VanillaPlus Black Book 2015

BLACK BOOK 2015 SPONSORED BY

YOU WERE YOUR BIGGEST TRANSFORMATION PROJECT You were not afraid to change how you think, how your organization works, and how you measure the success of your processes and systems. You realized your support systems were no longer supporting your business but driving it, and you evolved them to drive it harder and faster. You are an Agile Operator, powered by the Ericsson Agility Suite and informed by consultation with the biggest network operator in the world. And you are changing the future of telecom.

YOU ARE THE AGILE OPERATOR. ericsson.com/ossbss

@EricssonOSSBSS

C O N T E N T S

IN THIS ISSUE 5 LEAD INTERVIEW Adan Pope, the chief technology officer and vice president of technology at Ericsson’s Business Unit Support Solutions, explains how as Ericsson’s vision of the Networked Society becomes reality, the services are as important as the technology. Pope also describes how CSPs are adapting to more IT-oriented technologies and reaping the benefits of virtualisation and increased agility

Adan Pope

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9 VANILLAPLUS CLOUD INSIGHT We started 2014 with a VanillaPlus Insight examining how cloud technologies and services are affecting CSPs. The Insight contains a specially-commissioned analyst report written by Bob Brace, the senior analyst at Telco 2.0/STL Partners, who explored ways in which CSPs will maximise their potential in cloud

89 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

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VANILLAPLUS BLACKBOOK 2015

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23 VANILLAPLUS BIG DATA ANALYTICS INSIGHT Next, we revisited the big data analytics topic with a VanillaPluscommissioned analyst report by Dan Baker, the research director at Technology Research Institute. We explored how big data is becoming less about addressing volume and more about addressing complexity 35 VANILLAPLUS CEM INSIGHT Then we commissioned Shagun Bali, an analyst for CSP IT at Ovum to write a report on the issues CSPs face in customer experience management (CEM). We drilled down into why CSPs’ awareness of quality continues to set them apart from other types of provider in a best effort world 51 VANILLAPLUS POLICY INSIGHT Alongside CEM, policy is a discipline that enables CSPs to deliver new and profitable business models. We hired Karl Whitelock, the director of global operations and monetisation strategy and Troy Morley, an operations and strategy analyst, from analyst firm Stratecast | Frost & Sullivan to write our report on how policy is being applied and approached in the new telecoms arena 61 VANILLAPLUS BILL & CHARGE INSIGHT Of course, none of the new systems, technologies and services help the CSP business if they can’t be charged for. Our Bill & Charge Insight begins here with a specially commissioned report written by John Abraham, the senior analyst for Telecoms Software Research at AnalysysMason 75 VANILLAPLUS DATA ANALYTICS INSIGHT In the last of our Insight reports for this Black Book we took an in-depth look into how CSPs are deploying analytics to mine their data for revenue generating insights. The Insight starts with a specially-commissioned report from Ari Banerjee, the principal analyst at Heavy Reading 89 VANILLAPLUS DIRECTORY 2015 Now in its 15th annual edition, the VanillaPlus Directory lists the key companies in global B/OSS. As telecoms becomes more and more software focused the companies listed here are the one that are helping CSPs transform and redefine themselves for the digital value chain

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C O M M E N T

WELCOME TO THE VANILLAPLUS BLACK BOOK 2015 When we published our VanillaPlus Black Book 2014 at Mobile World Congress last year, we highlighted a series of technological and business model advances set to transform the traditional telecoms market. Many of those seeds are now sprouting, some have become strong, young saplings o retrospective of 2014 can be complete without taking into account four factors that are reshaping telecoms as we know it. The move to virtualisation, the increasing reliance on cloud as the platform for everything, the emergence of big data analytics as a line of business rather than a concept and the recognition that all types of provider can provide all types of service if they want to are truly transformative.

N George Malim, editor, VanillaPlus

For communications service providers (CSPs) transformation is underway and is no longer a question of if but a question of degree. For some CSPs the answer to generating greater revenues is to offer quad-play services and ruthlessly market those, assuring great customer experiences, with the timely application of actionable intelligence derived from big data analytics.

Across the world, from former PTTs in Europe, such as BT, buying sports rights to AT&T providing pay TV provider DirecTV, operators are adding media to their service bundles. Those that don’t have it are looking to add it. The flipside is also true with cable operators and TV providers buying mobile operators to make sure they can address the mobile opportunities.

Others that either have a quad-play proposition or don’t see it as viable in their market are looking to greater efficiency. The technical innovations of network functions virtualisation and software defined networks, coupled with the flexible scalability offered by cloud in terms of both network and computing resources provides the first real opportunity in a generation to redefine the cost base of operating a CSP. One executive I spoke to in the last year told me that the emergence of these technologies is the most transformative event to have hit telecoms since the introduction of internet protocol (IP). For many now working in the industry, that’s a lifetime ago.

For those with greyer or less hair this level of transformation is jarring but not inconsistent with the ways in which telecoms has reinvented itself in previous generations. Gone will be the intense CSP focus on ultra-high levels of resilience, although CSPs remain mandated to provide specific levels of uptime and quality by national regulators, in

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contrast to their web company rivals. To a large extent this will be replaced by services provided at the right level of quality for the experience being delivered.

A voice call will still be a premium quality proposition, a free text message won’t. CSPs have the opportunity to provision capacity accordingly and at a cost that matches the revenue that can be generated.

I’m delighted that Adan Pope, the chief technology officer and vice president of technology for Ericsson’s Business Unit Support Solutions is the subject of our lead interview in this Black Book.

Pope intuitively understands the differences between the web time at which new services and providers operate and telecoms time, the more measured approach CSPs take to ensure services are delivered at maximised quality and resilience.

He also recognizes the crash of convergence as IT and network technologies blend and fuse within CSPs and previously disparate industries such as media and telecoms collide.

Ericsson has been putting forward the notion of the Networked Society for many years and now is the time when the ingredients are starting to come together, from different industries, from different technologies and from different cultures. Pope sits in the centre of that Venn diagram as the chief technologist of an organisation that has brought together companies from the IT, media and telecoms software markets to create an environment that is more unified than ever before and that seeks to enable the best of both worlds: The quality, resilience, reliability and trustworthiness of the old CSP world with the innovation, agility and flexibility of the web world.

In 2015 we will continue our series of VanillaPlus Insight reports, authored by independent analysts.

Topics for the rest of the year include: NFV, Bill & Charge, CEM, Policy and OTT. In addition we’ll also publish a series of business-specific supplements covering network planning and optimisation, cloud, digital TV, revenue management and assurance and the Internet of Things.

We hope you enjoy this, our second, Black Book and the Insights contained within it.

George Malim, editor, VanillaPlus

VANILLAPLUS BLACKBOOK 2015

I N T E R V I E W

Adan Pope: CSPs are on the cusp, ready to harness the potential of ICT to claim their rightful position in the Networked Society

Agility and virtualisation make the promise of the Networked Society a reality for CSPs Adan Pope is chief technology officer and vice president of technology for Ericsson’s Business Unit Support Solutions. Here, he tells VanillaPlus that as Ericsson’s vision of the Networked Society becomes reality, the services are as important as the technology. Within that, communications service providers (CSPs) are adapting to IT-oriented technologies and reaping the benefits of virtualisation and increased agility

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anillaPlus: To what extent is the arrival of the Networked Society a game changer in terms of redefining business models and relationships?

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AP: Probably the best part of my job involves meeting a lot of people who are responsible for introducing services at CSPs. A key focus is on creating and introducing new services more rapidly. We’ve made substantial investments in the area of service agility and, at the heart of that is an effort to integrate fixed network services, policy based mobile services, and the agile introduction of applications.

When separation exists in these areas, it requires CSPs to manage networks and services independently of one another, often with a different charging and operational model associated with each. That results in some services being turned up very quickly but it doesn’t allow for the flexibility that CSPs need in order to effectively

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Adan Pope: A generation has grown up taking connectivity for granted. Companies are growing up in the cloud. Further, it’s about the connections that will be established across the Internet of Things, digital home and rich media that will demonstrate the Networked Society’s true potential. The only qualification here is that these connections must provide value. An operator’s value, more and more, depends on how much value they help users extract from the Networked Society they’ve been instrumental in creating.

At Ericsson, our focus is on what the solutions are and how we can help our customers introduce services, care for them, bill or charge for them, integrate them into their businesses and deliver them efficiently.

VP: In what ways will the Networked Society see agile brands that help people innovate and solve problems become successful?

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I N T E R V I E W

Cloud and flexible infrastructure technologies in ICT have dramatically enabled the business case for providing distributed applications and storage

compete on a differentiated basis with the emerging players in the communications market. Instead, the CSP is forced to compete on a service-by-service level when the potential value of their integrated value is likely to be much greater.

Service agility for us is about how we can help our customers effectively and efficiently create innovative new and integrated services based on all this amazing network technology in which our customers have invested. It’s also about enabling integration of media-rich new services with third parties.

VP: Please can you give examples of the technology you’re delivering to help CSPs? AP: We’ve made significant investments in our OSS/BSS Agility Suite and Media portfolio to address these challenges. As a result, if a CSP wants to extend a home television experience to subscribers on mobile devices, we can help. That’s a complex situation because it involves handling the rights management in exactly the same way, enabling unified converged charging and assuring the experience on a mobile device is similar to what the subscriber experiences in the home.

Consider the service experiences we are used to as consumers. If our providers meet our level of expectation, significant value is created. With that in mind, we consider it imperative for service agility to be present across our customers’ entire value chain.

VP: You spoke of the entire value chain. What does that mean to you? Does it include over the top (OTT) providers?

AP: I think the market has moved on from looking at OTT providers as a bad thing. If you look at the objectives of OTT providers or search engines, they don’t necessarily want to be network operators. They want to provide their services over networks in a transparent way but don’t yet have a way to collaborate with CSPs effectively because CSP systems aren’t easy to collaborate with. If CSPs can enable easier collaboration, we foresee the relationships between CSPs and OTT providers becoming more mutually beneficial.

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The scalable infrastructure that the cloud provides definitely has reduced the barriers to these innovative Networked Society services. In the past, we would have to define the requirements of each service and then build and bring together the technical resources required. I’d estimate that saw data centres being built for the peak demand resulting in only 20-30% utilisation on average.

Ten years ago, that was absolutely normal but obviously inefficient and expensive.

Cloud and flexible infrastructure technologies in ICT have dramatically enabled the business case for providing distributed applications and storage. CSPs are taking advantage of the service layer to create services that use cloud technology for the delivery of media, as an example.

Software defined networks (SDN) and network functions virtualisation (NFV) really are enabled by the advances in flexible cloud infrastructure so now we don’t have to build all the computing resources statically. That’s a definite advancement.

VP: What about big data – that also seems far more IT than ICT? AP: Big data tools and technologies have developed and improved rapidly based on the advancements in fundamental computer science and the IT industry. These technologies are coupled with the standardisation of IT infrastructure and, because we have these technologies that come more from IT versus the communications industry, we can understand and analyse a lot more of the user’s behaviour. For a long time we’ve had call detail records (CDRs) and understanding from the network point of view but now we can know what the experience is like from a web point of view. For instance, with policy control data, we can analyse what the customer experience on Facebook is like in south Chicago. That’s not a CSP service but the CSP will be held at fault if the experience is not good so there’s a clear value in analysing it and even monetising this experience.

VP: As communications service providers become ICT players, they will need to embrace the same agility that the IT sector has embraced over the last decade. What are the challenges associated with

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VP: By its definition the Networked Society has ICT at its heart. How are ICT advances making the Networked Society real?

AP: The cloud and big data are enabling agility on the ICT side.

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moving at web time in an environment used to telco timescales?

AP: There are a few challenges that emerge when moving to web time rather than telco time. ’Good enough is good enough‘ is a key assumption of web companies. For instance, if I’m searching for a new banjo, having to press the search button twice is a good enough experience. Having a video freeze momentarily while streaming YouTube is a minor irritation or hearing a voice over IP (VoIP) anomaly is also OK because it’s free most of the time.

Another challenge is the expectation that web service business models are two-sided or free to the user, such as with the advertising model for search engines. From a CSP point of view, this is a foreign concept because they’ve traditionally built from a five-nines reliability point of view. They’re regulated and mandated to provide that level of resilience forever and it’s a matter of pride for many CSPs that they achieve this level of reliability and resiliency.

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However five-nines drives complexity and necessitated a certain pace of innovation that is counter to web speed development operations. Perhaps we are at a time in the evolution of the market where perfect is not required. Of course our customers need to provide well

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I N T E R V I E W

We already had the Ericsson media business but wanted to grow our market share more rapidly

functioning and valuable services. But if the industry continues to compete and innovate at web speed and continues to adopt web born technologies to do so, we need to reconsider the assumption of five nines.

I think the CSPs can adjust and continue to move towards web speed and if they do, they will be able to experiment more and become better at it because their knowledge of their customers will deliver even greater and more integrated value to their customers.

The main impediments to that are cultural. CSPs’ traditional environment is one in which they get fined if they have a service-affecting incident so caution exists.

That said, CSPs are evolving and IT leadership is making its way into network operations. I see the beginnings of this change afoot and some CSPs are well advanced along this path.

VP: Ericsson is positioned as an ICT transformation partner for the Networked Society. What investments have you made to enable that vision through your software portfolio and services, both organically and inorganically through strategic acquisition in both OSS/BSS and television and media?

AP: Since Ericsson’s CEO Hans Vestberg first identified the concept of the Networked Society, the company has executed on a plan to transform itself into an ICT provider.

What is different is the pace at which we’ve progressed along that journey in the last two years. We’ve made acquisitions in software and in services – which are a key aspect of an IT transformation.

It does take time and a lot of engagement with the customer to understand where they are. Even to look at business processes can be a real challenge so we look to help CSPs not only deploy a new system but ultimately change processes.

The acquisition of Telcordia was an obvious transformational deal for Ericsson. I joined Ericsson as a result of that acquisition, which doubled the size of Ericsson’s OSS portfolio and took it to a market-leading position. Since then, we have made organic improvements and ensured the products are integrated.

www.ericsson.com

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In addition, we’ve acquired ConceptWave, which was an OEM in the Telcordia portfolio. The beauty of that is that it was already integrated as a result. The change is that we’ve made the software and services from these businesses the hallmark of our OSS/BSS Agility Suite.

We’ve just recently acquired Sentilla, an analytics company, to enhance our cloud management and analytics capabilities and MetraTech, to expand our

leadership into vertical industries by adding its Billing as a Service platform to our software portfolio.

In addition to this, we’ve developed the Ericsson Cloud Manager organically, which allows customers to manage and orchestrate virtual infrastructure and networks.

Those newer capabilities are added to our traditional strengths, such as our extremely well-known charging platform that we continuously improve. A lot of our charging customers sell prepaid products and we created Ericsson Wallet Platform to add another dimension to their businesses. That has enabled several customers to turn from prepaid providers to providers of mobile money services as well in markets that are unbanked, for example.

In the media industry, we have been very active as well.

We already had the Ericsson media business but wanted to grow our market share more rapidly. We identified that Microsoft’s Mediaroom business was well suited to our media-first vision and that of our customers. We acquired that business over a year ago now which gave us an IPTV and media delivery platform with number one market share. Mediaroom was a very strong offer for the in-home market but customers needed to add a mobile complement, so we acquired Azuki Systems and integrated it into our Media First offer. This offer enables users to take the in-home experience with them when they’re on the move.

In addition to that, we’ve recently acquired Fabrix Systems, which is focused on cloud-based digital video recorders for customers that want to watch DVR content and delivering an innovative Broadcast over LTE capability that truly transforms the live sports viewing experience in stadiums and other public venues.

VP: How do you see the market developing in the next two years?

AP: The bottom line is that we’re at the point where the maturation of ICT technology and CSP desire to be more agile are coming together. LTE and smartphone penetration are also coming together and we expect to soon see the real action.

The next two years will see really rapid transformation for the CSPs and their offers. We have invested significantly to help our customers to transform and become more agile.

Ericsson has transformed a lot as well. We will continue on our journey toward becoming the industry’s leading ICT provider and fully expect that our customers will do so as well. As always, though, there’s plenty still to do with NFV and SDN and we have more innovations to come.

The bottom line is that it’s a truly exciting time for CSPs.

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CLOUD Will CSPs maximise their potential?

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ANALYST REPORT

Introduction loud computing delivers a range of networking and computing products to organisations and end-users on demand and as a service.

This can provide its users the strategic benefits of providing significant additional capabilities quickly and with relatively low commercial and operational commitments

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The author, Bob Brace, is senior analyst at Telco 2.0/STL Partners

These products or services are usually billed on a peruser, per-month, or per service basis, such as by CPU or disk space consumed, and this model can make planning and budgeting a relatively simple exercise.

Generally cloud services have little or no upfront capital expenditure requirements and paying for cloud services becomes a monthly operational expense.

Various estimates put the total enterprise cloud market – serving both large corporates and SMBs – as worth around $67bn in 2014, and our analysis suggests that communication service providers (CSPs) in aggregate have a share of just over 12% or $8.9bn.

However, while the cloud market might seem an attractive proposition to CSPs, it is currently dominated by two kinds of player: the web giants, such as Amazon, Google, and Salesforce.com, and the big tech players such as Microsoft, IBM and HP. Some CSPs, such as BT, Colt and Verizon Business, have a legacy of fixed line services used by a large enterprise customer base, and have chosen to develop infrastructure-as-a-service (See CSP opportunities in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) section) or hosting type solutions. This is taking them towards head-on competition with the big tech vendors and web giants that have significant scale advantages in data centre capacity and advanced IP, software and technologies.

Because of this dominance the major players are effectively setting the price points, and hence margins that can be achieved by these CSPs unless they can provide significant additional differentiation or value add.

Other CSPs, such as Telefónica, Vodafone, Singtel, Swisscom, Belgacom and Telenor, are more mobilebiased, with a legacy customer base of consumers and SMBs. This group of CSPs are largely pursuing a software-as-a-service (see CSP opportunities in software-as-a-service (SaaS) section) strategy, mostly as a syndication partner for Microsoft, or as resellers of other software suites such as Google Apps, Zoho and others. However, this is typically a low-margin business

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compared to their traditional voice and messaging businesses, although the more traditional revenue streams are in decline so CSPs must seek alternative sources of revenue and seek to add value by integrating their core services.

