can be used to identify patterns in data streams that can be then used for predictions or early detection of new signals – the two most important aspects of proactive insights.

potential of their customers or operations. Instead of analysing and acting on old big data, businesses need to start thinking about how to utilise streaming information in the moment, enabling them to quickly determine the immediate actions they should take and maximise their opportunities. For

With an automated analytics layer that utilises machine learning, businesses will be able to gain proactive insight into operations through in-stream contextual intelligence. For example, such in-stream contextual intelligence can be used to detect and warn about emerging negative sentiment and topics in social media or predict future service degradation due to unusually high loads, so CSPs can proactively ensure an optimal customer experience.

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Mediation systems have already evolved beyond collecting network data for billing and should expand to meet the needs of nexterday. A nexterday mediation platform should consist of a data processing layer that integrates information from every potential source such as customers, operations, locations, social media, apps, cars, houses and wearables, and offers in-stream contextual intelligence to drive the right actions, at the right times and through the right channels. But what will this new kind of in-stream contextual intelligence layer actually look like? And how will it work?

Data refinery: embedded intelligence A data refinery takes the best parts from Comptel EventLink, Comptel’s big data mediation technology, specifically its massive scalability and ability to integrate, aggregate and correlate virtually any data sources, and adds in machine learning, which enables in-stream pattern matching, anomaly detection and predictions. Machine learning is an iterative process, so the more data that is used for learning means that over time the better the results, such as predictions, become. A data refinery establishes an intelligent data mediation layer that can collect and analyse all data across all platforms, from mobile devices to networks and cars, and delivers insights and actions to appropriate destinations such as mobile applications, customer relationship management systems, network operations and campaign management systems. Examples of such insights and actions include: • A recommendation for a Netflix-tailored data package sent to a mobile application, when the customer is about to run out of data quota while watching a movie • Upsell campaign triggers sent to a campaign management system based on customer affinity • Early warnings on abnormally high cell utilisation levels sent to radio network operations

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• A list of network elements most likely to have issues in the next 24 hours sent to network management systems • A notification sent to fleet management systems when a connected car drives to an unexpected area With such a multitude of potential uses, use cases and users, it’s very easy for things to get complicated. Fortunately, a data refinery provides a modern, intuitive and clean user experience, which allows users to keep it simple, while building easily configurable workflows fast around different use cases. In the back end, a data refinery provides rich reporting capabilities on the integrated data streams, which enables the evaluation of the success of the deployed use cases as well as delivers insights for designing new ones. With so much data coming through every business, it’s critical for companies to have an intelligent data processing layer that can ensure no valuable information goes to waste. They must harness raw, real-time data across every possible source and turn that into business opportunities. An intelligent, automated and real-time data refinery is the logical next step – data is already everywhere, and only by enriching that information with analytics, can businesses make sense of it all.

www.comptel.com

D A T A A N A LY T I C S

Does revenue today mean lost potential? Data analytics deployments by their definition are long-term projects but they need to be rolled out in a climate in which short-term ROI is required to gain investment. Jonny Evans explores how business cases be constructed that deliver the short-term gains necessary to receive investment approval

Mounir Ladki: Budgetary environment remains challenging for most CSPs

Neil Lilley: CSPs can enable new revenue streams from valuable insights extracted from user data

Matthew Roberts: The positive impact of a data analytics deployment should be seen fairly immediately

otential short term gains may seem attractive but when planning data analytics deployments, communications service providers (CSPs) should keep the long and medium term potential of the technology in mind, or risk losing a far larger pot of gold further down the line.

using data analytics.

Caught between the competitive race to lower prices and soaring consumer expectations, there’s a demand to deliver a near immediate return on investment. “The budgetary environment remains challenging for most CSPs, and investment proposals need to be fully justified to receive management and procurement approval,” says Mounir Ladki, the president and CTO of Mycom OSI.

“It’s not about how many petabytes or exabytes of data a CSP can store. It is about how much value can be extracted from these data records,” adds Ladki.

When creating business cases for successful deployments, advocates should push the message that these are not the same as old-fashioned business intelligence rollouts; these are root and branch technology solutions that enable and inform new business opportunities. The challenge may seem huge: “Companies might be discouraged by the fact that their data is in a combination of legacy and new systems housed in various locations. They may think that a lengthy installation process or custom tool development is necessary to answer this question,” explains Rupert Naylor, the UK vice president at Applied Predictive Technologies. “Organisations can use the large amount of data they now have available to run tests to determine the impact of each new business idea. [This] helps organisations determine cause-and-effect relationships between business actions and key metrics, and identifies opportunities to tailor and target those initiatives to improve ROI.” There is potential for fast return. “The positive impact of data analytics deployment should be seen fairly immediately, whether that’s improving marketing performance, customer care or network optimisation,” explains Matthew Roberts, the director of marketing for big data analytics and strategic innovations at Amdocs.

For Chris Purdy, the CTO of CENX: “Data analytics can be used very effectively within CSP operations to drive revenue due to improved level of service with customer self-service portals for dynamic provisioning and real-time monitoring of data connectivity services.” Data will “typically include geo-location, demographic data, statistical models, as well as items calculated from a combination of external and internal sources, such as proximity of customers to the organisation’s network assets,” says Steve Farr, a product marketing manager at TIBCO Software. In the long term CSPs will eventually be able to create user profiles for customers in order to develop tailored services; even further down the line. “CSPs can enable new revenue streams from partners and third parties, such as advertisers, content publishers and social media by providing access to the valuable insights extracted from user data,” says Neil Lilley, Ericsson’s OSS product marketing director.

From JIC to JIT Part of CSPs’ strategies should address requirements to reduce opex and capex and position themselves for long-term gain. “The long term possibilities of data analytics are that the CSP can move from a Just-inCase (JIC) approach for managing capacity in their networks to a Just-in-Time (JIT) upgrade capability to significantly reduce capex and opex while still delivering quality user experiences,” adds Purdy. Additional opportunities may include: • Providing CSPs with a deeper understanding of traffic trends to enable predictive deployment of virtual services.

Gartner recently predicted that an average CSP could potentially generate US$300 million a year in additional margins, including cost savings and revenue uplift, by

CSPs can use data analytics technologies in numerous ways to address challenges such as customer churn, or to precisely address identified problems in capacity provision, enabling significant cost savings and improved service agility.

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• Helping CSPs to understand app and content provider relationships as they become OTT service partners • Enabling CSPs to offer appropriate analytics identified services to the right users at the right time, such as providing high quality video to travellers. To bring such opportunities in on time and on budget, while making good deployment decisions, CSPs should focus on what they want out of the analytics system, keeping costs down and the value proposition defined. “Combining this with cloud engagement will help keep the costs justifiable but also enable the transition between technical choices in the longer term,” says Fergus Wills, the director of product management at Openwave Mobility.

Rupert Naylor: CSPs might be discouraged by data being in a combination of old and new systems housed in various locations

However, this is not a one-size-fits-all scenario. “There is no single solution that can address all the use cases, so interoperability is extremely important,” says Purdy. Ladki urges caution. “A rushed decision made today may mean that a CSP is unable to use real-time analytics for customer experience management or to drive network planning and operations or to best support the smart world tomorrow,” Ladki warns. Purdy points out that the best analytics solutions make optimal use of open source software, which keeps them interoperable and faster to deploy. Among many other things, good data analytics systems could enable efficient and reliable services, paying a loyalty dividend that, arguably, in this age of customer churn, may prove even more valuable in the long-term. “It’s really important for CSPs to realise that data analytics isn’t about generating revenue, that’s only a small proportion of it. It’s about improved customer care and marketing, and more efficient networks and operations,” Roberts observes. “It is all about the business case, and there is a strong business case here,” Ladki points out. Nevertheless, decisions must be made carefully with interoperability and extendibility at their heart. “If the wrong technology is used then there is a high risk of rising costs and declining responsiveness – which is a negative spiral for any project,” warns Wills.

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CSPs handle data in motion to gain actionable insights Communications service providers (CSPs) are starting to take advantage of new technology that enables them to analyse the sheer volume of their data, much of which is in motion. Data analytics tools are transforming CSPs' businesses by allowing them to gain actionable insights from their vast data sources, write Linda Austin and Neil Lilley

ervice provider networks and systems, and other sources such as social media, produce vast amounts of data, much of which is in motion in this increasingly mobile world. Until recently the sheer volume of this data and added complexity of mobile data sources made it impractical to extract many of the key insights offered. Technological advancements, combined with the hyper-competitive and increasingly mobile world, are driving service providers to differentiate themselves by extracting and utilising this data more effectively.

Linda Austin is the director of strategic marketing at Region North America at Ericsson

• Time-to-Insights (TTI): making sure the data is immediately available to generate actionable intelligence across the organisation • Return-on-Insights (ROI): ensuring that the insights created will drive business advantages across the organisation. Understanding the potential business advantages from strategic intelligence is what determines the QOI

1. Implementing horizontal analytics architectures 2. Including real-time capabilities 3. Supporting specific use cases based on domain expertise 4. Adopting closed-loop action

Recent and current investments in analytics solutions are still dominated by analytical silos; that is, analytics solutions focused on a specific type of data and supporting a specific application. Examples of such investments are probe solutions or CDR analytical tools. These vertical solutions are a natural evolution, using existing, but comparatively narrow, data sets. Taken one implementation at a time, vertical analytics solutions appear to require relatively low investments of time and expense. However, these economies disappear as more data sources become the subject of analysis, and as more internal users seek to develop applications that address their particular needs.