Defining cloud Cloud services are typified by the following characteristics: • • • • •

Opex based – typically there are no upfront costs Scalable – in theory there are infinite resources Volume-billed – CPU, disk space, per user pricing or some form of measured pricing model Multi-tenant/virtualised – usually delivered on shared hardware/platforms Cloud services are often subdivided into ‘X as a service’ (XaaS) where the most common values for X are software (SaaS), infrastructure (IaaS) and platform (PaaS – see CSP opportunities in platform-as-a-service (PaaS) section).

Using such services allows enterprise customers to take advantage of economies of scale relating to power supply and backup, cooling, virtualisation, and network connectivity. Virtualisation, explained in the next section, is a key technology used by data centres hosting cloud services.

An example of a company successfully using cloud services is Netflix, a US-based provider of video-ondemand, which runs the whole of its web applications in Amazon’s EC2 cloud (Elastic Compute Cloud). This permits it to scale up the resources it needs as demand increases when the evening viewers come on line, and down again as traffic tails off overnight and only pay for the resources it needs while it is using them. It also, very importantly, permits Netflix to test, deploy, or rollback new features very easily – to start deploying a new feature, it only needs to specify the new software image through the Amazon Web Services (AWS) admin interface.

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Cloud technology and terminology primer Virtualisation: The key technology of the cloud

As well as permitting one physical computer to appear to be several computers (as in shared hosting or virtual private server products), virtualisation logically permits several physical computers linked by a local area network to appear to be a single computer with multiple processors. This is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Hypervisor sharing physical resources over a LAN

Source: STL Partners/Telco 2.0

Cloud is, at its most basic, a way of making vast computing resources in remote datacentres available to consumers, developers and enterprise IT departments in a highly efficient way.

In addition to connectivity with the data centres, virtualisation technologies are needed to: Make users’ access to the data centre (or network of data centres) look like the computing environments they need.

Optimise and control the operation of many individual computing units – servers, processors, storage and so forth – to both create individual user environments and maximise overall performance.

Virtual Machines (VMs) A programme emulating the identity of a physical computer is termed a virtual machine (VM). VMs are used in many different applications, notably when cross-platform capability is required, when a process must be isolated for security reasons, or when multiple users are sharing the same physical computer.

Virtualisation is the process of encapsulating a computer operating system and its applications into a software “container” which permits it to execute as a virtual machine.

Figure 1 illustrates how a programme called a hypervisor shares a PC hardware platform between multiple operating systems giving each operating system and the applications it supports shared access to the same PC hardware thus capitalising on the fact that most computers are never fully utilised by a single user and reducing costs through lower hardware costs which in turn includes power and cooling needs.

Figure 1: Hypervisor sharing hardware between multiple operating systems

The two scenarios described above are not mutually exclusive, as a sufficiently advanced virtualisation system can provide multiple virtual machines, running on multiple physical machines. In such an environment, the configuration of the virtual machine provided to any given user or application is entirely software-defined, and is determined by the settings of the hypervisor.

Major cloud providers invest extraordinary engineering efforts to optimise the virtualisation process, for example, by routing processing jobs between computers or even data centres on the basis of the current CPU temperature. It is now the case that a network of data centres, not just one data centre, can be considered to be a single computer.

As a result, the key technical battlegrounds are the data centre, the virtualisation system and the tools through which users interact with it. Key virtualisation technologies are Amazon’s and Google’s proprietary solutions, Microsoft’s Hyper-V, VMWare’s vCloud, several open-source Linux options, such as Xen, KVM, LLVM, and LXC, and the OpenStack project. At least in theory, these are general purpose solutions, although Google’s and Amazon’s are presumably designed to also meet their own corporate requirements.

Types of cloud Source: STL Partners/Telco 2.0

Different types of cloud have been developed or have evolved to meet specific needs, for example; private clouds, public clouds, hybrid clouds or virtual private clouds. We give a brief explanation of some of the more popular definitions below.

Public clouds Public clouds typically offer services accessed via the public Internet using PCs, tablets or smartphones. Figure 3 shows a typical public cloud with users and devices connected to services

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ANALYST REPORT

via the internet. Access to services may be via a dedicated client or via a web browser, and both mechanisms can use encryption to ensure data travelling over the internet is secured.

Figure 3: Examples of public clouds

What differentiates this from a public cloud is that the services are operated exclusively for a specific customer - it is not a multitenanted system. In this model the infrastructure is virtualised and the system is managed through a web portal or desktop application on a semi-automated basis, thus fulfilling basic definitions of cloud.

Source: STL Partners/Telco 2.0

As the computing infrastructure is not multi-tenanted, it has an ongoing cost and may be more expensive to operate than shared cloud computing models, but the customer retains a greater degree of control over the system and the overall costs are much lower - potentially 30% lower - than a traditional IT solution where each application has its own server.

Hybrid clouds

Typical enterprise examples are Microsoft Office 365, which is a charged for business utility service (email, intranet, instant messaging), Salesforce – another charged for CRM solution, and Google Apps which provides a similar service to Office 365.

Figure 5: A hybrid cloud combines a public and private cloud

Source: STL Partners/Telco 2.0

Services may seemingly be offered for free (Gmail, Hotmail), but in fact the service provider is using the service to gather information (data or analytics) in order to market products to individuals, as is the case with Gmail. This is typical of many consumer-facing SaaS offerings.

In a hybrid cloud, part of the system is outsourced to a public cloud, while other elements, perhaps more critical, more privacysensitive are retained in a private cloud. This is essentially a combination of the first two options outlined above. The private cloud element could be on the company’s premise or provided by a third party. An example would be a company using a private cloud to run SAP applications for internal systems, and using Salesforce for CRM and Microsoft Office 365 for email and collaboration.

Private clouds An organisation with a private cloud has its own infrastructure, virtualisation services, and software licences - all of which it may have developed or bought from a third party such as an IaaS or hosting provider - and runs its cloud behind a firewall.

Figure 4: A private cloud is protected by a firewall

Numerous other types of cloud exist such as virtual private clouds which make part of a public cloud private and community clouds, where the infrastructure is jointly owned by a group of companies, but with no public access. This is like a private cloud with group ownership.

Source: STL Partners/Telco 2.0

Key criticisms of cloud – security and sovereignty Security The recent revelations by Edward Snowden regarding the USA snooping activities and the discovery of security flaws in SSL exploited by the Heartbleed bug have done little to reinforce public confidence regarding the use of cloud services. However, cloud services are generally more secure than most enterprise systems

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VANILLAPLUS BLACKBOOK 2015

and most public data centres comply with some form of security management audit or certification scheme.

Consideration of physical building security has to be paramount for data centres. Every aspect needs to be considered, so not just physical access methods, but also bomb and weapon detection, airlock/mantrap doors, perimeter security and anti-ram raid mechanisms are required. Getting into a data centre should be more difficult than taking an international flight without a ticket if that were possible.

What are the key opportunities for CSPs in cloud?

Distinctions between the most popular definitions of cloud are shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6: Cloud definitions

But physical security is just one aspect; security of data, backup/restore, confidentiality and privacy all have to be taken into account. Once an enterprise starts storing data in publicly accessible systems, they are effectively handing over security to the cloud services provider, and need to be assured that appropriate measures are in place.

For many CSPs, this means moving from security systems that are adequate for voice, to systems that are secure enough to ensure that stored data is not lost through server/disk failure, while providing physical security worthy of the stored data that is entrusted to them. Existing data centres and data centre locations may therefore be inadequate, for example, to resist an armed attack. There has already been a case in the UK in which thieves cut through the roof of a Verizon Business facility in order to bypass the access control and steal equipment.

Data sovereignty Security arrangements for both physical access and data resilience may all be in place with appropriate audits and certifications.

However, when data is stored in another jurisdiction, an organisation may be unknowingly opening itself up to scrutiny of its records and emails, and to different legislation on data protection.

In fact, there are a number of strict national regulations in place that forbid certain classes of organisation from storing data outside their national boundaries and certain types of data from leaving the country, whoever stores them.

Equally, organisations are becoming increasingly concerned about who has access to that data via a court of law. For example, if your data is stored in Amazon or Google’s clouds, then it is entirely possible that US government could subpoena that data to gain access and analyse it, opening up the organisation to potential legal issues and security concerns that wouldn’t have happened if it had stored the data inside its own national boundaries.

Such considerations should create opportunities for CSPs to deliver cloud services to their national markets although this is an issue that needs careful management by multinational CSPs who have data centres in different geographies. The French government, for example, is subsidising the development of two national cloud providers, one as a partnership with SFR and Bull, one with Orange and Thales, specifically in order to keep this option open.

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Inevitably, there is quite a lot of variation in how different vendors, customers, CSPs and analysts use these terms, and the boundaries between them are not necessarily well defined.

Typically, a product will include more than one of the elements on the left of the chart in Figure 6.

What are CSPs doing today?

As mentioned earlier in this report, through our research we found a fairly clear delineation between fixed CSPs and mobile CSPs. Fixed operators, such as Verizon, BT and others, generally address larger enterprise customers and, therefore, have offerings in the hosting, IaaS and VPC segments, which are also the simplest for them to implement and bill. In 2012 Verizon Business paid approximately $1.7bn to acquire Terremark, a US based IaaS provider in order to deliver a range of products and services to its large enterprise accounts which include IaaS type solutions along with core CSP services such as voice and connectivity.

Many, but by no means all, fixed operators also have SaaS offerings, but few are present in the PaaS space and so have minimal share.

In contrast, even converged CSPs that also have fixed offerings tend to be seen by enterprise users as mobile-only providers, and all mobile and converged CSPs seem to be biased towards SaaS products as these nicely address the SMB segment and fit quite closely with their existing channels to market.

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ANALYST REPORT

CSP opportunities in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) IaaS consists of cloud-based, usually virtualised servers, networking, and storage, which the customer is free to manage as they need. Billing is typically on a utility computing model: the more of each that you use, the more you pay. The market leader in IaaS is Amazon, and there is a price war underway between Amazon, Google and Microsoft with each matching the others pricing as soon as one or the other drops its pricing. CSPs currently have about 20 % of this market in aggregate, with Qwest/Savvis and Verizon/Terremark being notable players.

CSP opportunities in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) SaaS is the biggest segment and is the most familiar to the enterprise, being similar to the outsourcing model that has been in use for some years. Aimed at the end user, it consists of ondemand software, typically accessed via a browser. Billing is typically on the basis of the number of seats per month. The market leader is Salesforce.com and other players include Intuit, WebEx, Microsoft and Oracle. CSPs currently have minimal share in this market. Although many of them participate as resellers, the great bulk of revenue goes to the software sector.

CSP opportunities in Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

advantages of lower cost through economies of scale. It will also be the case that many, if not most, organisations will never move entirely to the public cloud, preferring for a number of reasons security and compliance chief among them - to retain some of their data processing in-house.

For example, enterprises are more likely to want to outsource backoffice processes, such as HR or accounts, while retaining in-house real-time control systems, proprietary processes and highthroughput transactional databases. Straddling the divide between the two or more clouds creates complexity: Hybrid clouds will need systems integration and highly-skilled expertise to provide a seamless experience for end users. Hybrid Clouds have created a need for standards which have yet to solidify in the market to enable virtual machines to move between the two domains seamlessly. In addition, the market for tools that can manage such environments remains immature, although initiatives such as OpenStack and CloudStack are moving in that direction.

CSP opportunities in virtual private cloud (VPC) A VPC is an isolated section of a cloud provider's facility that the customer manages as if it were a stand-alone datacentre effectively, a cloud within a cloud. Amazon was among the pioneers of this market, allowing customers to connect to its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) services through a VPN. This approach offers greater security and integration with existing management tools than would be the case with access to a shared area, where customers' data may be co-mingling on the same server.

PaaS is the smallest of the three main segments, but the fastest growing. From a technology standpoint, PaaS is midway between IaaS and SaaS. Essentially, you get SaaS, but without the end-user applications on top. Aimed at developers, who need a consistent platform on which to build applications, it consists of the combination of a computing platform and middleware that allows the customer to develop their own applications and services.

CSPs such as Orange Business, Verizon and T-Systems have also developed virtual private cloud services. Orange, along with its integration partner Cisco, argues that this should be the first market for CSPs to address as it allows them to use their strong trust credentials and to build on their managed services sales and delivery capabilities.

Use cases include multinational organisations where several teams may be working on a project across geographical boundaries. In this example, PaaS allows those developers to build database-based applications using a central set of systems without having to invest in the hardware and other resources. In practical terms, this will include the operating system and, more often than not, a development platform such as Microsoft Azure, Java, or MySQL. It might also include elements that could be considered SaaS, such as Google Docs or Microsoft Office 365. In other words, PaaS supplies the wherewithal to deliver services, but not the services themselves.

CSP opportunities in cloud service brokerage

CSP opportunities in hybrid cloud Hybrid clouds are seen as the long term future by many large organisations. A private cloud, while offering more complete control than a public cloud, also loses many of the public cloud's

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There are many routes for CSPs to deliver on the longer term vision of a hybrid cloud. The one most likely to achieve results quickly is the one that satisfies customers’ needs now while giving them a roadmap for the future, as they 'cloudify' further.

Evaluating a single service and its fitness for purpose - both functionality and cost - in a large organisation is not a quick and easy process. Evaluating a range of services to ensure that they also integrate well together or integrate with connectivity to provide and acceptable service such as video or telephony adds complexity upon complexity.

Cloud services brokerage is an opportunity to bring together a range of services along with CSP core services such as connectivity and to offer existing customers who are moving to the

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cloud a single point of contact for support, billing and with set of Service Level Agreements from a trusted supplier such as a CSP. CSPs already possess many of the relationships required with vendors to deliver and integrate these services and could enable swift service selection and deployment while at the same time increasing average revenue per user (ARPU) and customer satisfaction.

Telco 2.0 believes there is a good opportunity for CSPs to become effective cloud service brokers by combining their core products and services with third party or their own cloud services and offering their customers a complete solution. While there is a market for off-the-shelf bundles of common solutions, such as Office 365 with Lync/CSP telephony integration, or solutions such as desk.com with CLI and telephony integration, there will also be enterprise customers who will require customised solutions and CSPs should plan to support these scenarios.

Other CSP opportunities in the cloud CSPs have an essential role to play in the cloud ecosystem and could do more to integrate their legacy services with their cloud offerings, such as delivering guaranteed quality of service (QoS) and exploiting their latency advantages to support streaming cloud services and VoIP. Private cloud deployments can make significant savings over traditional IT systems because of the more efficient use of servers and reduced power and cooling needs. There is an opportunity for CSPs to start building private cloud-based and virtualised Microsoft and Cisco Unified Communications (UC) deployments that integrate with their own telephony and mobility platforms. This approach could deliver a complete suite of cloud-based solutions, including telephony, mobile device management, and user management, on an international basis for multinational organisations and nationally for SMBs or smaller national enterprises.

Bundling core services versus integration - what’s in it for the CSP? There are a number of approaches that CSPs could explore, including bundling and integration. Bundling usually means working with third party suppliers to deliver a solution that contains the key elements of a solution a customer is looking for and is commercially-attractive. Generally, there is little if any integration and relatively low margins. When the telephony contract is due for renewal, there is also little to keep the customer with the CSP other than attractive commercial terms and the inconvenience of switching supplier.

An integrated approach ties the CSP to the cloud solutions by using APIs or proprietary integration points. Integrated solutions are generally more attractive to enterprise customers because features like telephony can be integrated with the user’s desktop and mobile devices, improving the user experience and lowering costs.

Integration usually involves billing, support and service delivery, weaving the CSPs’ products much more tightly into the overall cloud solution. This reduces costs, increases the attractiveness of the solution, and usually ties the customer into the service offering,

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as it becomes difficult and risky for them to move suppliers.

In the UK, BT is offering VPC based-Lync telephony and UC solutions integrated with BT’s telephony platforms. It has also been developing an extensive Wi-Fi network, acquiring LTE spectrum and providing mobility and VoIP to fixed and mobile enterprise users. By tying these offerings together, BT are able to offer an enterprise customer a full suite of cloud-based UC solutions with integrated telephony and mobility.

Innovator or follower?

Is it best to innovate or follow the pack? Traditionally, CSPs have been followers, and some, fast followers. The few innovators are usually the smaller national players, such as Elisa in the Finnish market, but occasionally larger organisations, such as Deutsche Telekom or Telefónica. There is a lot to be said for being a follower in markets that develop quite slowly with little innovation. This has been the traditional CSP market and approach. However, cloud and mobile technology for which read apps and OTT have been developing at a much faster pace, threatening CSPs’ position and eroding their business. We believe that it is no longer adequate for CSPs to be followers, and that they must adapt their organisations and business practices in order to innovate and be competitive in the rapidly-developing cloud services market.

Innovation comes at a cost. Moreover, compared with CSPs, all of the leading technology players have leaner organisations, operate in a different regulatory environment, and are at the forefront of the innovation curve. CSPs could do well to emulate these organisations by implementing agile product development techniques, looking to lower cost open source or proprietary solutions, and creating a culture of hunger and innovation.

CSPs must adapt and start to move at Internet speed and they must reduce their cost base.

What are the challenges for CSPs? Skill and market awareness needs to be increased across CSP organisations including senior management teams. Cloud is either a focus or a distraction to CSPs. For example, at a recent Vodafone Analyst Meeting, Vodafone’s chief executive, Vittorio Colao brushed off cloud as something that needed further research by the Vodafone team, this despite the recent acquisition of Cable & Wireless and the Enterprise Division’s focus on the needs of some of the world’s largest enterprise customers.

Other than senior management, critical factors are likely to be the balance between access network and data centre skill sets, plus virtualisation and web development capability.

We also expect that the key underlying cloud technology, the virtualised data centre, will continue to exhibit considerable economies of scale well into the future. As a result, bigger players will hold a cost advantage and we can see this being played out in the battleground between Amazon, Google and Microsoft, leaving CSPs who try to compete on a like for like basis high and dry.