Delivering data in real-time is insufficient unless there is a process to convert that real-time data into actions that drive value. CSPs need to make sure they are analysing the right data, converting this data into customer insights quickly, and making use of those insights across the entire organisation in order to create value for the business. This process is what we call the insights in motion framework.

By contrast, horizontal solutions are designed to pull key data from multiple and diverse sources, perform pre-processing, and make this big data available to a variety of applications, each tailored to the needs of different users and use cases. These horizontal platforms lower investment of both time and money to incrementally meet the needs of various internal users and external partners.

Traditionally, CSPs have focused their analytics initiatives in one of three different domains – network, IT and business. Understanding all three areas, as well as the relationships between them, is essential to helping organisations use their data effectively. This framework looks at three key components:

Perhaps the greater drawback of vertical analytics solutions is that they miss many of the possible and useful insights that could be attained simply by including diverse data from multiple sources. In contrast, horizontal analytics architectures can correlate data from all possible – network and non-

To that end, many CSPs have begun making significant investments in big data analytics tools that handle not only data at rest, but also data in motion. However, CSPs should ensure that their efforts are focused on gaining actionable insights – rather than simple exploration – to maximise the value of analytics investments. CSPs can gain actionable insights and derive the maximum return on their big data and analytics investments by:

• Quality-of-Insights (QOI): determining which information is relevant and where to get the data in order to create reliable insights

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network and physical and virtual – sources. For example, consider that probes can provide detailed insights into the quality of service that each individual customer is receiving. If that quality is inadequate, probe data typically cannot explain why. However, session events, performance metrics and other data sources can reveal the cause, even for an individual customer. A horizontal analytics platform can collect cause and symptom data from multiple sources, and correlate those metrics by customer identifier and session, creating a customer experience record that is valuable to several different use cases – such as customer care, operations, or marketing – and which cannot be derived from any vertical, siloed analytics environment. Existing analytical deployments mostly consists of offline – (batch) – tools. This approach can reveal patterns and trends, which can be useful for a number of use cases, including long-term capacity planning and customer segmentation. However, newer approaches make real-time analytics possible and practical, supporting many more use cases, such as pro-active customer care or real-time resource optimisation. Consider targeted marketing, where many use cases can be supported by offline analytics. Robust, experience-based marketing can be supported if realtime capabilities are available and analytics are integrated with policy, a centralised catalogue and self-care. In this case, the actual, recent customer experience can be added to the customer profile, thus allowing a more appropriate offer – such as retention, cross-sell, or usage incentive – to be matched to the individual customer based on whether the customer’s recent experience was below or above average. CSPs could even develop a Service Level Index (SLI) that weights recent experiences to better predict risk of churn as well as receptiveness to various incentives. According to McKinsey’s 2012 article ‘Using big data to boost marketing capabilities’, more than 50% of telecoms companies that conduct Customer Level Marketing (CLM) projects achieve a 10% or greater improvement in their EBITDA performance. Domain expertise is the secret ingredient for deriving actionable insights for service providers from big data. After all, most analytics tools are akin to blank spreadsheets. Just as a spreadsheet must be configured with formulas and formats to be useful, so too must big data analytics tools such as big data storage tools or complex event processing engines be configured with data models, business rules, thresholds and the like in order to support a given use case. In order to gain useful insights, you must know what data elements, in what combinations, and at what thresholds truly matter to the question at hand.

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Primary customer research, network expertise and other knowledge guide the development of these rules. Many CSPs still have manual analytical steps to support their business. Real-time automated analytics will enable closed-loop action, driving decisions efficiently. The greatest value is derived when big data insights are connected to business processes, thus enabling closed-loop action, where data drives insights and insights drive actions – network configurations, work orders, customer marketing offers, and so on – without human intervention. This ‘data to cash’ process is where the horizontal architecture, real-time capabilities, and tailored applications supporting specific use cases all come together to drive significant improvement in operations and customer experience, and ultimately return on investment.

Neil Lilley is director of marketing for CEM and Analytics at Ericsson

www.ericsson.com

CSPs are finished with being passive – it’s time to proactively manage the subscriber experience Communications service providers (CSPs) are under attack from new and traditional competitors and at the same time usage of services is dramatically shifting. Thomas Vasen advocates that CSPs move from managing the service to managing the subscriber experience.

C The author, Thomas Vasen, is subscriber experience evangelist at Procera Networks

ommunications service providers (CSPs) are beset by challenges. Over-the-top (OTT) service providers are taking their revenues; customers perceive the handset manufacturers as the providers of their good experiences and as mobile markets approach saturation, growth opportunities only exist in competing for subscribers with other CSPs. This is causing customer acquisition costs to increase, as well as churn. That cycle is unlikely to decelerate so CSPs need to redefine how they approach delivering good subscriber experiences. However, there still remains plenty of upside for CSPs if they can create and assure high-quality experiences for their customers. Higher quality results in higher usage, and with data consumption-based price plans now the norm that means more revenue for the CSP. At times it seems as if CSPs have been stuck in a reactive mode. Traditional networks are static, service profiles are provisioned by the CSP in isolation and new offers are made through sales calls to customers. Rarely does a CSP contact its customers about their experience proactively. Typically, the customer needs to call in and complain if they’re unhappy. When they do, the CSP’s focus is on reducing the number of calls to support centres and in shortening waiting times not on improving the subscriber experience. However, initiatives that result in fewer calls and more rapid call centre responses are of little value because 96% of unhappy customers typically do not complain. They just leave when it’s time to renew their contract.

What’s needed is a new approach that provides a complete loop comprising data collection that delivers the required perspective and insights needed to take the proper action. In addition to a transformation in business model and competitive landscape, the telecoms industry is going through a technological shift. The services themselves are changing and so are networks. Traditional probe systems that have been the key tools to capture user experience based on signalling are becoming outmoded because the signalling data doesn’t provide the level of insight required to assure the user experience. All networks are migrating to internet protocol and with the introduction of LTE the circuit-switched network has almost completely disappeared from mobile environments. Even voice has become just another form of data. This technological change is shifting the monitoring of user experience from the signaling plane to the user plane. With deep packet inspection (DPI) technology, full insights can be gained into the content being transferred from just a few central locations in the network and, with in-line deployment, the experience can be managed. However, despite providing a sophisticated degree of insights, traffic management using DPI alone is not

It’s time for CSPs to become more proactive and leave their passive approaches in the past. What’s needed now is automated action. CSPs need to behave more like OTT providers. For example,

Amazon automatically issues a refund when it detects the quality of video delivered over its video-ondemand systems is insufficient. Customers love this because they want the experience they receive to be acknowledged. The key to achieving this is to measure, manage and be aware of the device, location and content used to create a complete picture of the experience.

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enough because the radio access network (RAN) perspective also needs to be added. With information about the original location of each of the packets, better informed and more balanced decisions can be made that enable effective management of the crowded access networks.

forward in comparison to passive probes that see only the details about the start and end of the session and contain no insight into whether the session delivered a positive experience. Furthermore, the duration of data sessions is making this type of insight irrelevant because some sessions can last for weeks.

Once RAN monitoring is added to the insights provided by DPI, the magic can start to happen. For example, congestion control can be applied for the users located in a cell that is suffering congestion and it can be done in a service- and user profile-aware way. In this way, CSPs can eradicate congestion affecting key services such as OTT voice, including VoLTE or premium streaming video.

DPI-based experience management is a far better approach because it enables the detection of irritating abnormalities – the issues that annoy users. Its value is further emphasised because DPI-based experience management systems are real-time and deployed inline so action can be taken whether that’s tuning a third party system – such as a video server – or managing the traffic in a band. It’s that ability to take action immediately that makes the difference in a subscriber experience system. For CSPs, it means the days of being passive are over.

CSPs can now ensure a fair and consistent service is delivered for all subscribers. This is a major step

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www.proceranetworks.com

B I G D ATA V A L U E

CSPs careful not to get swept away in the big data gold rush All communication service providers (CSPs) have silos of data that could yield pure gold. Nick Booth warns that, in the rush to extract it, there could be a lot of casualties

Matthew Roberts: Data scientists are in high demand

o paraphrase one of the experts quoted below, there’s gold in CSPs’ data sets. The individual elements scattered about the storage landscape contain information on behaviour, tastes, location and demographics that, if combined by a marketing alchemist, could make CSPs richer than Facebook.

improving operations or creating pro-active marketing – is their priority. “Running all the different streams in parallel will be counter productive,” he adds.

Gold, like big data, has many applications beyond sales. Both are vital components in making business systems run more efficiently, with gold being a component in computers and electronics to speed the accurate transmission of information. Gold has dental and medical applications – as indeed does big data, which provides the basis of the nervous system and immune responses of the increasingly organic and self-regulating networks of the CSPs.

Contrary to popular marketing messages, many companies have impressive data mining systems like Hadoop and SAP’s HANA, but haven’t worked out what they really want from the data sets, nor do they understand the domains or know what they want to do, says Palepu.

In other words, there’s so much you can do with big data it’s terrifying. It is literally causing panic in some companies. “Many departments are under pressure to boost their customer revenue and optimise their network and even to improve the customer experience,” says Ravi Palepu, the head of telco solutions for management system vendor Virtusa.