Therefore CSPs will need to either find means of leaping direct to

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ANALYST REPORT scale comparable with the existing players – for example, via an acquisition, or by on-boarding all their own services, or else seek niches that differentiate them from the big generic clouds. In fact, differentiation sums up our advice to CSPs in one word.

Differentiation also requires control of technology, which implies looking at open platforms like OpenStack or working with vendors like VMWare to develop products that fit a specific product or market need.

Key CSP issues

Control of technology also requires competence, which is acquired through learning-by-doing, something we see lacking in many current CSP activities. Further, the cloud value proposition is all about saving by moving many systems into a common platform.

Operators who want to do cloud should do cloud internally both for the learnings and to take advantage of the economies that virtualisation brings to the core network, this though may mean moving further towards open platforms and away from closed vendor specific solutions where the entire stack must run in a dedicated environment.

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How to shorten development cycles to keep up with market pace, for example by adopting agile methodologies and architectures that are appropriate to the service being delivered.

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To develop and migrate to an organisational structure and finance model that supports innovation

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How to work at internet speed rather than CSP speed

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Senior management buy-in and understanding. Most senior managers are primarily focused on running the existing business and that means voice and data services. Education is required, as is making the time available to stay current with market trends.

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Channels to market: CSP channels typically consist of retail stores, resellers, and direct sales teams focused on selling traditional CSP products. Significant re-engineering is needed, both from a skills and an incentive perspective, in order to deliver success with new products such as cloud.

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Go to market strategies: it is important to get the balance right between personal and online sales and delivery. Many operators rely on direct sales, but some SMB customers would prefer to buy services online, but very few operators offer a sales portal for their customers as the web giants do. Illustrating the importance of direct sales, Vodafone sells OneNet, its PBX in the cloud offering for SMBs, direct and through resellers, and both Google and Amazon are building up networks of Value Added Resellers (VARs). However, there may be a risk that CSPs’ channels are too high-touch and too dependent on the sales force as opposed to the web portal. They are also too centralised and remote and the sales force is not readily accessible to SMB customers.

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Own use of Cloud: CSPs should also look to the expertise they will gain by their own use of cloud products both in their day-today IT functions and importantly in the operation of their core networks. Dramatic cost savings could be achieved in the core network by utilising VPC technologies, reducing energy consumption and the number of server or hardware required.

What should CSPs be doing?

The only CSPs who can expect to reach scale, quickly enough, to cross the chasm and challenge the big tech and web giants in generic enterprise IaaS, are ones that are very dominant in their own markets and who benefit from structural factors such as data centre development, partnerships (size has an impact on the likely partners) and are already offering cloud products or are entering the market.

This is really a special case of a wider point: in order to compete with the giant general-purpose IaaS platforms, differentiation and exploiting various structural factors and product niches – notably data sovereignty, geo-distribution, specialised clouds and industry clustering is absolutely vital for success.

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A key CSP strength could be access to capital but justifying a business case can be difficult. Using capital to jump to scale via acquisition is a possibility, but is inherently risky. As big tech shareholders are surprisingly risk tolerant in practice, this may not be as big an advantage as it seems. The minimum investment buyin for IaaS is very large. If a CSP is not specialising in cloud, we recommend CSPs should partner rather than build or acquire.

CSPs should also be talking to experts and seeking impartial advice. Equipment vendors clearly have an agenda, and for CSPs that lack appropriate expertise, they should seek to acquire the relevant skills because hiring is faster than retraining. Talking to experts who have the knowledge and market perspectives that they need is critical.

About Telco 2.0 Research/ STL Partners Telco 2.0 Research is created by STL Partners, leading international specialists in business model innovation at the intersection of the Telecoms-Media-Technology sectors, providing highly creative consulting, research and event services.

What makes us different?

We actively design and broker solutions to commercial problems, leveraging our global network of innovators.

We specialise in next generation business models for the Digital Economy We believe that the best innovation comes from appropriate collaboration at a company, industry and cross-industry level.

We work best with visionary leaders who are looking to make breakthroughs with their businesses.

Visit www.telco2research.com for our research or visit www.onfuture.com for our event series.

Email contact@stlpartners.com or call +44 (0) 207 243 5003 to find out more.

VANILLAPLUS BLACKBOOK 2015

COMPANY PROFILES

Company summary Today’s communication service provider services are very different from those that predominated just a few years ago.

Then, business models were based mainly on a fixed fee that was determined by a limited number of variables such as zones, distance and time. In order to make sense of the increasing business model diversity offered by service providers now, DigitalRoute offers a mediation platform that can be deployed horizontally to address a growing number of use cases, in so doing collecting data from a broad array of different sources and then pre-processing it prior to passing output back to downstream systems such as billing. analytics, CEM, CRM, and others. This mass data processing is done highly effectively in part due to the platform’s ability to scale to extreme levels with functionality that enables users to quickly enable new services, tap information previously hidden in data, and quickly monetise new business models without being constrained by the functional limitations of legacy BSS components providing additional advantages.

Founded in 2000 in Stockholm, DigitalRoute employs close to 200 employees and is a venture-backed, privately held company which had a turnover of around €40m in 2013. DigitalRoute is an ISV delivering mediation and data integration solutions to customers such as Vodafone, T-Systems, Sky and Verizon.

DigitalRoute sells directly as well as through a comprehensive partner programme that includes companies like SAP, NSN, Accenture, Cap Gemini and others. It has over 300 customers globally 70% of which are supported by partners.

Its MediationZone software platform offers high throughput and provides a unique degree of user configurability, processing all usage and statistical data extracted from relevant networks, including both billable and non-billable events. A number of different, pre-configured solutions can be deployed in areas including billing mediation, online control – which includes service control, policy control, and routing control, mass data processing and service assurance mediation. In this last case the focus is on processing data from network-related rather than business-related sources, typically at much higher volumes – installations running three million events per second is not uncommon.

Cloud credentials The DigitalRoute platform can support CSPs in a number of ways, both those who wish to provide their own cloud services and those who want to partner with other OTT providers, helping to integrate and bundle offerings as necessary. A key function within the platform is tokenization functionality through

VANILLAPLUS BLACKBOOK 2015

which customer data can be anonymised before being sent to an external cloud for analysis, then de-tokenized on its return.

This step addresses a number of critical and common privacy and security concerns and puts the CSP in a particularly strong position to successfully offer services over a local cloud, within national borders.

The platform can also provide policy and service control functionality, together enabling service providers to rapidly create, test and deploy new services and then monitor and modify these as required without lengthy vendor delays or costs. On the latter score, the platform enables the user to quickly become as self-sufficient as is desired.

Key differentiation The MediationZone platform integrates with a wide variety of external systems via a range of plug-ins, which implement the interfaces and protocols required when communicating with these. A large number of protocols are supported off-the-shelf, both for interfacing as well as for secure and consistent operation.

Support for additional protocols is added continuously as part of roadmap development, and also on an on-demand basis. A development toolkit is available for adding standard as well as proprietary interfaces. All APIs in the development toolkit have been designed from the outset to minimise programming overhead, and to enable third parties to extend the platform.

This capability extends the appeal of its platform making it very attractive to vendors occupying other parts of the value chain and probably going some way to explain the quality of partners that DigitalRoute has on board.

Competitive pressures DigitalRoute faces competition from large NEP vendors such as Ericsson and Huawei, which also offer mediation products.

There are also a number of software companies such as CSG Systems, Oracle and Comptel that offer point solutions, Comptel being of a similar size to DigitalRoute. However, with over 300 customers using MediationZone, DigitalRoute holds a leading position in the market, and is the only one taking the full “horizontal mediation” approach. Other platforms seem to lack the breadth of the MediationZone, for example its ability to anonymise data on the fly, and its simple graphical user interface, which is used to establish workflows between different systems and processes. With DigitalRoute’s MediationZone platform customers are enabled to become as self-sufficient as is desired, and at least be in full control of the business logic configuration.

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COMPANY PROFILES

Company summary Aria Systems provides an advanced cloud based billing platform that can easily be adapted to different needs, has a robust process and a data integration architecture that integrates well with existing systems and the power to be used

by CSPs as well as large business users who have complex products to be billed. The team that founded Aria Systems had their roots in the online ISP world of the early 2000’s which helped them take a unique perspective on the needs of billing systems in the post dotcom/telecom world. They realised that existing systems used old models and ideas preventing them from being adapted to new emerging business models such as software-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service which have very different billing requirements to systems that required an annual licence fee moreover, modern businesses operate in highly dynamic markets which require frequent and rapid responses to changing market conditions bringing the need for agility from a billing platforms allowing them to adapt to the needs of products such as cloud services which are usually billed by subscription, by consumption (usage) or combined subscription/consumption.

Aria Systems is headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA and employs just under 200 people. 2013 has been Aria Systems most successful year to date with over 40 organisations deploying Aria’s solutions. Companies that deployed on Aria include AAA NCNU, Pitney Bowes, Experian, Telekom Denmark, Progress Software, Red Hat and Verizon. In Q4, Aria also announced the close of a $40 million fourth round of funding led by Bain Capital Ventures, which brings the total capital raised to date to $82m.

Cloud credentials The Aria Systems solution can be used to support and bill for a variety of recurring revenue requirements including; subscription services, metered usage, tiered services, on-demand, pay-asyou-go, subscriptions plus some form of volume based usage.

The platform itself is cloud based making it easy to acquire and use. It runs in a multi-tenant environment allowing it to scale to the needs of large enterprises and CSPs. CSPs are finding that their existing platforms can’t easily or economically accommodate billing for recurring revenue services such as IP Centrex (PBX in the cloud) solutions or video on demand. Aria’s platform can act as a go between, managing the needs of the new cloud based services and feeding back to the existing

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revenue management platforms. For many CSPs this seems to be a much faster and more economical approach than reworking their existing billing platforms.

Key differentiation Compared to many traditional billing companies, Aria Systems is fast and flexible, its solution is also cloud based making it scalable and cost effective. Typically Aria’s solutions take about one third of the time to deploy and are about 90% less costly than traditional billing platforms. Aria also has a set of pre-built connectors, APIs, an implementation team and a partner network to ensure that its solutions tightly integrate with the cloud product or service and are available globally. Paying for the solution is also typically cloud in that you are billed either a percentage of total revenue through the system or by volume of transactions.

Other key differentiators are: The ability to make quick changes to product pricing, create bundles, introduce new products and services Drive upsell/cross sell with the ability to create coupons and offer discounts combined with the ability to set triggers on specific events that are meaningful to the business, for example downgrading a service, which might trigger an offer to receive some free service to retain the customer.

Competitive pressures Aria Systems face competition from traditional telco/CSP class solutions such as those from Oracle, Comverse and SAP. Their products are already very scalable, but lack agility and are not a true cloud offering.

Typically these companies are focused on deployments requiring a lot of custom work to support advanced usage and rating scenarios, whereas the Aria Systems solution is a much more off the shelf solution. However, we are seeing companies like Comverse and Oracle marketing to enterprise customers in an attempt to expand their markets and it also faces competition more directly from companies like Metratech and Zuora who have similar cloud based billing platforms but are less capable and are focused on different market segments such as SMB.

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TA L K I N G H E A D S

Software in the cloud, for the cloud and enabling the cloud opens up opportunities for CSPs

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homas Vasen is vice president of product management and marketing at DigitalRoute.

Here he explains how CSPs can migrate their systems to reap the internal efficiency advantages of virtualisation. At the same time, however, he sees software in the cloud provided locally and with guaranteed availability as the area of greatest attraction for CSPs seeking to offer cloud propositions to their customers

VanillaPlus: Ideas of telco cloud have the potential to revolutionise CSP operations in two directions – internally and externally. Which is most important and which are CSPs most likely to succeed in, or do both go hand-in-hand?

Thomas Vasen: The internal cloud infrastructure question for the CSP is really just a matter of finding a way to become more efficient and agile, in the process separating software and hardware assets. It’s valuable, but it’s not revolutionary! Any large data centre should be able to address this area. As a result, internal cloud for CSPs is driven by savings and possibly also enabling new technologies to be deployed quicker than before.

Using cloud externally is a much more interesting subject because CSPs have a huge opportunity at their feet. That is, offering access to a secure, end-toend cloud service locally. This involves packaging cloud access with quality of service and security plus a guaranteed working connection. With a local brand you can guarantee that customer data stays local and you can guarantee both customers and authorities that data will not cross a border. These facts allay important market concerns about the cloud, particularly in countries where data protection and sensitivity are a big issue. This means enterprises don’t have to send everything to an Amazon cloud that gives no such guarantee. That’s a big USP for the CSP.

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VP: How do you see operators maximising opportunities to become providers of services in the cloud to their customers? How can they avoid this becoming just another missed opportunity?

Using cloud externally is a much more interesting subject because CSPs have a huge opportunity at their feet

TV: The majority of service providers already have hosted offerings built around their capacity services so it is very natural for them to extend these into the cloud. Some CSPs are already successfully doing this but you only typically see traditional PTTs pursuing the opportunity. As an example in Holland you would see KPN do this for sure, but you wouldn’t generally expect to see tier two and tier three operators offer these sorts of services although there are exceptions.

For CSPs to maximise the opportunity, they need to focus on their strengths. This means packaging bandwidth together with a service and then guaranteeing the availability of both. If I was a CSP, I’d work together with a company like Cisco and build a service offering based around on that. That would let me focus on my strengths I’d use my brand to focus on securing the local enterprise customers.

VP: With virtualisation becoming more recognised as a means to generate operational and cost efficiencies, are CSPs really practicing what they are preaching and showing greater willingness to run their operations – or parts of them – in the cloud?

TV: I think all of them want to do this but are much

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CSPs can start to offer this sort of service easily. For example, a customer of ours is offering cloud as-aservice propositions and uses our MediationZone platform to do metering to measure the resources used in the service platform just as we do the same

thing in the network. These measurement points are then metered and mediated to come up with accurate charging.

Thomas Vasen: CSPs need flexible control to support cloud innovation

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TA L K I N G H E A D S

slower getting there than they’d probably like to admit. The majority of CSPs have definitely run virtualisation underneath and the vast majority are using VMware-like technologies in deployments but I would be cautious of stating that they run their BSS on virtualised systems.

There’s a long road to go and most CSPs haven’t really migrated to truly virtual environments yet. Of course, this doesn’t mean they won’t.

At DigitalRoute, we see this on the network side as well as in IT. We have a Routing Control solution, which focuses on signalling routing and that runs in virtualised mode as well. More and more operators are interested in a virtualised layer like this sitting between hardware and software. It helps them scale and reduces the maintenance cost.

VP: What role do you see DigitalRoute taking in supporting CSPs in cloud?

TV: We need to address this in three different ways in my view. First, software needs to run in the cloud and we have run software in the cloud for some time. And one needs to be Amazon-compatible in doing this if we want to compete, which we are.

Second, we have to do this efficiently. To that end, we have a clear route mapped out to enable our software to become multi-tenant so it is more efficient and we don’t end up with 100 virtual machines in the cloud. An important point here is to enable local CSPs to monetise cloud strategies by offering cloud to local consumers and to do that efficiently.

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The third aspect is to enable cloud deployments for IT applications such as analytics that require a lot of hardware. In these cases it can be highly desirable to go to a provider like Amazon to buy capability for data management but really that would be much better handled by a direct application the CSP controls. DigitalRoute has a solution here. We can facilitate the on loading process and an encrypted version of the data can follow a cloud domain. As a result, you can’t see whom the customer/user is when the data is brought on board. This is a major issue from a security perspective, as I said earlier. So our software is in the cloud, for the cloud and enabling the cloud.

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VANILLAPLUS BLACKBOOK 2015

VP: How significant is your Online Control capability for addressing the service management needs of CSPs? TV: Very, very significant. Why? Because the biggest problem that CSPs have today – and you can see the frustration at an executive level – is not how to innovate but how to innovate quickly. How do I get a new idea out to customers asap? The problem CSPs have isn’t “what” or “why”, but “when?”

Virtualisation is one way of enabling quick deployment of new infrastructure but quick deployment of new business logic can best be achieved with a flexible integration layer. Our solution sits on the border of network and infrastructure. We’re network-grade, handling all the BSS/OSS event data but at the same time we have the flexibility from the IT side to enable rapid deployment of new use cases in a way that BSS/OSS alone can’t and network systems alone can’t do either.

So our Online Control solutions are very well suited to meeting this particular need and given that CSPs are extremely focused on launching new use cases, you can probably work out why we see Online Control as being a highly significant innovation in the market. For instance, it’s clear to a growing number of people that not all of the cost of transport should be charged to the end user. In certain instances it makes perfect sense having OTT service providers sponsor the transport of certain data. CSPs need the kind of flexible control that can support this sort of innovation in place.

VP: How important does OSS and billing mediation become in making cloud approaches a reality?

TV: I think OSS, or service assurance mediation as we call it, is the challenge to processing a lot of records so you can measure what the service delivered looks like, in real-time. That involves grabbing the right types of records from the right sources, often new ones.

Historically service assurance was seen as a luxury add-on and you could launch operations without control but that’s not acceptable anymore in a realtime, online world.

To illustrate this point, Amazon video-on-demand services will, if the users experiences packet loss, reimburse them. And the customer doesn’t even have to initiate this process. That’s the way CSPs need to start acting towards their customers. It is the way for operators to start to differentiate themselves from each other. They can’t differentiate anymore when many offerings are commoditised and if they continue to compete on price that will just be driven down to nothing. The margins aren’t viable any longer.

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VP: To what extent are you seeing CSPs prepare to virtualise their operations and embrace cloud opportunities? Are they truly committing to cloud concepts yet?

I think OSS, or service

TV: I think that on the internal IT side, CSPs are definitely committed to running their infrastructures virtually. There’s no question about it, it’s just a matter of time. They won’t rush to migrate something that’s already working satisfactorily in another way but its eventual replacement will definitely be virtualised when the time comes.

challenge to

Externally – and personally – I’d like to see a larger push from CSPs on Cloud concepts. I see too little from them in terms of clear service offerings and playing to their inherent strengths. I’m not saying nothing is happening already, but I would like to see quicker progress in this direction.

looks like, in real-time

assurance mediation as we call it, is the processing a lot of records so you can measure what the service delivered

The question is what are the OTT players going to do?

They will probably focus more on applications, such as becoming a provider of the world’s leading CRM system, for example. But how are they going to get that secured in terms of guaranteed bandwidth and delivery? That’s a variation of the debate about whether a content provider like Netflix should pay for its users bandwidth.

VP: How has DigitalRoute developed as a company to address the changed needs of the market and how do you see CSPs and their cloud activities maturing in the next few years?

TV: DigitalRoute is adjusting and adapting its technology to ensure we’re compatible with how the market is evolving. We’ve had an early start and feel very much on top of what’s trending, as our Online Control solutions and the recent launch of Service Control suggest. As far as a business model, we’ve been working with various partners such as NSN, Logica and SAP on a hosted analytics solution for CSP data. It’s through these partnerships that we enable their apps by providing the required access to the CSP networks and data that we think represent the best way forward for growth. We have over 300 customers deployed whether direct or through partners and we think this base will stand us in good stead into the future. We’re growing with their needs, if you like.

So to summarise, I see CSPs taking virtualisation for granted when they do a gradual migration of IP systems and I see at least the tier ones, which are used to providing a large variety of services, investing more in cloud offerings. In the latter case, as I’ve said, I think building on a unique, local position will be key.

www.digitalroute.com

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BIG DATA ANALYTICS Will CSPs maximise their potential?

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ANALYST REPORT

Introduction

B

ig data has a broader meaning than the words suggest. Big data is less about database size and more about managing the huge complexities that exist in the networks and telco business.

Communications service providers (CSPs) are desperate to gain greater control over the big circus that’s happening inside their tent. The global, overthe-top internet, broadband and big mobile extravaganza they support truly is the biggest show on earth.

The author, Dan Baker, is research director at Technology Research Institute

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The risks are huge, of course, because the show goes on whether the CSP makes any money or not.

So the big data trend is almost a rescue mission to save telecoms from: • The onslaught of mobile broadband traffic growth • The explosion of smartphones and apps that have turned troubleshooting upside down • The relentless margin pressure and revenue encroachment of rivals and over-the-top players.

If the telephone operators of yesteryear knew they were being groomed as ringmasters of such a wild circus, they would have never accepted the job. But they did take the job and the rest is history. Now comes the challenge of profitably orchestrating all the video, voice, data, elephant, tiger, clown and acrobatic acts that operate under the huge communications tent. The circus performers themselves, of course – Google, Facebook, Netflix, Apple and many, many others – are often richly paid while the ringmasters face an uncertain future.

Unfortunately, the network equipment providers are as new to the game of managing huge mobile data volumes as the CSPs themselves. Sales of LTE networks are heating up for sure, but the essential ‘How to Profitably Operate and Profit from an LTE

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Network’ instruction manual is still just a work in progress. That means there’s plenty of opportunity for fresh companies to step in and deliver what CSPs need.

A flock of solutions vendors has emerged To better understand this big data trend, TRI began a full research investigation in mid-2013. I was frankly surprised at how many new players had come in since I wrote a report on the analytics market seven years before. In the end, we interviewed some five dozen carrier and vendor experts, publishing profiles on 41 active players.

Big data is rooted in analytics, of course, but the field has expanded far beyond the churn reduction niche that drove the market a decade ago. Big data basically is a layer of analytics value that rides across all the traditional BSS/OSS transaction systems. In fact, we figure the biggest solution market in big data today is in network and customer experience analytics.

All kinds of solution vendors are involved today: deep packet inspection specialist firms like Allot Communications, systems integrators like HP, service assurance firms like Nexus Telecom, and firms who grew up in the business assurance space like cVidya.

We think plenty more players are going to jump in and acquire some of the startups – the major service assurance and billing vendors for example. Companies like Amdocs, TEOCO, JDSU, SAP and Comptel have already taken the acquisition leap.

And as time goes on, it will become harder and harder to distinguish the new from the old solutions as analytics players are acquired and the markets melt into one another.

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Big data’s fourth V While big complexity is the greatest challenge, big data is certainly about managing huge data volumes too. In many ways, telecoms with their massive networks practically invented big data. And plenty of telco use cases fit the so-called three Vs of big data: large Volume, Velocity (speed of analysis), and Variety (of technologies).

But there’s a fourth V in the big data equation, and to miss that fourth V – Value – is to miss a lot because big data drags with it a more open and entrepreneurial way for telecoms to work with solution providers and create value.

In fact, the confluence of cloud, commodity hardware, BYOD and outsourcing is creating a new and highly organic marketplace where value is king. The long term impact is clear: the results achieved become more important than how big a software supplier you are, what computing technology you use, and whether or not the IT department sprinkled fairy dust on your contract bid.

The key question becomes: how best to add value at low cost and deliver an ROI? Analytics and big data provide the answer because these solutions can be inserted at relatively low cost and with minimal impact on current operations. In most cases, they require little hand-holding by the IT department.

In fact, the biggest customers of analytics are the business units themselves or standalone departments like network operations.

Dining in Manhattan I live two hours’ drive from New York City. Manhattan Island is not just the home of Wall Street: it's also a diner's delight. There are about 3,500 restaurants in Manhattan and every cuisine is

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represented: Indonesian, Ethiopian, Lebanese, Vegetarian, you name it.

Now the contrast between the Fortune 500 firms on Wall Street and all these restaurant entrepreneurs is striking and I think there's a parallel here to what's going on in telecoms software.

Being a big company didn’t prevent Wall Street’s Lehman Brothers from going bankrupt so are CSPs headed on the same perilous path that many bankers faced in 2008?

Well, the warning signs are certainly there. One authoritative one is a 2012 report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) entitled ‘We Need to Talk about Capex’ which singles out telecoms for poor management of its capex. Putting PwC’s conclusions into my own words: network investments are out of control in the CSP world. Nobody can accurately tell whether a particular capex expenditure pays off or loses money, so senior telecoms executives think it’s better to err on the side of buying more equipment. Sounds like a glorious plan to make John Chambers and company rich.

This capex issue is fundamental to the CSP business. It cannot be just dusted under the table. Overly restrictive policies and closely held relationships with a few large suppliers are clearly not getting the job done. Marketing and network operations are desperate to take action because everywhere they look there are savvy OTT competitors who seem to enjoy devouring telecoms revenue and traffic streams for lunch.

So these entrepreneur-like analytics firms are delivering exactly what CSPs need to shake up the solutions market and help solve such long-standing problems in capex and elsewhere.

Now, like the restaurant scene on Manhattan: this big

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data/analytics business is also fiercely competitive and a very risky business: only the fittest vendors can survive long term.

The exciting trend here is that telecoms software is now becoming a results-driven marketplace.

And if you’re a buyer of analytics, this is a great place to be because you have choices you never had before. This brave new software world will also be massively disruptive for those incumbent suppliers who figure they can sit on their nest eggs.

Market drivers and challenges The biggest driver of big data is the new-found freedom to allow results to decide which solution providers win and which ones lose, Lots of opportunities emerge when there’s a lid put on over-zealous purchasing controls and internal politics.

Big data opportunities cut across the entire BSS/OSS stack of applications and at every step in the service delivery process.

There's also no question that commodity hardware, SaaS, storage and open frameworks like Hadoop and MapReduce have lowered the barriers of entry.

Another welcome change is faster speed to analysis. With big data, you can employ the freshest data and not have to wait 30 days to pull results off the warehouse.

Yet another big driver is the ability to access data at a finer grain of detail – and to see the outliers of the data set as well.

Analytics used to be a sampling game but today, scanning the details is essential for detecting fraud, monitoring mobile abuse and measuring true customer profitability.

For weeks, a tier one US CSP experienced a big unexplained spike in traffic every business day from 9am to 5pm in one of its

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largest cities. Employing a big data solution, they isolated the trouble to a single taxi company who was abusing an all-youcan-eat plan intended only for credit card authorisations. The taxi company’s drivers were using the circuit to pump free videos to customers sitting in the backseats of taxis throughout the city.

By living in the outliers – the data to the far left or right of the bell curve – the taxi fraudsters escaped notice. Sampling could not detect them. And that’s precisely the value of big data – to make visible countless details of the business where so many fraud control and optimisation opportunities live.

The big data market is not all rosy for suppliers. First and foremost, the large flock of analytics firms out there puts pressure on price, and that's a very good trend for service providers.

Big data vendors are also taking lessons from the previous generation of analytics software which quietly went fallow in the last decade. Continuous and sustainable analytics programmes are the key and here, firms are getting creative by marrying software with in-shop marketing consulting, managed services, and risk/reward compensation programmes.

Yet there were troubles with this approach: 1) high cost; 2) the long time it takes to create value; 3) the risk of a programme failing to deliver sufficient value; and 4) the many known pockets (or reservoirs) of value became too expensive to pursue because of limitations around approved suppliers, authorised database and computing technologies, data sources in the data warehouse, and IT staffing to support new systems.

But in the big data era – the “After” diagram, opportunities open up. Rather than relying on expensive, monolithic transformation programmes alone, the operator can also fund many smaller programmes to pursue pockets of value across the business. The margins are there to support analytics firms teaming with small groups of industry experts to tackle niche operating problems.

Like oil fracking techniques, analytics programmes developed for one programme can be redirected to horizontally explore pockets of value beyond that of the original project mission.

Thus, greater reuse of the analytics asset is achieved.

Rather than be restricted by IT’s narrow support windows and authorised suppliers, the business units and individual departments work directly with big data suppliers, often using the vendor’s infrastructure or a SaaS cloud.

A cheaper and better way to extract value Big data is all about exploring and exploiting a CSP’s existing transaction data to discover and extract value. I think we can draw an analogy between telecoms data exploration and oil exploration by energy firms.

In the previous IT era – the Before diagram, expensive systems integration programmes were the order of the day. The idea was to transform the CSP enterprise through large-scale programmes architected and managed by the CIO/CTO offices.

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Data sources expand beyond the data sets maintained in the data warehouse. There’s an expanded use of deep packet inspection (DPI), radio access network (RAN) data and many other third party resources including location data, marketing data and social media.

And just as oil exploration benefited from advanced seismograph technology to locate oil wells underground, the lower cost of analytics programmes allows more testing and

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trials. Thus, low cost data exploration projects are funded and the ratio of oil strikes to dry wells improves.

The high demand for network analytics The key dilemma for telecoms today is not service delivery.

Skype can do that in voice. Apple does that with iMessage.

CSPs and cable operators face a much bigger task: deliver the service with sufficient quality or download speed to earn a premium. Network analytics and optimisation is therefore essential to keep telecoms a sustainable and profitable business.

Now just because CSPs own terabytes of data doesn’t mean they know how to manage them well.

Guavus found a way to analyse big data before it’s transported to a warehouse. Now that’s a clever idea. Ontology, HP, and Splunk, meanwhile are using Google-style search engines to skirt around APIs and deliver applications that don’t require expensive systems integration – they don’t even require accessing a database.

Analytics also brings great value to service assurance. For instance, comparing the best performing cells against the worst performing cells is a great way for mobile operators to isolate problems or sort out which of the 60 devices in the network is causing an issue. When it comes to optimising IP networks, offline analytics can actually deliver greater value than waiting for alarms to trigger in the NOC. So analytics becomes the new service assurance paradigm and will steadily replace previous generation software, at least in the non-real-time segment.

In fact, with the rise of 4G, LTE and smartphones, the telecoms network becomes more and more a data network, and with the rate of growth in wireless traffic and devices, engineers need all

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the help they can get from outside suppliers to understand capacity issues as firms like Subex, SAS and others are stepping up to provide.

Certainly one of the biggest stories is the race to analyse data from the radio access network, where TEOCO and Amdocs recently made big investments, and Tektronix Communications and InfoVista are also key contenders.

Consider this: probably 80% of the QoS issues in the mobile network live in the RAN. This is why RAN data is so crucial. In the years ahead, radio spectrum that’s become scarcer and scarcer is likely to become even more precious as regulators force operators to share their spectrum in real-time.

Finally, the geo-location capabilities of the RAN are invaluable to real-time data monetisation, basically sharing intelligence with partners in retail and other industries, a practice that China Mobile is pioneering with the analytics help from AsiaInfo Linkage.

Still another area of development is coupling analytics with deep research. Firms like Ericsson are doing that to understand the behaviour of advanced telecoms networks, which frankly behave much like complex organic systems like the weather.

The benefit? Greater customer satisfaction, faster trouble resolution, and lower call centre costs.

Market analytics One of the largest segments in telecoms analytics is marketing analytics, which is the effort to deliver real-time offers or ongoing campaigns to entice subscribers to spend more money, renew their new contracts, upgrade their services, and buy content and other services on demand.

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Several models are now vying for attention as best approaches.

Predictive Segment Analysis basically groups subscribers by demographics or behaviour characteristics to receive a particular marketing treatment. This approach has stood the test of time plus key vendors like SAS and IBM support it.

Meanwhile, companies like SAP and Alteryx are improving the model by automating model creation and democratising the analysis to business users, not just data scientists.

Another approach is Social Network Analysis looks at the network of people a subscriber is connected to via phone and determines who the key influencers are in the group and puts special emphasis on treating those people as a way of dragging in their loyal followers.

Contextual marketing is yet another methodology on the rise.

The idea behind contextual marketing is to make offers to individual users based on the context of that individual’s situation. Contextual marketing got its start primarily in the prepaid sector of developing markets, where user loyalty is often very low and the CSP has less intelligence on who the user is. It has certainly been enabled by big data because it would be very hard to manage offers to individuals without lowcost processing power.

A related hot area is data monetisation – basically delivering real-time or brand intelligence to third party businesses, often based on mobile location and actions triggered by some behaviour or preference of the mobile user.

Look at the retail industry and you begin to appreciate how valuable mobile data is. Retailers can use bar code data to find out what a customer bought in the past, but they lack the means to send a timely offer when the customer is traveling near a store, or even when she’s in the store, to direct the customer to a particular product or merchandise section. The

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personal mobile device is the answer.

We figure data monetisation is the next generation equivalent of Yellow Pages for operators. Remember that as recently as 1999, the Yellow Pages directory business represented 10% of revenue for large U.S. LECs (local exchange carriers) like BellSouth, and it was a hugely profitable business. Yet data monetisation may be a far more compelling offer to enterprises than Yellow Pages ever was because of the immediacy of the informaiton. Plus data monetisation is already proving itself in China where China Mobile monetises relationships with store owners in malls and websites, offering discount coupons for restaurant meals via the mobile phone.

Greater efficiency and lower costs in customer care Sales and customer care is a hot analytics market and that’s a bit of a pleasant surprise.

Here, analytics can drive business through real-time analysis of customers. Back end databases, such as those supplied by Neustar, can significantly improve the order uptake of customers and prospects calling into a call centre, visiting a website, or using IVR. Gaining a quick diagnosis of problems is another critical area where big data is helping. If a CSP has 75 active smartphones in use in a region, imagine if a customer calls in to complain about QoS and the care representative has no way of knowing whether or not there’s a problem with a particular handset.

But comScore’s analytics system runs a defective handset analysis on a regular basis so when the customer calls in, the care representative knows immediately whether the handset is the likely issue. This can save a few minutes in average handling

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time which translates to hundreds of thousands of dollars in decreased care costs.

Meanwhile, the light user of mobile may be highly profitable given the low costs he incurs.

Business assurance and enterprise search

The search capabilities of Google, Baidu and Bing are powering the modern world, but today that same power comes in a shrink-wrapped version, namely the enterprise search engines from companies like Splunk, HP and Ontology.

Business assurance is an analytics sector concerned with lowering costs and plugging revenue leaks due to operational errors, fraud and detected ill-conceived partnerships with interconnect and content partners that are either not profitable or not generating business value.

One area with huge potential in business assurance is margin or profitability assurance. At a macro level, the finance department can measure costs going out and revenues coming in but the real challenge is getting a view of profitability at a very granular level.

At face value, a mobile user paying a premium price with lots of data usage sounds like a VIP, but on closer examination, you are paying out huge interconnect fees to support that customer.

What enterprise search basically allows a CSP to do is skirt around APIs and other data access issues and perform either ad hoc analytics queries or build a full-blown application using logs and other machine data.

Conclusion I’ve spent time scanning a software market that’s exceedingly broad and deep – but that’s the nature of the big data beast. Its rise is an extraordinary opportunity for CSPs to bring innovation back into the business through hundreds of low cost, quick ROI programmes delivered by solution vendors, large and small.

About Technology Research Institute Technology Research Institute (TRI) is a boutique market research firm that has been tracking telecoms BSS/OSS developments since 1994. In 1996, TRI published the first-ever syndicated research reports on fixed and mobile billing systems. In recent years, TRI has focused on business assurance and analytics. In 2013, TRI published a sweeping 40-vendor, 515 page report on the market for ‘Telecoms Analytics and Big Data Solutions’. Dan Baker, TRI’s research director, is a regular contributor to VanillaPlus www.technology-research.com

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COMPANY PROFILE

Company summary

Key differention

SAP is using its big data, cloud and mobile expertise to both sell to and partner with CSPs. The company offers a full enterprise analytics suite bolstered by its flagship SAP BusinessObjects and Crystal Reports assets. Recently, SAP has added advanced drag-and-drop data visualisation with a product called SAP Lumira and rapid predictive analytics capabilities through its KXEN acquisition.

Predictive Analytics based on KXEN technology and combined with it’s own innovation in trusted data discovery, is key to SAP’s bid to gain a time-to-model and time-to-insight advantage over competitors such as SAS and IBM SPSS.

Big data analytics credentials SAP’s CSP go-to-market strategy is built on three key pillars: Customer engagement – Here, better and more consistent marketing and selling across contact channels is achieved with the hybris solution, which, in concert with SAP’s CRM, billing and analytics suite also enables CSPs to more efficiently manage campaigns and send more relevant, customer centric offers. SAP Mobile Commerce delivers mobile wallet and micro-banking solutions as well, especially for CSPs that operate in countries where the handset is the primary internet access point.

Competitive pressures SAP enables business analysts and marketing specialists to rapidly create and maintain – on their own – hundreds to thousands of predictive analytics models that micro-segment subscribers. This task normally requires enormous manual work by statisticians or data scientists which are in short supply.