The biggest mistake a CSP can make is to run all their programmes at the same time, says Palepu. First CSPs need to decide which of their ambitions – improving customer experience, boosting revenue,

Too often CSPs lack the expertise needed as there’s a small talent pool, says Matthew Roberts, director of marketing at Amdocs’ big data analytics and strategic innovations division. “Data scientists are in high demand, particularly those with a telecoms specialism who can understand the data in context,” he says. Meanwhile, the staff charged with striking gold are having to blend data from different sources and make sense of it. “It’s like a cocktail, blending different ingredients and you don’t know what works until you’ve found the winning formula. The trick is to find it fast before you drown in data,” says Roberts. If it’s difficult to find the staff for that ambitious deep

Ben Parker: CSPs must sift out the excess data to bring home the valuable nuggets

Having decided on which seam of data is to be mined, the next priority is assembling the tools and the personnel.

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“When panning for gold, you do it in the river, sifting out the excess, and bringing home the nuggets – you don’t shovel all the soil into a truck to take back home and sort, that would be a waste of time and money” dive into the data, why not create a more realistic target? While other CSPs are tying themselves up searching for the meaning of life in their data, it might be a lot more worthwhile going for some quick wins, according to Ben Parker, chief technologist for Guavus. “When panning for gold, you do it in the river, sifting out the excess, and bringing home the nuggets – you don’t shovel all the soil into a truck to take back home and sort, that would be a waste of time and money,” he says. Yet this is what many CSPs do when they take a store and query approach to data analytics. “By applying streaming analytics at the edge, sifting out the useless data and keeping the nuggets of gold, CSPs are better set up for success,” says Parker. The best way to immediately improve network operations, customer experience and revenue streams is to work on the data streams not the stored silos, Parker argues. It’s a more practical way of showing the top management that results are being achieved. Another practical approach that CSPs – and the companies that promise to solve their big data problems – could take is widening the talent pool by making analytics easier. Not many people can create the algorithms for interrogating big data, but why should they anyway,

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asks Steve Bowker, the vice president of technology and strategy for Teoco. “Once the data has been interrogated with a specific use case others can make use of it,” he says. Big data isn’t as scary as everyone makes it out to be, argues Andy Stubley, the vice president of sales and marketing at SysMech, which creates big data apps for CSPs. “You just need to know what you want to get from the data,” says Stubley, “half the battle is asking the right questions.”

Steve Bowker: Once data has been interrogated others can make use of it, too

The idea that big data can only be understood and translated for practical use by data scientists is a common misconception anyway, says Mark Davis, Citrix’s senior director of product marketing. “Yes there’s a shortage of big data scientists but a new class of big data analytics platforms makes the insights more widely available.” For big data’s benefits to be fully realized, more people need access to insight, which includes marketers and customer care organisations, who will want immediate and continuous use, Davis adds. That may be true, but that leads to another intelligence conundrum: there are so many big data solutions out there. How do we make sense of them all?

Mark Davis: A new class of big data analytics platforms makes the insights more widely available

CSPs must capitalise fully on the surge of big data from new services, such as VoLTE - What do they need to do? Robert Eriksson: The challenge with services such as VoLTE is to distribute the data they generate to the people and places where it will have an impact, in a way in which it can be understood, quickly and easily.

Everyone knows that the volume of data communications service providers (CSPs) generate is immense. The challenges of that near-overwhelming volume, though, are being addressed and the focus has turned to extracting useful information from the data. Analytics tools are being deployed and they go much of the way to enabling organisations to extract maximum value from their data

owever, the tools alone are not sufficient. Analytics relies on asking questions of the data to generate insight and, given that CSP data is useful to many different teams and departments within the organisation, there is a real risk that non-expert users will find the analysis process difficult. The need to obtain insight and capture value will grow more pressing with the increased focus on customer experience, the advent of VoLTE and the surge of data that this will create. Moreover, the ability to assure the experience the customer has when using the CSP’s services and networks is crucial in order to minimise churn.

The problem, though, is that one size does not fit all. It is not possible to have a single set of big data, and common dashboards to visualise it: such an approach would not suite the needs of all users within a CSP. Different teams have different needs for data - and different ways in which they need to visualise it. What is required is a way to adapt the data and the way in which it is visualised, so that different teams will be able to extract the maximum value from it. In other words, CSPs need a means to short-circuit the analytical process to make function-specific data

Robert Eriksson, director of customer experience management at Polystar, gives the example of a CSP that is deploying VoLTE: “CSPs have an edge on OTT voice services when it comes to the quality of the service. When deploying VoLTE it is important to be able to monitor and assure that the quality of the voice

service maintains the high level expected by users. At the same time, VoLTE is a complex technology that needs to work in some complicated scenarios,” he explains. “The CSP has to pay particular attention to how all of those can work together. They must have the information they need to be able to assess network performance, service quality, predictive tasks, and have early visibility into any problems that may affect the perceived quality of the service.”

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available to the different types of user within a CSP. “What Polystar is talking about is how the information that exists with CSPs’ big data can be directed to the people who actually need it,” adds Eriksson. “We are collecting huge amounts of data, we’re addressing how we can choose sub-sets of that data and then deliver it to the people and places where it will have an impact. We need to make this accessible, so that CSPs can assure their customer experiences and deliver new services securely and profitably.” Polystar has developed a proposition that takes care of the capture, sorting and the storage of data from networks and services, so that it can be accessed and utilised by the different teams and departments within a CSP. “It has got to be made easy for each user to interpret the data,” says Eriksson. “We have to convert it into something that is relevant to them.” That means a technology product on its own is not sufficient because it can’t know the operational priorities of a CSP business unit. For that reason, the Polystar proposition involves working with the CSP to understand what is relevant to it. “Which key performance indicators are required and how they should be presented can only be identified by understanding the underlying needs of the users. In turn, this can only be understood by working closely with the CSP,” says Eriksson. “It’s not about us giving you what we think you need or giving you everything we think you might want. Instead, it’s about us gaining an understanding of each customer’s priorities and tailoring the proposition for their specific situation. You can focus on doing your job, while we will interpret your needs and deliver the appropriate technical details.” Polystar acknowledges that CSPs typically have similar key goals, which is useful when identifying areas in which to make data available to CSP teams. However, he points out that CSPs are not all the same. “A greenfield LTE operator will be different from a CSP that has 2G and 3G and a new group of LTE customers to serve,” explains Eriksson. “What we offer is designed to support not just what we think matters but also what matches the needs of our customers.” Polystar’s approach is to create solutions aimed at specific stakeholders within CSPs. The solutions provide the data that is relevant to different functions, and is visualised in a way that supports the workflow of the users. The solutions already cover the majority of daily

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needs, but for queries that demand a very high level of detail, Polystar’s system also provides drill-down capabilities to enable insight from the lowest level of signalling events. Within that context, operations could be a specific user group that needs specific data to assure continuous network performance and consistent customer experience. To achieve this, they need powerful analytics tools adapted to their needs. Other groups can then use the same sources of data, but filtered and adapted to support their needs, such as customer care, marketing, and other functions. It’s inefficient to have each group analysing the complete set of data to obtain the insights required.

We’re only beginning to scratch the surface of the practical application of big data analytics but we have identified clear use cases and needs

“Having the single platform that we offer enables the needs of different groups to be met in group-specific solutions without duplicating effort or the resources used,” says Eriksson. It remains early days. “We’re only beginning to scratch the surface of the practical application of big data analytics but we have identified clear use cases and needs,” Eriksson adds. “This process will be iterative and we fully anticipate the use, to which CSPs put the data we present them with, will evolve dramatically.” Use cases Eriksson identifies include: • Analysis of near real-time data when introducing new services like LTE and VoLTE to provide insight into trends and provide predictive information to support network engineering and service operation centres (SOCs); • Improving first-call-resolution and customer experience in customer care by providing information on the likelihood of specific types of problems; • Supplying product management and marketing with actionable customer insights to identify user behaviour that could help in designing a new service, bundle or marketing campaign. Those examples are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to data analytics and Eriksson anticipates increased usage of data insights stimulating further demand. Use cases will proliferate and the number of groups needing data presented to them in a way that is readily accessible and understandable will increase exponentially as a result. “As a telecoms supplier, we intend to support CSPs through the CSP’s entire LTE and VoLTE journeys to ensure they achieve significant returns on their investments in data analytics,” Eriksson concludes.

www.polystar.com

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Virtualisation takes centre stage for CSPs of all types Virtualisation is at the top of communications service providers’ (CSPs) agendas. It doesn’t just affect network hardware, software and BSS in particular need to virtualise as well. Here, Mathias Liebe introduces Orga Systems’ GOLD Convergent Charging and Billing Release 3.0 and explains why the system has gone virtual

irtualisation is one of the hottest topics discussed in the telecoms industry today but in practice it is not new at all. During the past decade server virtualisation for x86 hosts has matured and won acceptance in the data centres, being used by more than 90% of all companies around the globe. Today, the amount of virtualised workloads exceeds the amount of workloads running on bare-metal. But server virtualisation is just the beginning of the journey. Software defined networks (SDN) and network functions virtualisation (NFV) are now entering the IT landscape, changing CSPs’ ecosystems and IT operations by pushing data centre automation and cloud-based services into the headlines. CSPs have to face a growing complexity and have to pro-actively manage their computing base in order to become as versatile and agile as the virtualised architecture itself. Therefore CSPs will need a scalable and robust billing system that can be deployed as an online charging cloud that is IT-based and supports virtualised network functions (VNF) such as policy control and real-time session management.

initiated a comprehensive programme to qualify its GOLD product family for virtualised systems by working together with hardware and software vendors such as VMware, Red Hat and Dell. This includes the offering of a reference architecture and an operational concept to plan and operate all revenue management functions in a virtualised environment. While the reference architecture serves as a baseline for any CSP to plan his system environment, the operational concept will provide practical advice for integration and operation of the virtualised stack. With this approach and the release of GOLD CCB 3.0 Orga Systems tremendously enhances capabilities to support cloud services and NFV orchestration.