Likewise, SAP quickly figures out which campaign offers are working and which are not. Combining its speed on the predictive side with the company’s larger IT infrastructure and cloud strengths and its real-time, big data, and in-memory database capabilities, SAP is in a good position to grow in telecoms analytics.

Operational efficiency – Building on its ERP platform, which helps over 4,500 CSPs globally to run their businesses better, SAP offers its entire Business Suite in the cloud, providing flexible deployment options for CSPs. In addition, recent acquisitions such as SuccessFactors in human capital management and Ariba for cloud-based procurement help CSPs maintain costs and quickly innovate in these areas.

New revenue generation – SAP partners with leading global CSPs to help them generate revenue from new, non-traditional, services. Services such as enterprise-class cloud services, mobile commerce, data monetisation, machine-to-machine and managed mobility services. CSPs can monetise its traditional data and services with SAP Mobile as managed service as evidenced by existing partnerships with major CSPs worldwide.

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TA L K I N G H E A D S

Real-time contextual awareness is where big data analytics reveals its real value r Andy Tiller is vice president of product marketing at AsiaInfo. Here, he tells VanillaPlus about one of the most exciting capabilities of big data analytics: its ability to provide real-time contextual awareness. All the unstructured big data that CSPs generate needs to be non-disruptively turned into structured, actionable context-aware intelligence that they can act upon immediately to the benefit of their customers and partners and, critically, themselves

D Big data allows the dynamic data to be extended to a much greater level of detail, incorporating what a customer is actually doing on their phone right now

VanillaPlus: What is real-time contextual awareness, and why are we hearing so much about it these days?

Andy Tiller: One thing we’re seeing is that a lot of CSPs are interested in understanding their customers’ contexts better. Context incorporates many different elements, from static data such as the user’s gender or ARPU to more dynamic data such as location, current balance, and which type of device the customer is using. Increasingly, it’s the dynamic data that CSPs are turning to in order to get a real picture of the user’s context.

Big data allows the dynamic data to be extended to a much greater level of detail, incorporating what a customer is actually doing on their phone right now.

An example would be if a customer is watching a video on their phone and their data balance is low. It might then be a good time to offer them a one-day pass for unlimited video access. That’s a simple example where an understanding of the customer’s context enables the CSP to offer the customer something highly relevant to their needs – the right offer at the right time.

It can be a win-win: the CSP gets to at least make the customer happy, and may even be able to charge for something they offer that is relevant to the customer’s context. Much of the drive towards improved understanding of the customer’s context is about improving customer experience. It’s about making customers happy.

VP: How complex is the environment in which a customer’s true context is constructed?

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In addition, you have to access BSS data to see if the customer is nearing the end of their data allowance.

You might also want to tap the OSS to find out if you have the network capacity available in that location to support the offer of a day pass of unlimited data for video consumption.

Only if all three factors match – in other words if the context is ideal – is the offer is made.

So there are at least three sources of dynamic data that need to be provided in real-time to support that simple example. We can also see the need for a complex event processing engine that looks out for those triggers and creates the appropriate response.

This is what contextual analysis is all about.

There are, of course, rules that have to be inserted into the process. The trigger might necessitate an outbound call from a customer care centre to make the offer or trigger an SMS with a click-through link to accept the offer.

Some CSPs already have the technology to do this, but we are at an early stage in understanding how to use these new tools effectively to create good customer experiences.

VP: How is contextual awareness enabled by big data analytics?

AT: There is typically masses of data that you need to analyse in real-time to find the context you are looking for, to find the fleeting moment in which to make a relevant, context-aware offer. Static data remains the same but the user’s location changes and their bill balance alters continually. Even more importantly, what the customer is doing on their phone changes all the time, and that’s where vast amounts of big data must be processed.

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AT: Amidst all the variables involved the important thing is to understand where you can get the data from in real-time. In the video scenario I outlined, you need to know that the customer is actually trying to watch a video right now. You have to interpret the bits and

bytes on the mobile data network and convert this into knowledge about what the customer is actually doing.

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Our Veris C3 big data appliance processes a copy of those bits and bytes and converts them in real-time into structured data. So a set of bits and bytes corresponds to a specific user on a Samsung Galaxy S3 who is watching a YouTube video, for example.

C3 structures the data and watches out for a pre-defined context to arise.

There is a lot of big data technology in there, including massively parallel and inmemory databases and deep packet inspection technology. All the signaling and user traffic from the mobile data network is processed. That structured data is combined with BSS data to identify context triggers in real time.

The structured data can also be analysed offline later to identify trends and patterns in how customers use the mobile network.

That’s also useful for identifying customers’ interests for market segmentation and campaigns. Big data technology is at the heart of enabling this and it is only recently that we have had the technology and the horsepower to make this possible. The early adopters are experimenting with it to see how it can change the world.

VP: What technology is required, and what are the integration points?

AT: The integration points are the data sources that reveal the context. For the mobile data network, optical splitters are used to take a feed of data, non-intrusively from the network. It’s actually raw data collected straight from the pipe. A copy of everything is streamed through the C3 system.

We can identify the user’s location by getting the cell ID from the data network and we’d have another integration point with the BSS. For data sources it’s not a difficult integration job because we’re just taking a copy of data in non-disruptive way.

Getting static data from a BSS is very straightforward; you just take a daily import, for example.

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The voice network is separate, and typically the OSS systems will provide the source data. One example of a context trigger might be that a user has experienced three dropped calls in the last hour. The CSP can use that information to make an apology and pre-emptively offer some free minutes.

To do that you’d want data in real-time from the OSS platform.

Dr Andy Tiller: More things are legal than you would think; the bigger issue is whether they’re socially acceptable

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The key thing is to focus on what is socially acceptable in your market and how to create experiences that customers like

VP: What are some example use cases for realtime contextual awareness?

AT: There are three key areas. One is upselling for a CSP that knows the customer context and has something relevant to offer at the right time, such as the video day pass we talked about. Another example could be with a CSP that has a music streaming partner. They can use context-awareness to know when people are listening to music – possibly on a different music app – and make an offer to attract them to their partner’s streaming service. That sort of upselling is a key application area for real-time contextual awareness.

A second area would be in help and support. A poor voice quality experience could lead to an offer of free minutes; or at the moment when a customer changes their phone, the CSP could provide relevant apps, services and help for the new device. Knowing the exact moment is important. CSPs talk about ‘moments of truth’ when the customer is particularly susceptible to being dissatisfied or motivated. If you can delight them at these times you can win their hearts and minds.

A final area is advertising. This relates to upselling but really knowing the user’s context means you can target advertising better and everyone wins. The advertiser gets greater take up, the user only sees relevant advertising and the CSP is able to charge more to advertisers.

AT&T’s sponsored data service allows the data consumed by users watching advertising videos to be paid for by the advertiser, but it’s a blunt instrument – it simply removes a barrier to the customer watching the ad, but doesn’t provide any incentive. A step further would be for the CSP to incorporate context awareness in its pitch to the advertiser. The advertiser could then target the ad to relevant customers at appropriate times. It could also provide a reward to people that watch its advertisements – this time the context you need to watch for becomes whether the customer actually watched the advertisement to the end. If so, the reward is given.

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VP: What are the issues around personal data privacy, and how can these be mitigated?

AT: There are two things here: what you’re allowed to do legally and whether it’s socially acceptable in your market. Are you allowed to monitor what a user is doing, and respond to it? For example, with our Veris C3 product you can even know what people are typing into search engines on their phones; China Mobile is using that today to target its own search-based ads ‘over-the-OTT’ (CSP over Google over the network), and it works. China Mobile is getting twice as good a response as Google from doing so.

You’d think this would be illegal in other countries, but it turns out that it’s legal to do that in Europe as well.

More things are legal than you might think, but the bigger issue is whether they’re socially acceptable. For instance, if you’re searching for a new car and you get a message from your CSP about a third party service to help you sell your old car, you might find that unsettling or intrusive.

The key thing is to focus on what is socially acceptable in your market and how to create experiences that customers like. To achieve that you need to understand the customer’s context really well.

It’s not just about making sure that the offer is relevant to the customer – you also need to be aware that a particular campaign might not work well if a customer is asleep or busy. It has to be delivered at the right time – hence the need for contextual awareness.

VP: What is AsiaInfo’s role here?

AT: Our starting point has been to build the technology platform and package it into the Veris C3 product. C3 is a specific big data appliance which tells you about how people are using the mobile data network. We can deliver C3 as a standalone solution, or we can build broader capabilities which take data from multiple sources (OSS, BSS, the CSP’s website… and others) feed them into a Complex Event Processing engine which watches for context triggers.

Events can take place anywhere and we can track them.

The early adopters in China and worldwide are giving us interesting insights into what works and what doesn’t. We’re building up not just the technical platform, but also the experience of how to make big data analytics deliver real value from context-aware actionable intelligence.

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CEM Why CSPs awareness of quality sets them apart in a best-effort world

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ANALYST REPORT

Introduction s competition for customers intensifies, it becomes increasingly important for communications service providers (CSPs) to retain the customers they have. Unfortunately CSPs are perceived as offering poor customer service, so they need to revisit their customer management strategies, improve service quality, monitor metrics and importantly map all performance improvements against the customer lifecycle to improve customers’ experience and consequently customer loyalty and satisfaction. CSPs now consider customer experience management (CEM) as central to their strategies to improve retention and loyalty and drive greater efficiency and new revenue streams.

A

This report outlines key market drivers for CEM, defines CEM, and highlights the key IT investments that CSPs must make to maximise both the customers’ experience and the ongoing relationship.

Key messages • The author, Shagun Bali, is an analyst for CSP IT at Ovum

•

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Customer experience is at the top of CSPs’ IT projects. Improving the customer experience across all areas of CSPs' operations is now firmly embedded at a strategic and tactical level within the enterprise, as they focus on the quality of their customers' overall experience, rather than the quality of service for separate applications.

CEM is a process, not a technology. It is a process that impacts the CSPs’ operating model and requires a spectrum of IT tools to ensure the goal of better experiences.

Consequently, CSPs need to create cohesive business processes to manage IT and networks, including OSS and BSS processes.

•

CEM initiatives should include management of service operations, customer analytics, sales, and marketing, all in an orchestrated manner.

The vendor market faces stiff competition as IT and network providers target the CEM market.

Vendors should ensure IT solutions analyse the customer experience in its totality, by integrating IT and network data.

Ovum view In spite of the industry buzz around customer experience, CSPs still have ground to cover to improve their customers’ overall experience. CSPs need to invest their CEM-related dollars more wisely: unfortunately CSPs do not approach CEM investments with a long-term goal in sight. Today, CSPs can approach CEM from distinct functional areas such as marketing, customer service, IT and networks; this disjointed approach defeats the purpose of having CEM strategic initiatives. Also, an industry-wide lack of clarity about the value of holistic CEM – and the haphazard labeling of

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technology with this term – has allowed CSPs to continue to view the customer’s experience and the relationship through a series of internal siloes, even while deploying systems that purport to unify the view.

Recommendations for CSPs To ensure success of their CEM initiates, CSPs must ensure full sponsorship from top management. CEM initiatives should be led by a C-level executive who ensures cross-departmental consensus and cooperation. The first step of CEM starts with overcoming departmental silos. CSPs must revolutionise the systems, departments, culture, and attitudes that contribute to their CEM projects.

CSPs’ CEM efforts have to reflect at each stage on the customer journey. CSPs need to map their CEM projects in line with customer journeys – from customer acquisition to ongoing services, loyalty and retention. CSPs need an end-to-end view of the customer experience at the IT and network side. This goal can only be achieved with the right mix of IT tools and business processes that facilitate the seamless integration of operational, network and customer data. A number of technologies such as network QoS tools, customer analytics mobile self-service apps and social media monitoring will help CSPs along the way, but investing in new technologies is not enough. We recommend a wholesale change in approach to customer management. Using the above-mentioned tools from the CEM arsenal can help CSPs differentiate their offerings with superior customer services.

Recommendations for IT vendors Ovum believes that simply transforming the marketing proposition around customer experience management is not enough for IT vendors to be successful in this market. Vendors must introduce customer experience management metrics to see tangible benefits from deployments. One of the most critical needs that CSPs face is tools that bridge the gap between IT and network data. Vendors need to focus on interoperability and integration of the various data sources required to bridge that gap.

Vendors must increasingly cultivate close partnerships with CSPs and collaborate on their end-to-end CEM roadmaps. As the CEM goals for most CSPs are still a work in progress project, they have far-reaching professional services and

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consulting needs around deploying new IT solutions around CEM and migrating data from various repositories into centralised data warehouses. Launching a new approach to delivering service and engaging with subscribers is a massive undertaking. If CSPs are to realise the full value of their investments in IT, they will require professional services that support strategic development and change management.

Consequently, Ovum advises vendors to develop more complete professional services offerings. Some of the top vendors have already made significant progress towards creating these services, which will position them well for expansion once the market begins to grow.

Market dynamics have forced CSPs to put the focus back on customers Increased competition to retain customers CSPs' operating models are under more pressure than ever before. The market has become increasingly saturated and competitive, where their services are regarded as commodities and their margins are thin. In order to survive, CSPs need to reduce churn and increase ARPU by finding cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

In the past, CSPs could afford to differentiate themselves based on network quality, attractive pricing or new devices. But today, globally CSPs understand that these aspects, while important, do not guarantee customer satisfaction and loyalty. In addition, number portability and has made switching a CSP service provider very easy for customers. As a result, CSPs are under constant pressure from customers that see CSPs lacking in terms of quality of service. The only way to stay ahead of traditional competitors, as well as the new breed of competitors – such as OTT application developers such as Viber and Skype; device manufacturers, such as Apple and Samsung – is by delivering a consistent and relevant customer experience each time.

To be successful in the long run, CSPs need to have a highly critical exterior vision. They should be in a position to sense and respond rapidly to changes in customer demand and adapt to remain persistently relevant to their customers. Continuous, timely, and relevant innovation around customer experience will be the key strategies to retain customers.

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CEM is at the top of CSPs’ agendas For the third year running, improving customer experience is the top driver of CSPs' investment in IT systems and platforms for the next 12–18 months. Improving the customer experience across all areas of CSPs' operations is now firmly embedded at a strategic and tactical level within the enterprise. Ovum's ICT Enterprise Insights: Global Telecoms survey revealed that improving customer experience is the top IT driver for investments in the telecoms industry in the coming 12 months (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Telecoms industry drivers for IT investment

Defining CEM for CSPs Delivering coherent experience at each touch point CEM does not describe a point-to-point relationship between a CSP and its customers, nor is it a relationship that exists purely to resolve problems. For many CSPs, customer experience is synonymous with customer service and call centres, but this is too narrow a view. CEM is not the same as ‘customer service’ – it is not just about how CSPs respond to customers. The relationship between a CSP and its customers extends all the way from pre-sales research to in-life device and service usage, as customers look to purchase new services, upgrade existing ones, and add new features throughout their lifecycle. CEM is about shaping demand, monetising opportunities, understanding how to segment customers by value, and thereby creating a whole system for engaging with the customer base on a more intense and valuable level.

Ovum believes that CEM should be defined as the process of: • • • • •

Source: Ovum ICT Enterprise Insights

In recent years, the telecom industry has by and large recognised the importance of CEM and is prioritising investment in the area. The maturity of CSP CEM systems varies greatly: CRM and billing systems have been around for decades; web self-service is maturing relatively quickly; the mobile self-service applications are starting to gain traction, while social media strategies are relatively immature.

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tracking the customer’s path through the experience lifecycle integrating data from network and all interaction channels encountered across that lifecycle integrating the view of that data across departments internally using that holistic view to improve the revenue derived from customers measuring the results of business processes that attempt to monetise that customer experience.

CEM combines technical components and skill sets from multiple CSP departments. Owners of CEM functions used to reside in different departments or business units. Networking was in charge of network QoS, IT owned billing, customer care owned CRM, self-service and campaign management. These divisions still exist, but CEM strategy envisions uniting information and insights from each of these departments to take reactive and even proactive actions to manage customer experience at each touch point.

For the industry as a whole, the emphasis on CEM has moved steadily from being in the conceptual stage to a more actionable plan. Today, CSPs often approach CEM from different angles – marketing, IT, and customer service – that are

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disjointed and defeat the purpose of having strategic CEM initiatives. CSPs need to create cohesive business processes to manage IT and networks, including OSS and BSS processes.

CEM initiatives should include management of service operations, customer analytics, CRM, customer segmentation and valuation metrics, analytics, and marketing, all in an orchestrated manner. CSPs that continue to ignore the pressing need for a 360-degree CEM framework might eventually find themselves lagging behind competitors.

Journey mapping should be integral part of CEM strategies for CSPs Since CEM starts right from customer onboarding through managing loyalty and retention, it is important that CSPs start their CEM initiatives with in the formal process of journey mapping to understand how customers make interaction decisions. CSPs need to conduct extensive journey mapping to understand the different touch points their customers use.

Journey mapping provides evidence that links specific processes with outcomes. It can show, for example, that customers are choosing one contact channel over another because of a lack of results, perhaps through the failure of one particular technology. It can also show the connection between positive outcomes, such as increased revenue, and specific behaviors. With so many possible entry points for customers, and so many internal stakeholders interested in the outcome of the customer experience, it is necessary for any business to explore patterns in the data for clues to customer behaviour.

or support channel. The absence of a unified or integrated view means that CSPs are delivering frustrating experiences and missing key opportunities to influence consumer behavior and capture revenue.

Figure 2, highlights the CEM evolution for CSPs: their journey from being reactive and departmental to being proactive and customer-centric. The first step starts with integrating backoffice functions, which will overcome various silos in the operational systems and processes. This is a large and timeconsuming project – for larger CSPs, operational support systems (OSS)/business support systems (BSS) transformations/integrations can take more than five years to complete. Once a 360-degree view of the customer has been achieved, a CSP must apply realtime analytics to customer data personalised next best actions. To create a customer-centric organisation, CSPs must continuously innovate at service levels to provide for contextual services that enhance the customer experience.