The author, Mathias Liebe, is director of product marketing at Orga Systems

Tasks like balancing workloads, managing downtime or simplifying and extending disaster recovery have to be mastered; all of them being compelling attributes to operate mission-critical applications such as billing and charging on virtualised systems.

Virtualisation support for all revenue management functions To support CSPs in applying virtualisation technologies, Orga Systems will launch a new release of its flagship product GOLD Convergent Charging and Billing (GOLD CCB) at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. In this context Orga Systems

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY / MARCH 2015

GOLD CCB 3.0 product highlights include: • a SID compliant data model to ease and speed up integration • a full virtualisation support for all revenue management functions • a comprehensive NextGen platform strategy aligned with latest VMware and Red Hat technologies

www.orga-systems.com

The hybrid reality - Why the ability to master complexity is critical for NFV success Communications service providers (CSPs) are about to enter a revolution that will transform their businesses through virtualisation. However, to realise the benefits they must master the complexities of the orchestration layer, writes Justin Paul

The author, Justin Paul, is head of OSS marketing at Amdocs

NFV drives OSS transformation NFV is highly disruptive. In particular, NFV will have a significant impact on the operational support systems (OSS) deployed today. OSS will have to evolve to support NFV introduction, and future OSS systems or next generation OSS must support a number of functions that are merely optional today. This means a significant disruption in the OSS market is inevitable over the next few years, with major vendors making significant investment in OSS development as they look to launch OSS for hybrid networks. For others, the advent of virtualisation will see an accelerated decline in their business, as their OSS becomes

he telecoms industry is approaching a period of revolution that will change its world. The impact of network functions virtualisation/software-defined networking (NFV/SDN) will deliver significant benefits to CSPs in terms of business agility and reduction in operational and capital expenditure. Ultimately, this revolution will drive down the total cost of network ownership. However, to realise these benefits they must be able to master the complexities of the orchestration layer because without such mastery, the actual benefits of NFV/SDN deployments could be minimal.

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY / MARCH 2015

ent ulfilm ice f serv E2E

increasingly unable to support the requirements of the new technologies. We will also see some new entrants to the market, but these typically provide niche NFV orchestration systems rather than providing the breadth and depth required of a next generation OSS.

Se rv & ice d cre e ati sign on

Next Generation OSS

Mul ti-fu lf orch ilment s t estr atio ack n

y tor en v in e* m i t alRe

NFV orchestration

Where are we in the NFV/SDN hype curve? 2014 was, arguably, the peak of the hype curve. Recognising the potential, many CSPs outlined their strategic vision to embrace NFV/SDN but now, a year later, there is also recognition that these technologies create significant operational challenges. Without doubt, the potential for NFV is huge. One use case I’ve discussed with many CSPs is the ability to spin up new Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) servers in response to an attempt to disrupt a corporate organisation. This is a great demonstration of NFV because it is simple and effective. The use case involves purely virtualised network functions (VNFs) which are instantiated based on a simple trigger. Unfortunately the reality is that 99% of the telecoms market is much more complex than this because of the huge installed base of existing equipment, some of which will remain operational for the next 20-30 years. Service providers need to accept that NFV/SDN will increase complexity while it runs in parallel with their existing networks. These hybrid networks, combining physical and virtual network elements, create a serious challenge to our utopian vision.

The best partner for the future networks journey There are four main contenders in the NFV/SDN arena: cloud vendors, network equipment providers (NEPs), virtualisation specialists and operational support system (OSS) vendors, each with their own specific strengths and weaknesses. The NEPs have a strong affinity to the VNFs (virtual network functions) that replace their current physical network elements, while cloud vendors understand virtualisation at the server level, and many of the specialists provide bestin-class capabilities in niche areas. However, in hybrid networks, Amdocs believes that OSS providers are set to dominate with their ability to manage and orchestrate physical, logical and contextual networks. This is because these providers have experience and expertise in managing the complexity of today’s multivendor, multi-technology networks, which puts them in the best position to manage these more complex networks of the future.

*Note: Near real-time

change. In the future, networks will dictate how they are configured based on network performance. The advent of hybrid networks requires a different approach to OSS and is driving the development of next generation OSS to meet the needs of these next generation networks.

Emerging capability for OSS The OSS of the future will have five key functionalities over and above those seen today. Firstly, OSS functionality will be focused on the rapid on-boarding of new VNFs and the agile design and creation of new services. Time to on-board and to design new services will be cut to just days, and service implementation to minutes or seconds. These processes will obviously have to cope with the complexity of hybrid networks. Secondly, to support dynamic, ever changing virtualised networks, the OSS must work in near-real time and be able to recognise the changes to the network configuration as they happen. It must also provide visibility across all domains and vendors to ensure a holistic view to support fulfilment and assurance of dynamically changing services. Thirdly, the evolved OSS must be able to orchestrate not only VNFs, but also SDN controllers and physical systems. One of the important precepts of NFV is the ability to rapidly create new services, particularly in the enterprise domain. The fourth functionality is the creation and management of complex end-to-end fulfilment from order to cash across multiple service stacks. The final functional area for next generation OSS is the ability to fulfil services. Service fulfilment has become more complex, and will become even more so in the future. Services themselves have become more complex, the fulfilment environments are more complex and the introduction of SDN/NFV requires fulfilment across hybrid networks. Strong service fulfilment capability is an essential functionality for next generation OSS.

Mastering complexity Evolution of OSS The impact of NFV/SDN on our industry will be huge. At the OSS level we believe significant changes need to take place to realise the full benefits of these new technologies. Currently, OSS systems are not required to be real-time. They were never designed for a constantly changing network environment where standard computing platforms change functionality and parameters in response to planned and unplanned network events. This is a fundamental

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY / MARCH 2015

NFV/SDN will deliver great benefits to CSPs who are able to overcome the operational challenges of managing and utilising these complex hybrid networks. While we see many worthy new entrants into the NFV/SDN domain, the vendors who are evolving their OSS are best placed to manage the complexity of hybrid network orchestration, because they can combine a solution designed for virtual networks with their experience and expertise in managing today’s existing complexity.

www.amdocs.com

AN EVENT OF

DIARY

Upcoming events

Mobile World Congress 2015 2-5 March, 2015

Cloud MENA 13-14 April, 2015

Ovum Industry Congress 2015 12-13 May, 2015

Barcelona,Spain Organiser: The GSM Association www.mobileworldcongress.com

Dubai, UAE Organiser: Informa mena.cloudworldseries.com

London, UK Organiser: Informa ovumindustrycongress.com

Connected Fleets Europe 2015 10-11 March, 2015 Amsterdam, The Netherlands Organiser: TU Automotive www.tu-auto.com/fleeteurope

Policy Control 14-15 April, 2015 Berlin, Germany Organiser: Informa policycontrolconference.com

TM Forum Live! 1-3 June, 2015 Nice, France Organiser: TM Forum www.tmforum.org

Telco Cloud 28-29 April, 2015

NGMN Industry Conference and Exhibition 2015 24-25 March, 2015

London, UK Organiser: Informa telecomcloudservices.com

Frankfurt, Germany Organiser: NGMN www.ngmn.org

Smart to Future Cities 28-29 April, 2015 London, UK Organiser: Informa smarttofuture.com

EVENT PREVIEW

The Innovation City: Mobilising the IoT to transform your world At Mobile World Congress (MWC) this year, to be held in Barcelona, Spain on 2-5 March, communications service providers (CSPs) and manufacturers will showcase the very latest services and devices in machine-to-machine (M2M) and the Internet of Things (IoT). Here, event organisers the GSMA preview the M2M and IoT highlights

n essential part of the exhibition is the GSMA Innovation City, which expands upon the highly successful Connected City that has been a major feature of Mobile World Congress in recent years. The Innovation City is a virtual urban environment comprised of trains, connected cars, a café, a theatre, shops and even a dental spa. Exhibits presented by GSMA partners, AT&T, Jasper, KT Corporation, Oral-B, Sierra Wireless and Vodafone will demonstrate the most advanced mobile-connected products and services. One of the central themes of this year’s Innovation City will be transport. There will be various demonstrations of the connected car, including a more detailed view of telematics and diagnostics from a manufacturer’s perspective. Much has been said in

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY / MARCH 2015

the last six months about the mass market appeal of wearables, and at the Innovation City this year, there will be a wide-range of wearables and connected equipment available for any attendee to test and try. The goal of the GSMA’s Connected Living programme is to accelerate the growth of M2M and the IoT. To achieve this, the programme aims to promote industry collaboration, appropriate regulation and create standards that will optimise network functionality. Last year, nearly 18,000 people visited the Innovation City, which is a great indicator of the power and interest in this showcase. We are keen to demonstrate the benefits that the Connected Living programme brings to the industry and invite all attendees of this year’s Mobile World Congress to engage with us in our efforts to bring greater cooperation, technological advancement and new revenue opportunities to the IoT.

www.mobileworldcongress.com

CLOCKING OFF!

DA TA

Are we reaching the point where data has become just too big? They’re all saying that visualisation tools make big data come alive. Nick Booth is not so sure

I The author, Nick Booth, is a contributor to VanillaPlus and a technology journalist

n this modern era of big data, there are many heart sinking moments brought on by the excessive use of information.

Infographics are one of the modern scourges of the information age. I can’t be the only person in the world who feels a wave of anxiety whenever one of these visual interpretations is mooted. They’re supposed to be quick and fun ways of graphically illustrating a complex point – but somehow they’re not. Anything that’s pre-announced as fun usually isn’t. It’s such a hard billing to live up to. But the creators of infographs always seem to make the subject even more confusing – to me at least. There’s nothing wrong with infographics, just the way people use them. Sometimes it looks like the author of the report has started with the intention of creating a pretty diagram, then rapidly tried to backfill the various fields with headings.

The problems of both infographics and broadcast TV are to do with big, rich data

Typically, you’ll be presented with a diagram resembling a biological deconstruction of flower parts. Instead of headings like stamen, sepal and stigma, the big data chart’s regions have headings like customer data, supplier data and financial data. But there didn’t seem to be any order in them, or relationship between the different entities. Unlike the flower diagram, which gave some idea how of how, say, the nectary helps to enable the function of the flower’s ovules, there were no such obvious relationships between the big data categories. It’s almost as if, in haste, someone just put as many category names onto a chart as they possibly could. It was ever thus, of course. I can remember presenting a report for a large UK telecoms company, which shall remain nameless. This company, which had recently enjoyed a near monopoly, was now facing competition for its channels to market. The pros and cons of the CSP’s offering could have been summarised on a single sheet of A4 paper but the marketing boss didn’t want that. So I had to make up 45 minutes worth of spider charts in order to pad out the presentation. These charts were created out of the values typed into the cells of an Excel spreadsheet. These scores were

themselves pretty random as the interviewees I was asked to quiz became so bored with rating so many attributes they just scored everything seven out of ten. So we could have created a short, punchy memorable feedback report. It would have been more valuable to give each person one useful tip they could have put immediately into practice. But instead, thanks to a data binge, many of the sales staff dozed off and had to be resuscitated from a trance. And it wasn’t my fault – well not entirely. Big data was to blame. In the wrong hands it can be lethal. The tool of presenting big data actually made it harder to understand. This happens everywhere. With all the functions available on broadcast media, we should be entering a golden age of TV. Instead, I find most documentaries on telly unwatchable. The narrative is usually so ploddingly slow that it insults the intelligence and tests the patience to the limit. This is usually because the programme makers want to include every plot device available to them from the vast smorgasboard of televisual delights on offer. So instead of following the story of why and how rogue builder A ripped off pensioner B, we’re forced to watch the presenter describing his journey of discovery and his preparations for the final confrontation scene. In the old, small data days, the smug ugly show-off would have been kept behind the camera, and his involvement in the narrative kept to a minimum. But not now. If you watch a consumer affairs programme, for example, you get the impression that the show is all about the presenters – and their journey. The problems of both infographics and broadcast TV are to do with big, rich data. In each case, the user is given so many options for mining and presenting information that they have lost the plot. They feel as if they have to use them all, forgetting that the most important discipline in the information age is to make everything appear to be simple and clear. I think some data austerity is needed. Or perhaps a data diet and some simple exercises. Otherwise we’ll all get bloated, lethargic and liable to fall asleep at our desks.

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY / MARCH 2015

THE NEW WORLD OF CUSTOMER E PERIENCE

Amdocs Amdocs Order Order Delivery Deliver y Orchestrator Orchestrator Delivers Delivers Added Added Agility Agilit y R Reduce educe order or der delivery deliver y cycle cycle b by yu up p to to 70% 70% for for y your our e enterprise nter p r i s e c customers. u s to m er s . T The he A Amdocs mdoc s O Order rd e r D Delivery eliver y Orchestrator Orchestrator e enables nable s d dynamic ynamic orchestration orchestration of of complex c o m p l ex o orders. r d e r s. Our Our solution solution provides provides enriched enriched vvisibility isibilit y and and monitoring monitoring tools tools for for the the overall overall sales sales process; process; and and accelerates accelerates the th e service ser vice d delivery eliver y process process ffor or e enterprise nterprise customers customers through through dynamic dynamic orchestration orchestration of of their th e i r b bundled undled services, s e r v i c e s, iincluding ncluding SDN SDN a and nd N NFV FV b based ased so solutions. lutions.

V isit w Visit www.amdocs.com/service-fulﬁlment w w. amdocs .com /ser vice -ful ﬁlment o orr c come ome to to the th e A Amdocs mdocs booth booth 3G10, 3G10, hall hall 3 at at Mobile M obile W World orld C Congress ongress ffor or more more information. information. ©2 2015 015 A Amdocs. m d o c s. A Alll l rrights i g h t s rreserved. e s e r ve d.

Convergent Billing Charging 4G/LTE Data Ch arging

Policy Management Management BSS Virtualization Virtualization and Cloud

Catalog-driven Cata log-driven BSS

Reusable Building Building Blocks

Short Time Market Short Ti me to Mark et

Customer Order Management Management

Centralized Centralized Prepaid Prepaid Energy Distribution Top Up Sales Sales and Distributi on

Customer NotiďŹ cation NotiďŹ cation and Engagement Engagement Prepaid Prepaid Debt Management Management

Find out more about Orga Systems Systems and our GOLD products and visit us: Mobile World Congress 2015, Hall Hall 5, Booth 5B40, main main aisle aisle www.orga-systems.com www.orga-syste ms.com | communicati communication@orga-systems.com on@orga-systems.com

February / March 2015 Volume 17 Issue 1 ISSN 1745-1736

Carl Boeing from hybris software, an SAP company, says CSPs are in pole position to commercialise context-aware, multi-channel experiences PLUS: Our CEO Guide to Mobile World Congress 2015 ■ How CSPs can cut the cost of their operations with auto-diagnostics Why Africa needs broadband to satisfy nations' appetites for innovation ■ How China has moved from imitator to innovator visit www.vanillaplus.com for the latest news, features and opinion

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C O N T E N T S

Introduction The theme for this year’s Mobile World Congress, to be held in Barcelona, Spain on 2-5 March, 2015, is ‘The Edge of Innovation’. Previous events have certainly driven users to the edge of something, usually exhaustion

evertheless innovation at the show is always only half of the story. Innovation tends to grab the headlines whether it’s the next generation of cellular technology, the latest, revolutionary device, or the potential for a completely new business model for communications service providers (CSPs). This year, those categories will be amply served by innovations in 5G, wearable technology and multi-directional business models.

industry is a large and old one that is doing it’s best to transform. That means things take longer to happen than they do in the web world but they do happen – eventually. The Edge of Innovation isn’t really a CSP focus. CSPs prefer to occupy the centre of innovation and work from there, only reaching today’s edge of innovation when it’s a long way inland, five years later, and there’s another edge to head, carefully, towards. Experience has shown that you can’t push a CSP to the edge of innovation, if you do, they might fall over it. What you can do, though, is introduce ideas along the edge of innovation that seed a notion in CSPs’ minds of the approaches they will take as innovation matures.

That’s all exciting to get acquainted with, but the aspects of the show that grab my attention more after attending for a decade are what’s actually happening and is real and on the market, today. The innovation – regardless of how close to the edge it is – for me serves the purpose of suggesting what the real story may become in five years from now.

I wish you a productive show and hope you manage to find good lunches, avoid blisters and don’t mistake Barcelona’s Parallel for the Diagonal late one night.

That backwards-looking view of forward-facing innovation serves me well as a filter from the far-fetched and also helps me avoid getting carried away. It helps me continue to recognise that the telecoms

Enjoy this CEO Guide to Mobile World Congress!

IN THIS ISSUE TALKING HEADS

hybris software’s Carl Boeing explains how big data analytics strategies and suites are coming together to the benefit of CSPs

Carl Boeing

C4 GUIDE TO MWC 2015

TALKING HEADS

GUIDE TO MWC 2015 VanillaPlus provides a preview of the keynote speakers, the Innovation City and the exhibition itself to help you decide, where to go and what to see

C11

EXPERT OPINION Lars Moltsen explains how CSPs can cut the cost of operations by using auto-diagnostics

C13

EXPERT OPINION Sameh Abdelaziz explains that African nations have a great thirst for innovation but access to fixed broadband remains an obstacle

C14

C7 VANILLAPLUS CEO GUIDE TO MWC 2015 \ FEBRUARY/MARCH 2015

CHINA Katie Matthew details how China has moved from being an imitator to an innovator as it transforms the mobile market

TA L K I N G

H E A D S

Why CSPs are in a prime position to commercialise contextual, omni-channel experiences and maintain competitive advantage over the rest of the market

anillaPlus: hybris software, an SAP company, will be exhibiting at this year’s Mobile World Congress. What do you see as the key features of your attendance?

Carl Boeing: This year at the Congress, hybris will be showcasing the potential of its powerful customer engagement and commerce (CEC) portfolio of solutions. For example, at our booth visitors can see how a hyper-personalised, contextual customer journey – starting with a second-screen TV experience, and unfolding through the different stages of the purchasing cycle – can surprise and delight customers at every turn with highly personalised offers. We’ll show how hybris can take a brand-building medium like TV advertising – a vital source of revenue for many CSPs – and use it to drive genuine consumer engagement. This results in more measurable conversion rates, as well as starting a contextual journey with the consumer across a range of different channels. For example, imagine a CSP was aware that a consumer viewed a commercial advertisement or product placement in a show, and could use that information to engage that customer at the right moment and the right context to maximise both customer satisfaction and conversion. This is based on where the customer is, what they are doing, and even what they are planning next.