Figure 2: Ovum's customer-centric maturity model

Departmentalised silos are the biggest roadblock For years, CSPs have managed their businesses in a departmentalised fashion. Various business functions such as marketing, CRM, billing and provisioning work as silos. Their IT systems are also developed in silos restricting the seamless exchange of customer data among business processes. CSPs continue to engage with customers through a functional rather than personal approach. Organisational silos make end-to-end processes difficult and result in poor performance and inefficiencies. These barriers have made it impossible for CSPs to get a 360-degree view of customer interactions and experiences.

CSP customers, however, don’t think about their interaction with CSPs in terms of channels; they expect a coherent and consistent experience and approach regardless of the service

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Source: Ovum

CSPs need a coordinated approach to their investments in the right IT tools CSP’s CEM investments must extend beyond the traditional stack Previously CSPs focused on customer facing technologies such as CRM, IVR, billing, but now CEM extends beyond the traditional stack to include self-service, web chat, social media,

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analytics for customer (data) management and mobile apps. A CEM strategy requires a portfolio of applications that work seamlessly together to enable any department (network or IT) in contact with the customer to deliver context-aware, relevant information. Increasingly we see CSPs trying to connect a portfolio of technologies that will enable them to interact with the customer on the customer's terms, including via social networks, and mobile devices. Figure 3, highlights the various IT components of CEM strategy for CSPs.

give them insights into larger swathes of the lifecycle, en-route to a more holistic approach.

Figure 3: The technology components of CEM

• • • •

Keeping in mind the evolving mobile and social trends that are substantially altering the way customers interact with their service providers, CSPs need to invest in IT tools that can optimally manage changing customer behavior. For sustained CEM improvements in the coming years, CSPs’ investment priorities should include, but not be limited to: network intelligence customer analytics mobile self-service apps and social media monitoring tools.

Network QoS management is a key service differentiator for CSPs As demand for data services increases exponentially, preventing network congestion is of extreme importance to network operators. The unprecedented increase in mobile data traffic requires CSPs to deploy solutions that facilitate CSPs to cope with rising volumes of mobile data and video – and to help them stay profitable. Intelligently manage network congestion to optimise capacity and network resources, to boost users' quality of experience is a key area of investment for CSPs.

Source: Ovum

However, CEM strategy is not restricted to just these areas of investments. Any technology that potentially affects the customer experience – either positively or negatively – could be considered a CEM technology. To understand the role of CEM process in shaping better experiences for their customers, it is necessary that CSPs map the degree to which existing processes and tools are already part of CEM and then decide to invest in new technologies. At present there are no single tools on the market that provide the entire spectrum. IT vendors have begun to put together compatible portfolio of IT tools that

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CSPs realise that network additions and capacity modifications are lengthy, costly and complex processes. However, with the addition of intelligence software to their networks, CSPs address current shortcomings with automated solutions. CSPs aim to make mobile voice, data, and video services even more reliable – fewer dropped calls, consistent QoS, and higher callcompletion rates. Vodafone Ireland has deployed Tellabs Insight Analytics(SM) Services to analyse the network data contained in its multi-vendor 3G mobile network. Vodafone Ireland uses the information to optimise network performance and provide a higher QoS. It also enables Vodafone Ireland to perform capacity management and root-cause analysis quicker and more cost-effectively.

Intelligent traffic management is vital in ensuring efficient operations in existing networks and in planning for nextgeneration network investments. Intelligent networks provide avenues for CSPs to reduce both operating and capital expenditures as well as optimize network performance.

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CEM needs to be proactive with advanced customer analytics As the amount of accessible customer information increases, so does the need to use intelligent tools to obtain actionable insights and improve overall CEM. CSPs need to invest in the deployment of advanced analytics such as predictive analytics and big data analytics at the network, service, and application levels in order to elevate simple connectivity to an enhanced connected experience with predictable, consistent, and relevant services at each point of interaction in the customer lifecycle.

The telecoms industry is fertile ground for analytics; CSPs are data-intensive businesses and collect large amounts of data from their networks and subscribers, arguably more so than any other sector. Analytics is key to using this data for business success. However, our research shows that CSPs are in various stages of analytics maturity. Most early implementations tend to focus narrowly on network design, planning, efficiency and performance, primarily to ensure service quality and reliability, but there are more potential benefits. Many CSPs want to correlate network and subscriber data and other business data for monetisation. This occurs in three different ways: • • •

to drive better customer experience and avoid customer churn to utilise network assets more efficiently, and to drive new information-brokered revenue models with partners through open analytic web services APIs (application programming interface).

Globally CSPs are aggressively investing in analytics tools. For example, Etisalat Nigeria has deployed Oracle Communications Data Model (OCDM) to analyse data from more than 25 sources across multiple business areas, including customer, revenue, and network management systems—enabling management to react quickly to technology, regulatory, and business challenges in the prepaid and postpaid communications services markets.

On the other hand, predictive analytics can move CSPs' CEM initiatives from analysing the past to predicting and influencing the future. Proactive care monitors all relevant data sources to understand the complete customer lifecycle and process dynamic customer context in real-time. This enables CSPs to identify the potential issues and execute context-specific, personalised actions through their preferred channel.

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Forward-looking CSPs treat subscriber data as an asset – the oil that will fuel their future growth. CEM initiatives must start by gathering data from each and every interaction a customer has with the CSP, then analyse that data throughout the entire customer lifecycle. The goal of actionable insights should be to identify and predict unfavorable outcomes and rectify them with proactive care.

Mobile self-service apps empower customers and reduce call center costs Mobility has transformed the expectations customers have from service providers. Consumers want answers and services as fast as possible; they want to avoid the challenges associated with traditional customer service such as long waiting times, irritating IVR, and multiple or incorrect phone numbers. Their first reaction to such challenges is to look for answers or solutions themselves rather than reach out to the CSP. CSPs consider that the ability to access accounts on mobile devices is key to enabling continual customer self-service. Mobile realtime self-service (RTSS) impacts the overall experience of the customer, providing customers with control of their own services and support.

Mobile RTSS can drastically reduce calls made to the call centre, which would have a direct positive impact on profit, and it goes a long way to helping CSPs achieve the goal of becoming more efficient by providing personalised experience.

Moreover, it is what an increasing numbers of consumers want and would consider a positive differentiator. Movistar Argentina deployed a mobile self-care application from MobileAware, and it has also announced plans to deploy NICE Mobile Reach to improve mobile customer service. This solution will serve as a bridge between Movistar's self-service mobile app and the contact centre, and will engage customers based on their intent, profile, and the context of the interaction. When a customer selects this option, all information about the customer's activities in the mobile application will be automatically transferred to the contact centre and immediately displayed on the agent desktop.

The investments in mobile self-service apps will only increase as CSPs achieve the right balance of cost optimisation, customer satisfaction and retention, and revenue increase through crossselling and upselling.

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Social media monitoring is integral to CEM strategies Social media has transformed the concept of customer service across industries. Never before did consumers have the power to question, criticise, or praise their service providers on such a large stage. Customers use social media to voice their opinions throughout the presales and onboarding stages and during the lifetime of their product or service. It is important for CSPs to listen and respond instantly to their customers on social media by investments in social media monitoring and engagement tools to enhance customer experience or customer service.

Social media monitoring and engagement offerings focus on various aspects of customer interactions, with better identification and authentication tools, analytics tools to help extract relevant and actionable messages from among personal tweets and noise, and cross-channel capabilities to move interactions from the social sphere to more individual and costeffective channels. Belgacom has deployed SDL Social Media Monitoring to engage with its customers across several social media channels, ensuring that every customer is heard and responded to in an efficient manner. Even in emerging markets, CSPs are aggressively deploying tools to provide better services through social media platforms. In the Philippines, Globe Telecom has deployed Lithium Technologies to reduce customer service costs and increase customer loyalty through social media. Globe is using Lithium Social Web to respond quickly to enquiries and posts about Globe across social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook. In addition, Globe is capturing and storing trusted content generated throughout the community that serves as a source of reliable answers for Globe's service agents as they respond to large volumes of customer conversations on public social networks.

Ovum believes that the need to offer customers a service channel via social media will persist, and CSPs need to develop more sophisticated and strategic mechanisms to cope with the high volume of interactions and ensure their quality. CSPs must ensure that their social CEM technologies and processes do not operate in a silo, and that social data and insights are integrated back into the customer account to gain a more balanced and holistic picture.

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CEM strategies facilitate operational and business benefits Multi-channel integration is prerequisite for seamless service Today’s customers expect services to be flexible and enable them to switch between channels of communication. With the right CEM business processes and technologies in place, CSPs can seamless exchange data across each channel and touch point with multichannel integration. Multichannel integration centralises data from all service channels and helps CSPs deliver consistent and personalised data along with contextual information at each interaction to the customer. For example, when a social media team forwards a customer request to a live agent, the agent doesn’t require the customer to repeat their request again. The data from the consolidated customer database will provide the agent historical data from previous interactions to give a holistic picture of customer experience.

As CSP customers have become more sophisticated and demanding – they want to be able to call, chat, email, selfservice because they want 24x7 support. CSPs need to make sure they can service the entire portfolio across touchpoints with most contact channels being deployed for both sales and service interactions. With the right investments in IT, CSPs' CEM strategies eventually can evolve to offer multiple channels to their customers, adjusting their channel mix to the customer's communication preferences and striking a smart balance between automation and human interaction. This approach holds great promise for improving loyalty, reducing churn, raising ARPU and margins, and raising CSPs' overall customer satisfaction. In addition, with effective CEM strategies, CSPs can improve their agility and flexibility while reducing the time required rolling out new services. CSPs can also reduce operating and capital expenses by combining multiple customer information into a single, logical resource.

IT providers’ strategy CEM is the new battleground for vendors CEM vendors come from different starting points in the network and IT domains. Most CEM vendors offer comprehensive solution suites and some have been branching out into CRM,

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analytics, reporting, operations support systems (OSSs) and related functionality.

The market is mixed, including vendors from large global network equipment providers to small analytics start-ups. Large CSPs generally source their core CEM technology solutions from a handful of larger independent software vendors (ISVs).

But for small and midsize CSPs, and for large ones looking for adjunct solutions, there remain dozens of suppliers.

CSPs are looking for greater flexibility in their IT solutions and partnerships models to combat harsh market conditions.

Vendors that successfully embed themselves in their CSP customers by becoming part of their operating models will be successful in the long run. In addition, vendors need to be in constant dialogue with various departments within CSPs beyond IT, such as those of the CIO and CMO, because CSPs are changing how they make IT decisions. More decisions are being made by strategy-focused executives than by IT, which reflects the greater interdependence of business processes and the fact that investments in software and IT affect business processes across the entire company.

As business models for CSPs are undergoing rapid changes, CSPs do not want vendors, they want partners. Many times, in the midst of large CEM projects, things do not work out as

planned; at such times CSPs want vendors to cooperate and even invest further in the relationship. They want their vendor partners to walk with them on the journey.

Conclusion This report has discussed the changing dynamic of the relationship between a CSP and its customers. CEM is a complicated endeavour. It does not have a simple technology solution – there is no “CEM” product that, once deployed, produces seamless customer experiences. The CEM philosophy has to be consistent across all departments, systems, and channels for all elements of this customer journey. Only then will a CSP be able to describe itself as customer-centric.

The biggest challenge for all vendors, though, is to demonstrate clear business benefits of the solution. Suppliers are still struggling to articulate their CEM strategies, but market dynamics should become clearer as vendors develop their CEM frameworks and as vendor ecosystem becomes more definite.

Going forward, technology suppliers that can best capture and harness the growing volumes of structured and unstructured data will become leaders in this space.

About Ovum We create tangible business advantage for our customers by providing actionable intelligence that can be relied upon in evaluating opportunities, benchmarking performance, and making better business-critical decisions. Ovum is the leading analyst house across converging telecoms, media and IT markets. We offer more metrics and insight across more markets, than any other provider.

Working with Ovum puts at your disposal: 220+ country market forecasts and KPI’s 10,000,000+ market data points and 180 analysts, each with on average more than 10 years industry experience.

Our Telco IT research channel evaluates the challenges facing communications services providers as they transform their IT systems, software and business processes. Our research identifies the role that vendor partners can take in supporting that journey and provides detailed evaluations of the competitive vendor landscape.

To find out more about how Ovum can help your business visit www.ovum.com, or email us enquiries@ovum.com

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COMPANY PROFILE

Company summary Accanto Systems offers customer and network analytics that facilitate CSPs to manage the quality of experience of their customers.

Headquartered in Lahti, Finland, Accanto Systems has 180 customers across 60 countries including BT, Elisa, Hutchison, MTN, Orange, Telefónica, Telekom Austria and Vodafone.

CEM credentials Accanto Systems’ flagship intelligent CEM (iCEM) solution, powered by its patented real-time business analytics algorithm, calculates the quality of experience (QoE) of subscribers across fixed and mobile networks, voice, VoIP and data technologies. Accanto iCEM provides real-time insights into all aspects of the customer experience, including applications, devices and the network. iCEM’s architecture collects and correlates input from a wide array of sources, including probes, OSS, CRM and others.

The solution identifies the business impact of the lost revenues and costs that stem from poor service in order to provide recommendations to improve the QoE and optimise ROI for each customer segment.

The latest version of iCEM (iCEM 6.0) introduced in early 2014, is able to process significantly more traffic and data volumes, and includes four key redesigned applications: QoE driven operations, customer experience analytics, network analytics and customer care.

Company summary Amdocs is an established IT solutions vendor in the telecoms market.

With its headquarters in Chesterfield, MO, United States, the company employs more than 20,500 people. Since 1982, the firm has focused on meeting the needs of CSPs with its BSS, OSS and network control product portfolio along with professional services and managed services operations. Its customer base includes the world's ten largest mobile operators, many of the largest incumbent (integrated) operators, and a number of major cable and satellite providers. AT&T and Vodafone are among its customers.

CEM credentials Amdocs provides a broad Customer Experience Solution (CES) portfolio for CSPs which offers an integrated set of applications to holistically manage the customer experience from the device to the network. Key capabilities in the Amdocs’ CES portfolio that enable CSPs’ CEM strategies include: Amdocs Multi-Play which utilises a single product catalogue across all lines of business and devices.

Amdocs Social Care Solution which integrates customers’ social identity with their BSS profile and uses real-time analytics to enable care agents to identify and respond to customer issues across social networks.

Amdocs Smart Net an intelligent Wi-Fi offload solution.

Amdocs Big Data Analytics which encompasses an Insight platform

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iCEM views are divided into two value added packages servicing customer-centric and network-centric data with a focused set of applications. iCEM offers a wide range of use cases and applications such as advanced monitoring and troubleshooting, investment recommendations to optimise the QoE, high-value customer QoE monitoring, and big data analytics enabled marketing.

Key differentiators The QoE driven operations application is a key differentiator for Accanto Systems. It acts as a foundation for iCEM. It calculates the QoE Index for all deployed services and for each subscriber. Once it has identified a drop in QoE, it sources the location of the problem and identifies the root cause. It then simulates a path to an improved QoE and generates recommendations for the CSP.

Competitive pressures The competition among CEM providers is becoming stiff as the market place becomes more crowded with look-alike products. Many IT and network vendors are making investments to understand the customer experience with sophisticated analytics offerings, so Accanto Systems will have to make continuous investments in R&D and partnering efforts to stay ahead of the game. Also, the vendor must expand its presence globally.

to analyse data in near real-time from Amdocs systems and third party data sources Following the acquisitions of Actix and Celcite, and the introduction of its Big Data Analytics offerings, Amdocs has also introduced new solutions that integrate network insight into its B/OSS to further improve the customer experience: customer network care, smart cell placement, and corporate network experience applications.

Key differentiators Overall, Amdocs’ focus on the telecoms vertical, along with in-depth knowledge of CSP processes, are the biggest differentiators from its competitors. Since many large CSPs globally have already deployed Amdocs billing systems, many enterprises can benefit from integrating Amdocs CES systems to existing billing platforms. Amdocs provides a combination of deep vertical capabilities and integration with platform components provides a ready-to-roll, scalable, end-to-end solution.

Competitive pressures Amdocs needs to overcome numerous internal challenges to reap the full benefits of its new and enhanced position in the market. It must cope with the integrating is acquisitions, removing duplication and coordinating R&D investment across multiple product streams. Amdocs faces stiff competition from other vendors such Oracle and Ericsson however, Amdocs is actively focused on winning more deals with the top tier CSPs.

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Company summary Founded in 1876, Ericsson is a provider of communications networks, telecoms services and support solutions. With its headquarters in Sweden, the company employs more than 110,000 people and serves more than 500 CSP customers in 180 countries.

CEM credentials Ericsson has a broad portfolio of network equipment, OSS, BSS, system integration and consulting capabilities to help CSPs achieve their CEM goals. As one of the leading IT and network equipment providers, Ericsson can seamlessly integrate various IT and network data points in the CRM system to create a holistic profile of customers.

This allows CSPs to manage experience at each and every touch point.

Recognising the growing need for evolving CRM in the industry, Ericsson launched its Telecom CRM in 2012. Ericsson uses the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform to offer a telecoms-specific solution.

Ericsson has built a layer with robust telecom industry-focused functionalities and APIs based on the Shared Information and Data (SID) model. Additionally, Ericsson has recently launched a horizontal analytics platform called Ericsson Expert Analytics (EEA). This platform enables several applications, including Customer Experience Assurance (CEA), which combines and correlates network and customer data from multiple sources for customer care and network and service operations centre use cases, as well as Expert Analytics for Marketing (EAM), which combines real-time, network-based contextual data, enabling

Company summary hybris delivers enterprise software and on-demand solutions for ecommerce, multi-channel commerce, master data management and order management. The solution covers all industries and has been optimised for telecoms, with specific relevant functionality. hybris was founded in 1997 and is headquartered in Munich, Germany.

In 2013 SAP acquired hybris to enhance its customer experience portfolio. A new line of business in SAP has been created called Customer Engagement and Commerce. This is a new breed of solution that supports relevant and contextual interactions, enables marketing, commerce, charging, billing, sales, service, and support with unified data (customer, product, order) and business process across a diverse and rapidly evolving set of interactions.