The key here is to turn big data into little data, and you can see in this example that’s exactly what hybris has delivered. hybris has seamlessly connected the user’s movie preferences with their location and time, correctly figured out that it’s a date night, and armed with this information connected the customer with the cinema to make a relevant, contextual offer. It’s vital to note that this scenario only works because all of this takes place in real-time. In the notso-distant past it took organisations six months just to provide analytics on one element of this proposition. Now it’s coming together in the moment, allowing us to create targeted offers that deliver incredible experiences, not intrusive advertisements that disturb and annoy. We also do this from a single platform, at speed. This enables offers to happen while the window of opportunity is still firmly open. Wait too long, and the user has already finished dinner and is busy drinking tequila in a bar somewhere else rather than spending money in the local cinema.

VP: What does that concept look like in terms of providing the experience to the user?

CB: Let me give you a perfect example of this coming to life: A customer makes an online restaurant booking based on a local TV advert. The CSP, who manages the TV service provision, knows the customer likes vampire movies because they’ve watched a dozen of them in the last week. A cinema close to the restaurant – also a customer of the CSP – is empowered to offer the delighted customer a discount for a date night vampire movie package that starts straight after dinner.

VANILLAPLUS CEO GUIDE TO MWC 2015 \ FEBRUARY/MARCH 2015

VP: It’s about 18 months since SAP completed the acquisition of hybris software, how are the two companies coming together? CB: Combining SAP’s customer engagement solutions with the unparalleled omni-channel commerce capabilities of hybris, underpinned by the power of the SAP HANA platform, we are now capable of delivering a platform for businesses to engage their customers anytime, anywhere, from any device at any point in their journey. As you’ll see from our presence at the show, we’re very excited about what this means for the future of our company. VP: That’s a big step forward. Are CSPs ready for this transformation in the way they engage with customers and generate money from these new ways of marketing?

CB: It’s clear that everyone is on a learning curve increasingly driven by the customer. hybris plays two roles as we partner with CSPs. The first is to inspire with possibilities, demonstrating what can be done today with SAP and hybris. The second is to reassure that regardless of what’s coming next for CSPs, we’ve built an agile platform that has the scalability, flexibility and capability to support an infinite range of future use cases.

Carl Boeing is global vice president for Telecommunications, Customer Engagement and Commerce (CEC) at hybris software, an SAP company. In this interview, he talks to VanillaPlus about the opportunities and challenges that await communications service providers (CSPs) that are looking to take an early lead in providing their customers with contextual, omni-channel experiences enabled by real-time data analytics.

VANILLAPLUS CEO GUIDE TO MWC 2015 \ FEBRUARY/MARCH 2015

TA L K I N G

H E A D S

These future use cases aren’t necessarily about CSPs selling more smartphones and data plans. That existing business model has reached maturity in many markets. Instead, the advantage for CSPs lies beyond the traditional telco technology stack, in the new, innovative services like machine-to-machine technology, precision marketing or smart homes. With the right technology partners, CSPs have the agility to seize the initiative and gain first-mover advantage. VP: Is CSPs’ interest in this focused on protecting their traditional business or entering a new business by introducing new applications and services? CB: Being able to engage customers in a meaningful, impactful way is vital because loyalty is fleeting. With general network and device parity and an evergrowing list of alternatives for communications and entertainment, customers will choose to do business with CSPs simply because they enjoy and value the experience being provided, not for old reasons we’ve relied on for so long such as brand loyalty or resonance. CSPs also face internal pressures that are driving them to seek out new sources of revenue. The industry continues its colossal network arms race, pouring capital into networks to keep up with the voracious need for bandwidth. Think about what that means for the balance sheet – it’s a cashflow challenge to pour billions of euros of capex into today’s products while also investing in the carrierclass business of the future. That means CSPs need to monetise their investments at scale in shorter timeframes than ever before, and successful CSPs are betting on many new fronts simultaneously.

www.hybris.com/ telcoaccelerator

The new era of contextual engagement for CSPs is partly about targeting and sending the right message at the right time to the right customer, but it’s just as important to be ready when the request comes in from the customer themselves. Being able to offer a broad spectrum of products, and being able to offer them consistently across every channel and touchpoint is very important because if the CSP can’t provide the product or service the customer wants when and where and how they want it, they’re in trouble. The philosophical and technical shift from device-centric customer relationships to identity-centric customer relationships is essential for long-term retention, longterm value, and sustainable results.

VP: Given the complexities involved do you see this as a market that CSPs can lead in? CB: CSPs have a short-term advantage. They’re in prime position, but the race has already started. CSPs have an acute awareness of their customers’ needs. In addition having upstream content and the advanced network capabilities to deliver this gives them a big advantage and potential to lead. CSPs have a window of opportunity to enable contextual experiences before competing industries can. That window is going to close pretty quickly, though, so CSPs need to get a move on. VP: How do you see hybris software’s role developing? CB: We see many CSPs, and organisations of all types, focused intensely on creating a better customer experience - but to what end? For many, that remains an open question; what are they going to do with all the eyeballs they attract to actually make some money? What is the desired outcome? Answering that question is really where hybris’s strengths lie as a business. Together with SAP and our customer engagement and commerce portfolio, we can help CSPs sell more smartphones and data plans but, if they want to take their businesses to the next level, we can help extend their businesses into new areas too. What really sets hybris apart is our omni-channel approach, which means we don’t restrict the customer experience to a particular path. What starts on a TV and goes to a tablet and then a smartphone and touches multiple parts of the CSP organisation can all be co-ordinated and handled consistently to deliver a contextual, relevant and satisfying experience to the customer, regardless of device, lifecycle stage, or channel. It’s important for CSPs to have a single view of the customer but it’s doubly important for that customer to have a single view of the CSP. It’s vital that they get the same offer, the same answer and the same information at every turn. It needs to be one experience and if they do it right, customers reward brands with incredible loyalty.

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Expanded programme to take attendees right to the edge of innovation As the mobile industry once again decamps to Barcelona, Spain for Mobile World Congress 2015, to be held at Fira Gran Via on 2-5 March, VanillaPlus reveals what’s in store for visitors to this year’s event vent organisers, the GSMA, assert that mobile industry continues to be characterised by high levels of growth and opportunity and, as the industry becomes more dynamic, the opportunities within it increase in equal amount, as do the challenges. The theme for this year’s event is ‘The Edge of Innovation.’ It’s unclear from the event’s marketing whether the focus will be on accessing innovation to give CSPs an edge in the hotly competitive mobile market or whether the organisation is planning for the event to take attendees right to the leading edge of innovation. The GSMA may well be thinking of both interpretations.

Congress, the 2015 conference programme will continue to be a central focus for the event, challenging and educating delegates while covering the latest technological developments, next generation services and growth strategies.

This year’s Mobile World Congress conference programme looks to be addressing a comprehensive spread of innovation across the mobile ecosystem – not just at the edges, An expanded programme will offer in-depth coverage of the contemporary and future mobile industry, highlighting specific areas of growth and opportunity.

“The breadth of companies represented in the Mobile World Congress keynote programme underscores the transformative impact that mobile is having across a wide range of industry sectors,” says Michael O’Hara, the chief marketing officer of the GSMA. “We have an outstanding roster of CEOs set to take the stage in Barcelona in March, offering attendees new insights and perspectives into the developments that are shaping mobile today and well into the future.”

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Running across the full length of the Mobile World

A new format has been introduced for 2015 to include more sessions and to enable an increased, in-depth analysis of the topics and trends that are shaping the mobile industry in 2015 and beyond. From the keynote programme to topic-focused conference sessions, senior executives from the most important companies in mobile and adjacent industries will be represented across the four days of the event.

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2015 Keynote Speakers

Anne Bouverot: the director general of the GSMA

Jon Fredrik Baksaas: the president and CEO of Telenor

Hans Vestberg: the president and CEO of Ericsson

Steve Mollenkopf: the CEO of Qualcomm

Anne Bouverot, the director general of the GSMA

Carlos Ghosn, the chairman and CEO of the Renault-Nissan Alliance

Francisco GonzĂĄlez, the chairman and CEO of BBVA

Simon Segars, the CEO of ARM

Raja Teh Maimunah, the CEO and COO for digital and transactional banking at Hong Leong Islamic Bank

Jon Fredrik Baksaas, the president and CEO of Telenor Group and the chairman of the GSMA

Gary Kovacs, the CEO of AVG Technologies Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia

Ken Hu, the deputy chairman and rotating CEO of Huawei Jeanie Han, the CEO of LINE EuroAmericas

Sanjay Kapoor, the chairman of Micromax Infonetics

Charles Scharf, the CEO of Visa Alvaro del Castillo, the founder and CEO of TAPTAP Networks Dr. Davor Sutija, the CEO of Thinfilm

Mitchell Baker, the executive chairwoman of Mozilla Foundation Thiru Arunachalam, the founder and CEO of Peel

The exhibition More than 1,900 exhibitors are set gather in Barcelona this year to bring MWC attendees the newest technologies and most innovative products available.

GSMA Innovation City A new feature for this year is The GSMA Innovation City, which builds on the Connected City area of previous years by bringing a fully immersive mobile experience to visitors in 2015. Visitors will be able to see first-hand how mobileconnected products will continue to transform usersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; personal and working lives across the world in the largest and most interactive collaborative showcase at Mobile World Congress 2015. Experiential demonstrations from AT&T, Jasper, KT, Oral-B, Sierra Wireless and Vodafone will come together with the GSMA which is presenting its key initiatives that pave the way for a more enriched, secure, connected future for global citizens.

Bill McDermott, the CEO of SAP Steve Mollenkopf, the CEO of Qualcomm

reality technology will enable visitors to experience the future of mobile by travelling through the network from the inside, experiencing a world of connected devices and services. The GSMA Innovation City is an opportunity for delegates to experience and interact with the latest technology advancements and meet with leaders in mobile and adjacent industries. In addition, as the mobile ecosystem continues to expand into new industry segments such as retail, banking and health services, Mobile World Congress will feature sector-specific conference sessions, partner events, exhibition content and other programmes related to the growing industry segments and trends that are impacting the mobile industry. Specialised areas will include: The App Planet In Hall 8.1, the App Planet will showcase more than 200 app-focused exhibitors in the areas of apps, gadgets, devices, and technology in the mobile ecosystem, the App Planet Exhibition is the gateway to the app developer community.

For the first time at Mobile World Congress, virtual

Hans Vestberg, the president and CEO of Ericsson

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The App Planet is the place for the app development community to connect, network and develop on the edge of innovation. There is much to see and do in the App Lounge as well. It provides attendees a location to hold meetings with new and present customers, make new acquaintances who share common ideas and goals, and pick up publications provided by GSMA media partners. App developer conferences In Hall 8.0, the Theatre District, App Developer Conferences (ADCs) will be hosted. ADCs are programmes led by some of the most influential companies in the mobile industry. The programmes feature keynote presentations and/or panel discussions, and encourage audience participation and interaction on a wide range of topics. Industry experts will provide insight on how to deal with obstacles to make an app a success and guidelines for future app development. Attendees will have the opportunity to find out what the key issues are and what lies ahead for the mobile app industry. Connected living The specialised area of Connected Living will be addressed by conference session in Hall 4, including: • Keynote: Keys to the Connected Lifestyle – Monday, 2 March at 11:15 – 12:45 • Integrating Interactions with the Connected Consumer – Monday, 2 March at 16:00 – 17:30 • Connected Citizens, Managing Crisis – Tuesday, 3 March at 14:00 – 15:30 • Wearables – Tuesday, 3 March at 14:00 – 15:30 • Everything is Connected: Enabling IoT – Thursday, 5 March at 11:30 – 13:00 Key exhibitors addressing this market include: AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Jasper Technologies, Sierra wireless, Sigfox, Orange, Vodafone

Digital commerce, identity and security The specialised area of digital commerce, identity and security will also involve a series of conference sessions in Hall 4 at the following times: • Spotlight on Mobile Identity Solutions: Development and Innovations – Monday, 2 March at 14:00 – 15:30 • The Rise of Disintermediation: Financial Services in Focus – Monday, 2 March at 14:00 – 15:30

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• The New Security Challenges: Perspectives from Service Providers – Wednesday, 4 March 16:30 – 17:30 • Navigating the Mobile Contactless Payments Landscape – Thursday, 5 March at 11:30 – 13:00

The App Planet is the place for the app development community to connect, network and develop on the edge of innovation

Health and wellness Targeted conference sessions relating to the burgeoning health and wellness market will also be held in Hall 4 at the following times: • Wearables – Tuesday 3 March at 14:00 – 15:30 • Health and Education for Connected Citizens – Tuesday 3 March at 16:00- 17:30 Key exhibitors include: Fitbit, Garmin, HewlettPackard, Oral-B, Samsung, Sony Innovation and app development Specialised sessions covering innovation and app development will also be hosted in Hall 4 throughout the event. Presentations will be held at the following times: • Keynote: Operators on the Edge of Innovation – Monday, 2 March at 9:15 – 10:45 • The Rise of M&A: Key Strategies for Business Transformation – Tuesday, 3 March at 16:00 – 17:30 • Mobile Gaming – Wednesday, 4 March at 15:15 – 16:15 • Keynote: Innovation at the Edge of Real and Virtual – Thursday, 5 March at 9:30 – 11:00 Key exhibitors covering this area include: Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Intel, Ford and Qualcomm LTE Even though it’s in deployment, LTE remains a key focus as roll-out continues and CSP attention turns to LTE-Advanced. Conference sessions exploring LTE will be held in Hall 4 at the following times: • The Seismic Spectrum Shake-Up – Monday, 2 March at 14:00 – 15:30 • Network Evolution in Practice – Monday 2 March at 16:00 – 17:30 • Keynote: The Road to 5G – Tuesday, 3 March at 9:15 – 10:45 • 5G – Wednesday, 4 March at 14:00 – 15:00

• Ensuring User-Centred Privacy in a Connected World – Monday, 2 March at 16:00 – 17:30

• Keynote: The New Mobile Identity – Wednesday, 4 March at 9:15 – 10:45

E V E N T

The ‘Young Mobile Innovator of the Year’ and ‘Connected Women: Leadership in Industry’ awards will be presented at the Global Mobile Awards ceremony at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on 3 March 2015

P R E V I E W

Marketing, media and advertising Now at the centre of the mobile ecosystem, marketing, media analytics have specialised conference sessions in Hall 4 at the following times: • Personalising the Consumer Experience – Monday, 2 March at 14:00 – 15:30 • Integrating Interactions with the Connected Consumer – Monday, 2 March at 16:00 – 17:30 • Content Evolution for the Multi-Form Factor Future – Tuesday, 3 March at 14:00 – 15:30 • Context is King: Capturing the Mobile Content Opportunity – Tuesday 3 March at 16:00 – 17:30 • Mobile Retail: Delivering Contextual Experiences to Drive Loyalty & Spend – Tuesday 3 March at 16:00 – 17:30 • The Explosion of Imaging – Wednesday, 4 March at 14:00 – 15:00 • Mobile Gamification – Wednesday, 4 March at 16:30 – 17:30 Global Mobile Awards 2015 The Global Mobile Awards 2015 comprise more than 40 awards across nine categories and are open to companies across the entire mobile ecosystem. The awards are judged by independent experts, analysts, journalists, academics, and in some cases, mobile operator representatives.

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The GSMA has introduced two special awards that have been developed to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Global Mobile Awards. The ‘Young Mobile Innovator of the Year’ and ‘Connected Women: Leadership in Industry’ awards will be presented at the Global Mobile Awards ceremony at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on 3 March 2015. The first new award, ‘Young Mobile Innovator of the Year’, is designed to showcase young and exciting new talent from across the mobile ecosystem and is open to anyone between 18 and 25 years old, working in an organisation or independently, or currently pursuing further education. The second, the ‘Connected Women: Leadership in Industry’ award, will recognise leadership in the establishment of initiatives that have a positive impact in reducing the digital skills gap and attracting and retaining women and girls in mobile and telecoms. “These additional awards will put the spotlight on individuals and organisations that will be shaping the face of the mobile industry in the years to come,” says O’Hara. “The ‘Young Mobile Innovator of the Year’ award provides a platform for up-and-coming individuals to showcase exciting new and innovative mobile ideas, and the ‘Connected Women: Leadership in Industry’ award will honour individuals, enterprises and initiatives that are working to close the ICT skills gender gap and inspire female leadership in technology around the world.” For further information visit: www.mobileworldcongress.com

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Traditional incident handling

Incident handling with 2solve

CSPs can cut the cost of operations with auto-diagnostics The telecoms landscape of networks and services is rapidly changing. Single and dual technology networks serving voice and second generation data are becoming multitechnology, high-speed data networks, where certain traffic will be off-loaded to third party systems ranging from WiFi hotspots to global satellites, and where parts of revenues will go to OTT service providers, writes Lars Moltsen

n this new landscape it is critical to be extremely competitive and efficient, especially in domains where almost-free services are available. The cost of operations and customer care will be critical where third-party solutions are locally very cheap or free of charge. Only if it is possible to keep the offered price sufficiently low, will the customer feel no big need to go outside. Achieving efficiency is a challenge. A strong and mature organisation with well-defined processes is one thing. Sufficient, trained staff is another. The utilisation of technology, however, is what determines the achievable level of performance. Think of aviation: Since the first propeller-driven aircraft left the ground more than 100 years ago, speed improved gradually as technology matured. But in just a few years around 1960, the shift to the utilisation of jet engines alone resulted in a 50% speed increase of commercial aircraft. Even if the jet technology was new and somewhat immature, it still outperformed traditional methods instantly. So, assuming the right organisation and staff is already in place, leaders should look out for technology that enables similar shifts in organisational performance or efficiency. We have developed a solution for network monitoring which has been enriched by an accurate system for

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auto diagnostics. This system, which has now been installed in five networks, enables non-technical staff in customer support functions to effectively diagnose network incidents at an expert level, and it enables engineers to conclude investigations much faster. The auto-diagnostics system works through a combination of knowledge bases and advanced mathematics. Knowledge bases are developed specific to technology and leading vendors and bundled with the provided solution. Others have made attempts to bring similar solutions to the market, but these often come short if the resource-demanding task of capturing knowledge is left to network operator staff. Other approaches have been unsuccessful because insufficient reasoning technology – such as using simple rule-based or case-based reasoning – has been used. That means that the system will never reach a required level of diagnostic accuracy. We have spent time to find the right way of structuring knowledge, bundling knowledge into a scalable solution, called 2solve, and making use of advanced technology and mathematics to accurately replicate human reasoning. The result is a system where the estimated total cost of handling a technical incident – taking resource savings, shorter time to repair, and improved customer experience into consideration – is reduced by approximately 75%.