CEM credentials hybris is a platform that handles the complexities of managing multiple customer touch points, delivering consistent information and consistent customer experience regardless of how the customer wants to engage with a CSP. hybris’ commerce suite is an open, extensible omnichannel platform, with product content management, order management and unified commerce processes designed to give CSPs a single view of its customers, products and orders, and its customers a single view of the CSP. With its platform, in addition to the standard commerce functionality, hybris provides product and services bundling, subscription management and order management functionality.

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marketing to add fresh user experience insights to their defined customer profiles and deliver tailored offers that drive usage and retention.

Over the past ten years, Ericsson has built a significant services business, representing 43% of net sales in 2013 (42% in 2012). As CSPs carve out their CEM strategies, Ovum predicts that the company may see an increase in the demand for its services, and hence increase its revenues. Past success in areas such as managed services, consulting and systems integration will in turn create opportunities for more business.

Key differentiators Ericsson’s broad network and software portfolio combined with its strong operations outsourcing and systems integration business that supports customer experience-centric managed services makes it a one-stop-shop for all CSP CEM needs.

Competitive pressures Ericsson faces strong competition from other large network and IT providers such as Nokia, Alcatel-Lucent, Oracle and IBM in the telecoms market. Attempts to match Ericsson’s end-to-end portfolio and 130 years of industry expertise have led other vendors such as Amdocs and Oracle to ramp up acquisitions in recent years. However, long-standing relationships with CSPs across the globe and a strong product and services portfolio rightly position Ericsson to succeed in the telecoms market.

hybris solutions are available for deployment as on-demand, onpremise and managed services. It is also available in multiple languages and currencies. hybris commerce platform is fully integrated to SAP solutions such as CRM, marketing, billing and analytics for customer engagement and commerce deployments.

Key differentiators The company's software is built on a single platform, based on open standards, which is scalable to be able to expand as a CSP grows. The core architecture of the platform provides a master data-management layer that ensures consistent inventory, pricing, order-status and other information across all channels web, mobile, call centre or retail stores.

There's also a process-management layer that applies the same business rules across channels, so prices and promotions encountered online are consistent with those encountered in stores or on mobile devices. Consistent information across channels helps CSPs to provide relevant, contextual information and, thereby, enhanced customer experience at each touch point.

Competitive pressures IBM and Oracle are clearly SAP's chief rivals, and they've both spent billions on acquisitions in the commerce and customer experience arena. The most directly competitive products to hybris at IBM are Unica and Sterling Commerce, while Oracle has ATG and commerceoriented capabilities of BEA, E-Business Suite, FatWire, Stellent and Eloqua.

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Company summary Polystar is a long-standing analytics provider to the telecoms industry.

With 30 years of industry expertise, Polystar has established a strong global customer base, servicing over 110 mobile and fixed-line telecoms operators, service providers and network manufacturers in more than 50 countries. Polystar is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden and also has ten offices around the world in Sweden, Canada, USA, Russia, South Africa, Germany, UAE, and Singapore.

CEM credentials Polystar provides customer and network analytics, monitoring, troubleshooting and reporting solutions that facilitate CSPs to harness the value of big data and successfully monetise their data assets.

Polystar provides proactive real-time Network and Customer Assurance solutions, including Network Analytics, Network Monitoring, Roaming Analytics, Interconnect Analytics for Network Insights and Subscriber Analytics, Marketing Analytics and Corporate Analytics for Customer Insights. Those solutions are used across the entire CSP organisation in network operations and engineering; roaming and interconnect; customer care; product management and marketing departments.

These solutions can be deployed as stand-alone solutions, or integrated with third party systems, when required. As stand-alone

Company summary Razorsight provides cloud-based analytics software to the telecom industry. Headquartered in Virginia, USA, Razorsight serves 100 CSPs worldwide including tier-1 CSPs such as AT&T, CenturyLink, Comcast, Orange, Time Warner Cable, T-Mobile, Telus, Tata, Virgin Mobile and Verizon. The vendor has developed over 200 telecoms industry specific rules to run on its advanced predictive analytics platform, and is continuously adding more.

CEM credentials Razorsight's cloud-based predictive analytics solution, RazorInsights, provides real-time predictive analytics insights that streamline operations, refine marketing to meet customer demand, and enhance the customer experience. RazorInsights is tailored to serve four groups: The Sales and Marketing product provides insights to deliver the right offer and message to ensure satisfaction and loyalty.

The Operations and Care product generates insights to optimise expenditures and address emerging and hidden operational weaknesses before they impact the customer. This results in preventing network issues, reducing calls to care, optimising truck rolls and improving the customer experience.

The Executive Insights product provides a unified view of key financial metrics, trends and predictive outcomes, to understand consumption by customer, device, site, and segment.

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solutions they grant operators vital information, displayed in an easy digestible graphical user interface, specifically designed to deliver immediate value to their customers.

Key differentiators Polystar enables CSPs and network equipment providers to adopt a focused approach to their CEM and big data analytics initiatives. It provides a strong solution for LTE as well as an integrated unified platform with the end-to-end functions for supporting multiple generations of mobile technologies from 2G, 2.5G, 3G to 4G. Polystar’s platform combines all its analytics solutions that facilitates a seamless drill down for deeper insights into the network and customer data.

Competitive pressures With the large service assurance vendors and other suppliers such as HP and IBM, aggressively pursuing the telecoms analytics market, it becomes difficult for smaller vendors to stand out from the crowd.

However, with a strong solution portfolio and a comprehensive range of services, including best practices, methodologies and disciplines, Polystar has managed to gain and maintain a strong market position.

Polystar has a strong customer base in EMEA and needs to continuously expand its geographical presence in North and Latin American, Asian and African markets.

The Audience Management product delivers forecasts of audience viewership at the household and time-slice levels to help optimise sales for addressable and digital content delivery in near real-time.

The vendor has developed strong mobile and web capabilities for its solutions.

Key differentiators Razorsight’s cloud-based software is unique in the industry, delivering both high performance and economy. Insights into subscriber, care and network activities are operationalised out-of-the-box to improve margins via revenue growth, retention and cost reduction.

Competitive pressures From large IT and network equipment vendors to start-ups, vendors are focused on the CEM space, each vying to differentiate its offerings with advanced predictive analytics capabilities. In 2013, SAP acquired KXEN to deepen its predictive analytics ability. In addition, Oracle and IBM, the former with its 2007 purchase of Hyperion and the latter with its 2009 acquisition of SPSS, have tightly integrated predictive analytics capabilities into their offerings. Razorsight need to continuously integrate more data sources and bridge the gap between IT and network data to stay ahead of competition.

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TA L K I N G H E A D S

Analytics driven CEM provides the complete context of a customer interaction ustomer experience management (CEM) is poised to be revolutionised by the insights generated by big data analytics. Jeff Stacey, the vice president of CEM and Analytics at Ericsson tells VanillaPlus that, while there are technology and organisational challenges to achieving CSPs’ ultimate CEM goals, there are lessons to be learnt from the early big data analytics deployments of other industries. The good news is that CSPs have vast, unexploited customer data that can be turned into actionable insights, that create up-sell and cross-sell opportunities that enable them to protect customer base, and grow in an increasingly aggressive market

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VanillaPlus: The telecoms industry is being seen as the next area in which investments in big data analytics will boom. Why is that?

Jeff Stacey: Insights gained into our operations and customer interactions are by nature, very perishable. It goes without saying that we must improve our responsiveness to remain competitive, but there are also significant opportunities to become more efficient, which we will talk about.

The telecoms industry faces high volume, and high velocity demand patterns that will require us increasingly to act on data in motion, rather than only aggregating and analysing data at rest.

What’s fortunate about what has been happening in big data analytics is that it was first birthed, and nurtured, in the high-tech and finance industries. These early adopters have funded the bleeding edge technologies, gone through the hype and taken out some of the pitfalls.

They’ve spent the dollars on making the technology applicable to business in general, not just the .com sector.

The next big spend is lined up for the telecoms industry because it has vast, and complex sources of data – from billing, to networking, to applications – that can now can be exploited to deliver highly differentiated services.

There’s a significant difference between what is generically being called big data, and big data analytics. Loosely defined, big data is generally associated with the challenges of harnessing, storing and managing this fantastic amount of data growth we are experiencing.

Some argue that more data has been created in the last five years than in the entirety of history – but that is not inherently an asset, unless it comes to extracting value from the immense volumes.

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CEM is not a new concept, but the next generation of CEM software solutions are definitely being transformed by analytics. However, the reverse is not necessarily true, in that loosely defined big data analytics projects do not give you CEM. VP: So how is big data analytics redefining the customer experience?

JS: There are a lot of obvious areas, such as being able to look at messages in big data from an operational standpoint. Less obvious is being able to correlate those to an individual customer. That’s the holy grail the CEM industry is working towards – a complete context of a customer interaction.

Jeff Stacey: The telecoms industry has vast, complex sources of data that can now be exploited to deliver highly differentiated services

Inevitably, that requires culture and process change, in addition to technical change. It almost goes without saying that having the right sponsorship and backing for a project is key.

In my past life, I've seen literally hundreds of individual big data consulting projects launch. It has become crystal clear that projects that have alignment with business priorities are wildly more successful than those that don’t.

In the vast majority of projects – those that were not aligned with business initiatives, the project got stuck in IT for almost a year. There’s therefore a lot of opportunity for CSPs to avoid these pitfalls drawing on the experience of seasoned business consulting, to keep the project aligned with business priorities.

The goal should be to take the science project out of data science, and instead make available actionable insights as part of routine, daily operations.

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In fact, we are getting reports from our CSP customers that sometimes only small, single digit percentages of the big data they are collecting, gets analysed. Effective big data analytics is all about finding the right data at the right time and making that available to the person who can take action on it, in time.

According to TM Forum, 62% of the world’s CSP CxOs view improving customer experience as at the top of their agendas. CSPs’ challenges include market saturation, which that means they need to compete with rivals to win new customers, and fight to retain the customers they already have. CEM initiative is the key way in which they will drive growth.

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TA L K I N G H E A D S

Big data analytics labs and CEM driven data projects should be held responsible for enriching the CEM software applications, CSR tools, and marketing campaigns.

Setting up a centre of excellence model has proven very effective in the finance industry, where project teams prove out their ROI to the test every 90 days, and scrap the project for another initiative, if it doesn't move the needle.

Analytics resources, and the potential payoff, are too valuable to just let it run blindly within IT for a year or more.

VP: If next generation CEM is about drawing on insights uncovered by big data analytics, how can CSPs assess what insights are valuable?

JS: Next generation CEM is often a dedicated analytics application, but it has to be insight driven, not data driven.

The quality of the insights has to enable a decision to be made whether that’s network, operational, customer or marketing. The insight has to give the right information at the right time to the right people.

Ideally, such an application is embeddable in existing business process, without disruption to existing CSR applications. But often, the value is so great, that it drives consolidation, or single pane of glass initiatives, because a superior process, and optimisation of process is now possible.

The timing is very important. Traditional reporting, for example, provides a snapshot of the past and, while there’s a place for that, some critical actions have a very short expiration date. Those include customer retention and the ability to respond rapidly to a customer upset.

The goal should be to take the science project out of data science, and instead make available actionable insights as part of routine, daily operations

Real-time or just-in-time as I'd say is sometimes more accurately said – conceptually is exactly what organisations need to effect change operationally on their networks. They need a real-time view of what the network and handset is experiencing now, and what factors cause customer concern. In addition, they ideally need to have a predictive view, to take preventive action in their network, and on high-value individuals.

From a return on investment point of view, it’s important to emphasise that not all of this is negative. There are up-sell and cross-sell opportunities among customers who are demanding better experience, and packages.

That’s incremental new revenue for CSPs. A lot of the ROI isn’t as far away as people thought.

There are engagements that can show results within 90 days and also bring the ability to generate immediate responses to campaigns for up-sell and cross-sell.

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One of the most important observations we have made is not to try and boil the ocean but to remain focused on clearly defined projects that will help CSPs reduce costs, reduce calls to customer care or increase satisfaction.

This project-specific approach can then be proved out in a manageable way.

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A successful approach here is to define a reusable, extendable analytics platform that feeds a variety of analytics applications that in turn support specific use cases for high value users or micro-markets. This way, the analytics investments and expertise are utilised, and yet the results are measurable, and aligned to support everyday business actions.

VP: You spoke earlier of CSPs being able to learn from the early adopters in other industries. What are the key lessons?

JS: In the financial industry, seconds made all the difference, and operationally the same reference architectures and the same approaches apply to CSPs. One of the hardest lessons learned was the patterns used to aggregate data, did not match the sometimes erratic patterns of demand a finance company would use, to take market advantage.

Contextual extraction, and delivery of information is key.

The telecoms industry also faces erratic demand patterns and will require us to increasingly act on data in motion, rather than only aggregating and analysing data at rest.

Not enough big data efforts have accounted for the value of data in motion because of the contextual disconnect of IT with the stakeholder's needs.

Many CTO's at our CSP's now are seeing that there is significant efficiency gains on only analysing and processing real-time data that is relevant, even if overall data will be archived at rest.

Therefore there needs to be a top down approach that requires you to take prioritisation of what investment must actually be used to create insights.

VP: So what are CSPs' options to deploy big data analytics that feeds CEM? JS: Lets name three stages to this – crawl, walk, run – and though every company may be in different stages, technologies, and projects - we all have much more to gain.

Crawl - means start looking at the facts, even in a past tense fashion, if necessary. The intelligence you gain may not be immediately actionable, and will tend to only raise blood pressure, for now.

This level of honesty and corporate self-awareness is required to align your CEM strategy with strategic initiatives.

Define, and prioritise which KPIs can be measured to effect change and how can that cascade throughout the line of business to become a measurable solution.

Walk - usually encompasses engaging the right partner – whether internal or external – and moving forward carefully to execute an action plan based on the requirements of the business – and testing the impact of contextual analytics in the NOC, call centre, and marketing operations.

Also, keep in mind the promise of the cloud and virtualisation revolution was that you could utilise the maximum capacity of your technology assets by managing a dynamic infrastructure that deals with the fits and starts of your business.

Run - this stage moves beyond just taking a snapshot of the past and current state – it involves being able to see around the curve, and on an individual level. Advanced, but very attainable analytics are needed to do correlations that operators may not have considered. For example, most CSP's are evaluating analytics to prevent and act on an individual experiencing poor network, but an unseen combination of bill shock is the perfect storm for a customer to leave.

The better portion of your analytics investment should not be sitting idle between projects, but directly feeding CEM applications. New big data technologies are designed to maximise your workloads for just that aim. An experienced partner can make use of these proven blueprints, and architect a solution, that stays in touch with the specific needs of our industry and your business priorities.

On the opportunistic side, being able to take the next best action or offer is something that can revolutionise the call centre experience and make the jobs of call centre representatives far simpler. Predicting when a user will call and why and then pinpointing the issue and troubleshooting it in potentially 40% less time provides a truly enhanced level of customer experience management. The up-sell and cross-sell opportunities then follow.

VP: How must CSP leaders think differently about analytics to take account of that?

CEM winners will be able to move forward aggressively because they see where the risk versus rewards are, and define what opportunities they want to take.

JS: They really have to think carefully about how their goals are to effect change in the customer experience they provide, as well as their approach to marketing.

Then, based on measurable objectives, identify what actions they’ll need to take upon each insight cycle.

Siloed analytics projects are not only limiting in terms of what can be achieved, it is also a recipe for duplicated IT investment across each silo.

A bottom up approach does have its place, but mostly to inventory what data assets you have, for potential harvesting.

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CEM winners will be able to move forward aggressively because they see where the risk versus rewards are, and define what opportunities they want to take

Clearly, those who wait and see are paying a terrible price in churn, network quality, and marketing effectiveness.

There is strong evidence showing direct correlation of customer experience to top line revenue, quality of customer base, and even a company's stock price.

Those that act will gain clarity, prioritise and then place educated bets. Those CSPs that respond organisationally – and swiftly – will achieve the highest return on their customer experience investments and that is what will set the winners apart in the telecoms market.

www.ericsson.com

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POLICY Can policy deliver flexible and profitable business models?

Sponsors

ANALYST REPORT

The authors are Karl Whitelock, (left) director of global operations and monetisation strategy and Troy Morley, (right) operations and monetisation strategy analyst, at Stratecast | Frost & Sullivan

Introduction ising data traffic is not new, in fact there has been a continued increase in traffic volumes for more than five years now. This action will persist in the near term, with some estimates indicating that data traffic by 2018 will be 11 times larger than it was in 2013. A major reason for this increase is the steady rise in smartphone and tablet sales across the globe to sustain both the consumer and business always-connected mindset

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For customers, the always-on and always available connectivity requirement for these devices is based on their need to: share data with others, engage with social media, bring the internet into an enriched learning experience, use apps for nearly every business and personal need, and seek out a variety of content sources, especially video. For network operators, the need to control how data flows across the network and to best position how usage of the network will meet rising customer needs is the business proposition for policy management today.

What is policy management?

Policy management solutions are used on both fixed and mobile networks; but, to bring clarity to the discussion, and to align with current market understanding of the role of policy, the Third Generation Partnership Programme (3GPP) definitions are commonly used by communication service providers (CSPs) and suppliers. However, the industry regularly uses 3GPP terms such as Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF) and Policy and Charging Enforcement Function (PCEF) to discuss policy functionality beyond the technical 3GPP standards for mobile.

The 3GPP specifications offer what is called a Policy and Charging Control (PCC) architecture, consisting of several key components including: •

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Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF) – The PCRF supports the definition of policy rules, and makes policy decisions based on those rules. It provides policy control, and is often called the policy manager. The PCRF directs the enforcement actions of the Policy and Charging Enforcement Function; and also interacts with the billing system – in particular, the rating and charging engine or, in 3GPP terminology, the Online Charging System.

VANILLAPLUS BLACKBOOK 2015

Policy 1.0 Business needs have changed and customer expectations are now different. Improved customer experience means controlling data usage differently than policy 1.0 prescribed

© 2014 Stratecast I Frost & Sullivan, all rights reserved.

Proprietary and Confidential to Stratecast

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Policy and Charging Enforcement Function (PCEF) – The PCEF provides policy enforcement on behalf of the PCRF, or via predefined rules configured directly on the PCEF. This logical entity also interacts, in some cases, with the rating and charging function.