The author, Lars Moltsen, is chief executive and managing director of 2operate

2operate is exhibiting at Mobile World Congress in Hall 6, stand 6C50 (Denmark Pavilion)

www.2operate.com

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TMT DRIVERS OF CHANGE AND INDUSTRY TRENDS Analysys Mason is the global specialist adviser on telecoms, media and technology (TMT). For 30 years, Analysys Mason has provided data and analysis on the key industry drivers in order to help clients make critical business decisions. • Leveraging next-generation and virtual networks: We help clients prepare for the radical shift in network architecture needed to support operators’ changing businesses.

Positioning for the digital economy

• Maximising operational efficiency: We offer insight on network sharing, spectrum pooling and consolidation which will critically shape mobile operator thinking. • Monetising data services: Helping TMT clients understand how to develop new strategies for pricing, service deployment and bundling to keep ahead of competitors and meet the changing needs of users. • Positioning for the digital economy: Answering the questions as to why telecoms operators need to understand the digital economy for business growth.

Monetising data services Leveraging next-generation and virtual networks

TMT INDUSTRY DYNAMICS

Reducing churn and aquiring customers

Maximising operational efficency

• Preparing for 5G: World-leading research and consulting on 5G spectrum and technology. • Reducing churn and acquiring customers: Helping new operators to acquire customers from well-established rivals, and established operators to retain their customers.

30 years

More insight on these industry drivers at analysysmason.com/Trending-Topics/

Celebrating 30 years as global specialist advisers in telecoms, media and technology (TMT)

Sameh Abdelaziz: Fixed broadband connectivity is still an issue for the continent

African nations thirst for innovation as broadband access increases The African telecoms industry is an environment full of challenges as well as opportunities. In spite of the usual pessimistic perception of doing business in Africa, Sameh Abdelaziz, the chief executive of A3&O, sees the African market as having huge potential for new innovations and unique products

ince the inception of A3&O in 2002, we have found the African nations hungry for innovations that facilitate their lives and assist them in their day-to-day activities and communications.

Countless challenges are waiting for you when you give the dynamics in Africa a closer look. These challenges would vary from country to country but more than 75% of the challenges are common especially when it comes to infrastructure capabilities, local regulations and security. You will always need someone to hold the torch to light your path so you won’t face any unexpected surprise in such complex environments. Some countries in this second most populated continent have already taken steps towards enhancing local regulations to attract investors and innovative companies so they can benefit from technology in serving their nations and resolving the inherited problems. During the coming few years we expect technology to be a major factor in Africa’s development in several domains. Education should be one of the main hot topics for any African government and technology could easily enhance this area given that the required infrastructure is in place. Especially important is that reasonable fixed broadband access exists but unfortunately the continent lags behind the rest of the world in broadband connectivity. However, research

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indicates that within the next five years, the number of mobile broadband connections will explode and reach ten times its current figure in Africa. But the fixed broadband connectivity is still a serious issue for the continent, as the penetration is about 5%. Another major domain where technology is highly needed is power and renewable energy. The continent has all required natural resources that could lead to successful deployments for solar and wind power generation systems. In some African countries, the power problem is a major obstacle for any required development especially in the area of telecoms. More than 30 African countries are now experiencing power shortages and regular interruptions in service, leading many to rely on very costly leased generating plants as an emergency stopgap which can’t be a permanent solution for this problem. In Sub-Saharan Africa, just 20% of the population has access to electricity. If we don’t have extensive plans for rectifying this and keep at the current trend, at best, the percentage of population with access to electricity will only double by 2050. There are endless solutions and innovations in the telecoms industry that can be beneficial for the African continent. However, based on our extensive experience in Africa, finding the right solution to be deployed is part of the success of any project, while finding the right partner represents a huge part of such success. That is our aim and that is our vision: to be a partner for success in Africa.

Another major domain where technology is highly needed is power and renewable energy

www.a3ando.com

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From imitator to innovator – how China is transforming the mobile market China may have grown into a technology powerhouse by following the example of the west, but the country is now carving out its role as a global leader in mobile Internet; setting trends in telecoms, mobile devices and social commerce, writes Katie Matthew orking for AsiaInfo, it stands to reason that I would promote China as a centre of innovation. It would be remiss if I didn’t believe that Chinese innovation is leading the way in the mobile internet; creating credible – and, more importantly, profitable – solutions to the challenges communications service providers (CSPs) in the west are now facing.

W The author, Katie Matthew, is telecoms market analyst for AsiaInfo

It is now starting to feel as if our industry is finally waking up to China’s influence, having dismissed the country as a Shanzhai – copycat – nation for far too long. Indeed, it is those in the west who may find themselves copying – or taking inspiration – from China soon.

China – an innovation nation? At AsiaInfo we have seen this tired, old stereotype of China as a follow fast market perpetuated on a daily basis. In reality, it is a hugely outdated image because China has, in many ways, defined markets such as search, commerce, social and entertainment, while the nation is light years ahead in mobile, having already tackled many of the challenges that CSPs in Europe are now facing. The balance of power is already shifting from west to east. This was flagged up earlier in the year when Chinese e-commerce firm, Alibaba, began public trading, and immediately joined fellow Chinese companies, Baidu, Tencent and Xiaomi, in the world’s top ten largest internet companies by stock market value. Headlines such as ‘Internet Power Balance tilts towards Asia’ (Wall Street Journal) showed that people were finally waking up to the power drain from Silicon Valley.

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The user base is vast and the facts speak for themselves: with a population of 1.35 billion, there are currently around 642 million internet users in China, which is only 45% of the population. It also has the largest smartphone market in the world – with around 630 million connections, reports GSMA Intelligence, Q2 2014. The numbers are certainly staggering but sometimes distract from the other story: how advanced and dynamic the consumer market is. China’s market has moved much more aggressively into mobile than the US and Europe. This was highlighted recently in Google’s Consumer Barometer, released last month, which showed that Asia is the only continent to have gone mobile first, where smartphone adoption has overtaken computer adoption. Secondly, critics point out that a high proportion of China’s market-leading companies are based on ideas copied from their Western counterparts – Baidu vs. Google, Renren vs. Facebook, Weibo vs. Twitter, Xiamoi vs. Apple, WhatsApp vs. WeChat, and others – and they therefore challenge the concept of China as an innovator. It’s true that most of China’s major internet companies started life as pretty obvious clones of popular foreign sites. But all the companies listed above have grown into innovators with products and services very different – and, in many cases, entirely superior to – those offered by the companies they once set out to

But still, many people questioned whether this dominance was anything to do with domestic

innovation. For a start, skeptics argue that Chinese internet firms benefit from some serious scale – and they do. Joseph Chen, chief executive of Renren, has acknowledged this himself saying that the size of the market is a serious advantage to big market-cap companies – “It’s the same technology but when you put it in China it’s worth more,” he has said.

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imitate. After all, consumers living in a mobile-first world need new products and services built with mobile in mind, not as an after-thought or a nice to have. Take WeChat as an example. Already, WeChat, a mobile messaging service with over half a billion users, has gone far beyond a social media or instant messaging tool. WeChat combines the best of Facebook and WhatsApp — and then adds a whole host of monetising innovations of its own. From playing mobile games and hailing taxis to posting videos, sending voice messages and making online payments, WeChat is an all-you-can-use mobile service. There is nothing comparable in the west. Meanwhile, smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi is busy upsetting the Apple cart with its $50 mobile phones and innovative marketing techniques, leaping into the international spotlight as the third largest smartphone vendor by shipments. Xiaomi is commonly described as China’s Apple and founder Lei Jun as the Chinese Steve Jobs, yet the company is only four years old and did not release its own smartphone until 2011. And an important side note here: while Apple is rightly a much-celebrated brand, it did not invent the mobile phone or even the smartphone; rather, it recognised unarticulated consumer needs and went ahead and served those needs. That is innovation.

infamous lack of agility when an opportunity is not spotted, means the west has a habit of letting other players and markets get ahead. However, the challenge of operating in a fast moving digital ecosystem is forcing CSPs to rethink business models, and everything else that entails.

It’s true that most of

That might explain why prejudices about China are finally starting to subside in the west, because CSPs recognise that the nation has a thriving digital landscape that is sometimes way ahead of us in terms of business models, applications and infrastructure. The market is changing so rapidly that Chinese companies have to be agile, nimble and innovative to keep up. In other words, copy/manufacture/undercut is a model that is not only entirely out-of-date, it’s just not practical in this incredibly competitive and fastmoving market.

obvious clones of

China’s major internet companies started life as pretty popular foreign sites

Europe and the rest of the world will need to keep a close eye on China’s innovations because, as well as threats, they will bring with them opportunities – including ideas that may just be worth taking inspiration from.

The CSP/OTT challenge While the applications are more advanced, so too is the CSP strategy for engaging with these innovative internet players. We may finally be starting to get on top of this challenge in the west – or, at least, we’re certainly talking about getting on top of it – but the Chinese CSPs have been visionary about this threat, and have taken strategic steps to sandbag their businesses against the OTT wave. They are a market that we in the west can really learn from in that respect. China Telecom is a good example. The company recognised the threat faced by the OTTs long before many of its counterparts. China Telecom knew it had to turn this threat into an opportunity, and saw serious merit in partnering with these players, and reselling converged products into the marketplace. It was a hunch that paid off, with annual incremental revenues of more than US$2 billion coming through partners using China Telecom’s open operational platform. That’s a relevant take away for CSPs in the west.

The landscape for innovation In the west, our industry has tended to navel gaze, which, combined with an

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