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Online Charging System (OCS) – Interacting with both the PCRF and the PCEF, this system ensures that the service consumed is paid for, in the case of prepaid; or can be paid for under a postpaid billing contract. The OCS is part of a real-time rating and charging system.

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Off-line Charging System (OFCS) – The OFCS receives charging events from the PCEF, and is used for off-line charging. This logical entity is also part of a convergent rating and charging system.

The PCC architecture shows the tight interaction between the real-time rating and charging engine coupled with policy management. The rules function may be a PCRF server, capabilities included within a policy-enabled, real-time rating and charging engine, or both. For traffic pertinent to voice over LTE (VoLTE), some CSPs are dedicating a second PCRF server.

Policy management functionality provides the CSP and, under certain conditions, some customers a way to customise how a pricing package is consumed or a service is accessed.

The role and purpose of Policy Management 1.0 In the past, controlling bandwidth consumption without notifying customers (Policy 1.0) was a frequent occurrence.

Controlling bandwidth usage continues today, though to a lesser extent, in the name of keeping the network available for all. This practice – known in the global user community as usage throttling or metering, and to CSPs as traffic shaping or policy-based traffic control – is not a new concept. Policy 1.0 uses policy management rules and enforcement mechanisms to control network traffic, based on type, location, and, in extreme cases, data sent or received by individual users when network capacity thresholds – not billing thresholds – are

VANILLAPLUS BLACKBOOK 2015

exceeded. When such thresholds are reached, connectivity is either cut off completely or severely limited to a heavy data user in the name of preserving network quality and performance for all customers. Often customer notification is not provided.

Policy enforcement plays a key role in policy management.

Today’s PCEF solutions still aim to help control and optimise the network, while also maximising the quality of service (QoS) and the customer’s quality of experience (QoE). PCEF solutions also work with the PCRF and billing functions to more effectively monetise the use of network resources. In 2013 for example, mobile video traffic consisted of more than 53% of all mobile data traffic globally. For most CSPs, optimising the transport of video traffic is key for the effective operation of network assets. In the recent past, when network congestion was detected, these CSPs would have reduced the quality of all video traffic, and, therefore, the bandwidth consumed by this traffic, with little regard to how such actions affected their customers’ service experience. That approach is beginning to change.

With many CSPs today, policy enforcement strategies, most of which provide video and content optimisation, now take into consideration the potential customer impact. Video is optimised to provide the best viewing experience for the subscriber, on the device on which they are watching it – reducing the bandwidth required, but, more importantly, providing the best QoE for the end user. Popular video content is cached, further reducing bandwidth consumption, in an optimised format so that every smartphone, for instance, receives a quality viewing experience. Implementation of 4G LTE brings additional improvements.

Stratecast believes that the quality of the customer’s experience, the increasing desire for personalised service offers, and new needs from advanced mobile technologies such as VoLTE, mandate that policy strategy focus first on the customer experience then on managing the load-carrying capabilities of the network.

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ANALYST REPORT

Policy 2.0 Instead of differentiating on price, which eventually becomes a losing proposition, policy 2.0 allows new services that compliment the data connection

Š 2014 Stratecast I Frost & Sullivan, all rights reserved.

Proprietary and Confidential to Stratecast

Policy 2.0 - Paying attention to the customer experience The evolution of policy from its need as a network management and optimisation function to a tool for enhancing the customer experience is ongoing. So what is second generation policy management – Policy 2.0?

Policy 2.0 is the teaming together of policy management with rating and charging to deliver an improved experience through delivery of advanced services that involve network connectivity, content and cloud-based functions. These services, regardless of payment method – prepaid or post paid, have operations and monetisation needs that must be addressed on a real-time basis. The real-time component is a driving factor in aligning Policy 2.0 business strategy with customer expectations and current business realities.

For mobile, customer services revolve around data. Increasingly, instead of one network dedicated to voice traffic, and a separate designed for data, mobile is evolving to a single data network. As an example, most CSPs have either deployed or are in the process of deploying LTE. Where already deployed, LTE has delivered much faster data rates and increased throughput capacity over that of 3G, often approaching fixedline speeds. In addition, moving to VoLTE services with LTE makes the transition to all-data mobile services a reality while introducing several new functions that place CSPs back in a lead position with over the top (OTT) suppliers. These new functions include high-definition (HD) voice, HD voice/HD video interchange within the same call session, and embedded voice on a website or in an application.

These new capabilities are reflected in how subscribers are charged for the services they use. Mobile plans now include

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unlimited calling and text messages, but charge data usage. As VoLTE services roll out, CSPs may choose to charge for different guaranteed levels of quality such as HD voice and for multi-stream (voice and video) single session services.

Instead of differentiating just on price, policy allows new services to be built on top of the data connection. This approach allows service differentiation, including quality of service differentiation, and the delivery of added value to the customer experience. Of course, other CSPs will follow any success; but, by continually innovating through services based on a policy-enabled, real-time, rating and charging solution, a service provider can keep ahead of its competition. And, by personalising services to the wants and needs of its customers, such services get stickier, especially when the service is rightlypriced for the benefit received.

Policy 2.0 in action: The wave of personalisation A majority of new policy-driven use cases focus on enhancing the customer experience and in delivering the tools needed by a CSP to increase the profitability of its customers. Some time ago we introduced the notion that the evolution of policy was following a wave of personalisation, moving from networkfocused control and optimisation to increasingly personalised, customer experience-enhancing services. We see this trend continuing today at an even faster pace than just a few months ago.

The broad groupings shown in Figure 1 are a way of categorising the types of use cases that are at some level of deployment around the world. As is becoming increasingly apparent with the growing needs of CSPs, a use case

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Figure 1: Policy evolution use cases – The wave of personalisation

Source: Stratecast

introduced in one geographical region can become an instant success, while the same use case in a different region will receive mediocre or even poor customer response.

All of the policy categories described are relevant to business success, including network-focused policy. While not personalised nor displaying much customer appeal, networkfocused policy is essential for the health and operation of the network. In other words, a higher level of personalisation does not equate to better, it just serves a different purpose.

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Application-based – In the past this was a control-related approach designed to not allow access unless a premium was paid. Today, control is focused on bettering the customer experience with a specific application. In some cases, a behind-the-scenes B2B relationship between the CSP and app partner allows free usage for certain CSP customers who have a particular price plan or loyalty arrangement.

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Fair usage – Is aimed at users that consume more than their fair share of network capacity. In 2010, the top 1% of mobile data subscribers generated 52% of the global mobile data traffic. Focusing policy-defined traffic controls on this group was a logical step. In 2013, the top 1% of users generated only 10% of the global mobile data traffic – a clear example of why the Policy 1.0 approach is no longer the right focal point for a CSP’s business strategy.

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Tiered Plans – Tiered usage plans provide a happy medium for both customers and network providers. For instance, the lowest tier may be 1GB of usage, the next tier 2GB, then 3GB, and so on. Tiers may be for an individual or part of a shared plan. These plans also provide customer notifications when certain levels of usage are reached – which is now a regulatory mandate in many global regions.

Network usage-based use cases Usage-based service offerings are geared to address network usage and control needs. While we view this set of service offers as holdovers from Policy 1.0, they are the most common type of policy use case in force today, and form the foundation of more customer-centric use cases to follow. Some of these are: •

Usage quotas – Allows a certain level of consumption per period; such as 1GB of data per month. A quota within a quota allows additional levels of control; such as 1GB of data per month, with a daily usage limit not to exceed certain values.

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Time-based plans – Adds time as a criterion; for instance, 12 hours of access, with or without usage quotas.

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Location-based plans – Adds location criterion, for example, with international roaming service plans; provides an incremental usage level per day when roaming outside the customer’s home network.

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Network-focused use cases Network-focused use cases are not designed with the customer in mind, but are necessary to assure that a network operates at an acceptable level of performance to minimise service quality concerns including:

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ANALYST REPORT

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RAN congestion management – With increasing levels of data traversing a network, congestion is sometimes inevitable. This category gives CSPs policy-based solutions to mitigate congestion problems when they occur.

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Wi-Fi offload – A method for dealing with network congestion is to off-load traffic from a mobile network to Wi-Fi, and then back again. Wi-Fi offload is emerging as a new way to increase bandwidth limits and as a potential new source for monetisation tied to advanced service offerings and possibly sponsored advertising.

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Multi-access networks – Few CSPs have a homogeneous mobile network – composed of all LTE technology, for example. This type of use case is designed to help CSPs deal with the complexities of mobile devices switching between networks – say, from 4G to 3G.

Optimisation use cases Optimisation is a double-edged sword – initial use cases focused on the network to operate better, but more recent incarnations are more about the customer's QoE, including: •

•

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Video optimisation/management – With video now accounting for more than 50% of global data traffic, optimising video is essential to the health of a network. But consumers of video also appreciate the end result when what they want to watch loads quickly, plays without pauses, and looks great on their particular screen.

Device-based optimisation and application optimisation – Video or web pages can be optimised for a type of device, which again supports network operation and a quality customer experience. Applications are also optimised to the performance and output display of a device.

Bill shock and customer notification use cases Initially driven by bill shock regulation, there are several use cases that can inform customers when a level of usage is reached compared to a percent of plan limit. CSPs have now realised that the ability to notify customers, on their devices in near real-time, provides more than protection from the regulators. Real-time notifications allow customers to be more comfortable with data usage before exceeding plan limits.

Bill shock use cases also enable CSPs to upsell. For instance, a customer watching a video as they near a data plan limit can be offered – in real-time and on device – not only the ability to continue the video, but an option to consume more video in the future.

Group and shared plan use cases These use cases are not new. Regardless of the grouping, the idea is to share usage and spend amongst a group with common customer-definable attributes. A family share plan allows data limit allocation amongst users on the plan. This allows a level of personalisation that is specific to the needs of the group. The plan may include, for example, 4GB of data usage for a four-person family; but the administrator of the plan may allocate 1.5GB per parent and 0.5GB per child. After report cards come out, one child may be rewarded with additional usage for the next month, due to his or her success; potentially, at the expense of a child who did not meet expectations or reallocation of one of the parent's usage limits.

Groups may be anything: a family, a club, or an enterprise. They could even be an individual that needs the flexibility to share usage between devices. Each type of group has different needs and wants, but the idea is the same regardless of the group.

More specific group-level use cases include: Shared Plan or Shared Wallet; Family Plans; Group Plans; Enterprise Split Billing Plans; Sponsored Data Plans; Multiple-Device Plans; and Multiple-SIM Card Plans.

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Quality of service use cases Policy 2.0 encourages customer usage, especially if QoS guarantees are possible. These overlap heavily with other use case groupings. The aim is to not only make customers happier by increasing their QoE, but to monetise this enjoyment, either directly from the customer or via partnerships and sponsored data. For example, additional revenue may come from an executive who insists on QoS guarantees on their device(s) or from an OTT provider that pays a CSP for a defined level of network quality. Typical Quality of Service use cases are: •

Quotas with QoS guarantees – Combines a usage quota with quality guarantees.

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Turbo boost/Bandwidth on demand – Provides the ability to boost bandwidth on demand, where capacity is available and automated processes are operational.

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Application-based QoS – A particular application is guaranteed by the CSP to be delivered at a particular level of access or response time definition.

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Service bundles – A set of applications bundled together with a particular QoS level. For instance, a social media bundle may include Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with a guaranteed level of access and service performance for posting messages or updates.

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) – As M2M business models evolve, the value of traffic for a particular application may require QoS guarantees. This applies particularly with delivery acknowledgement within a fixed time window. An example would be M2M in a healthcare setting where timely delivery may mean the difference between favourable and less than desired outcomes – literally life or death.

Location-based QoS and roaming plans – Locationbased policy for roaming may mean a guarantee that data usage and voice services always work whenever a customer travels outside their home country.

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•

Tiered plans – Plans with tiered usage levels may have some QoS with certain service plan offers. An example might be an executive tier, with high usage levels and service availability guarantees.

Customer control use cases A major change from the recent past has been an increase in the amount of near real-time information that customers can access, and the amount of control that customers have with their accounts and services. Customer self-care is desired by both the CSP – to reduce cost; and the consumer – to increase personal control. Giving end-users the ability to adjust their services to their liking, in near real-time and without the need to call a customer service representative, is a major step forward in the personalisation trend. Usage examples that allow customers to personalise their communication services based on specific needs are: •

Parental Control Plans

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Enterprise Control, including Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) Plans

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Service Personalisation Plans

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Roaming Control Plans

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Data Control Plans

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Spend Control Plans

Loyalty and promotion use cases Receiving awards for customer loyalty promotes longevity. This approach works whether the customer is at the grocery store, a frequent airline traveler, or a mobile data customer. Promotions and loyalty plans may be used to encourage network usage at times when utilisation is low, or just to engender loyalty for premium customers. Promotions can be used to introduce new services, either specifically targeted or broadly based.

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ANALYST REPORT

Coupled with purpose-built analytics – automated analytical solutions designed to address specific business problems, advanced loyalty service offers can include packages based on device type, time-of-day, network location, type of content consumed and multiple others. In this case, a package of HD movie downloads could be provided for a set price, with no data usage measured against an already subscribed data plan.

Analytics increases the likelihood that offers will be relevant to the customer. Analytics combined with real-time presentation of an offer – on device and at the time of need – greatly increases the likelihood that the customer will accept the offer.

Examples include:

VoLTE use cases VoLTE is not one use case. It involves many complex process interactions between the policy management functions and other parts of a network. VoLTE is a building block for several new services such as high-definition voice, voice with video, and voice combined with certain web sites or applications.

VoLTE is a service sold as a superior quality alternative to regular voice. It requires policy to ensure that quality. In all likelihood, legacy policy servers will not be able to deliver the level of definition needed to give prioritisation to voice services such as emergency services, lawful intercept, or alternative voice support – fallback to circuit-switched channel – which is a regulatory mandate in most global regions. VoLTE use cases need policy to give the right level of prioritisation for service delivery and monetisation accountability.

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Loyalty programmes

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Promotional plans

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Upsell opportunities

Personalisation via analytics use cases

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Roaming passes

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Data passes

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Application service passes involving OTT partnerships

Combining analytics with policy is a growing trend amongst suppliers. Smartphones allow personalisation of external look and internal content – use of apps that now number in the millions. Utilising purpose-built analytics with their policy data, CSPs have greater insight into what types of devices consumers are using, where and when they are using them, what applications and services they currently utilise, and the content they consume. With this information, CSPs can offer services that appeal to niche markets. Combined with real-time presentation of an offer – on device and at the time of need – this greatly increases the likelihood that a consumer will accept any offer provided to them.

Partnership and new business model use cases There are a number of new business models taking shape, many involving one or more partners, that are essential for the future growth and financial health of the CSP community. One example includes a CSP ecosystem of partners to provide consumer services. These partners are often application and content providers that can supply various types of content or mobile applications. Certain OTT services may be greatly enhanced by increased QoS or network-based, customerspecific detail made possible from the CSP partner. Each requires policy control to deliver the right type of service functionality at the right time.

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Customer insight, gained through purpose-built analytics for understanding customer usage consumption and preferences, enables a more effective approach for the delivery of many of the use case examples previously discussed. For instance, imagine a package aimed at heavy users of Facebook and NetFlix, that have iPhone 6 devices, and who regularly roam.

Through analytics, CSPs can segment their subscribers in an unlimited number of ways.

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The last word Policy and policy-enabled rating and charging provide the keystone for creating, enabling and monetising advanced new services that are in demand by consumers globally. Other notable factors are: •

•

•

Policy’s role in ensuring the operation of the network continues in the face of exponential growth of data traffic brought about by increases in network speed and bandwidth from 4G LTE, along with increased customer usage from the immense global popularity of smartphones and tablets.

The next generation of policy – Policy 2.0 – expands the role of policy management: enabling new services, focusing on the customer experience, and, most importantly, monetising new offerings. The evolution of policy is enabling a wave of personalisation services, which allows CSPs to segment their markets to smaller and smaller sub-groups.

Purpose-built analytics, embedded within CSP billing and policy management solutions, address the need for real-time decisioning – the ability to gain insight about current customer behaviour, and then capitalise on that

knowledge by offering the customer something additional at the point of peak attention.

•

The effects of virtual network technologies are still evolving, but will impact policy management and all of the billing functions in the months ahead.

Policy has far reaching benefits to both customers and service providers, with a build toward service personalisation. The use of Policy 2.0 business strategies, described by each of the different use case categories represented by Figure 1 above, pushes business strategy closer to the level of a very small group or even individual customer service offers. When this occurs, customer stickiness is almost guaranteed.

Keeping customers is something that many CSPs must manage now, because obtaining a new customer in many regions of the world means stealing one from a competitor, as saturation levels reach well beyond 100%. We believe that the customer-centric use of policy management becomes the ultimate opportunity window for CSPs to continue to play a key role in the land grab for customer attention, which will be a lucrative revenue opportunity for some time to come.

About Stratecast Stratecast collaborates with our clients to reach smart business decisions in the rapidly evolving and hypercompetitive Information and Communications Technology markets. Leveraging a mix of action-oriented subscription research and customised consulting engagements, Stratecast delivers knowledge and perspective that is only attainable through years of real-world experience in an industry where customers are collaborators; today’s partners are tomorrow’s competitors; and agility and innovation are essential elements for success. www.frost.com

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CEO INTERVIEW

CSPs look to monetise with the power to predict Charlie Thomas is chief executive of Razorsight, a provider of cloud-based analytics solutions for CSPs. Here, he tells George Malim how the ability to predict network and customer behaviour and the capability to enable addressable advertising, provides CSPs with a valuable new revenue stream

C Charlie Thomas: CSPs and all their data can be analysed to provide a personalised experience to the user without violating their privacy

SPs of all types are faced with the same business challenge, that of market saturation, which is resulting in limited opportunities for growth in traditional operations. “That places inordinate pressure on growing topline revenues, particularly for publicly quoted companies, which most CSPs are,” explains Thomas. “Market saturation means price compression and a much more intense focus on delivering great customer experiences along with increased efforts to be proactive rather than reactive to customer issues.”

That is where the power of prediction comes in. “I see real-time insights providing strategic advantage sooner rather than later because keeping customers is extremely challenging for CSPs,” he adds. “I also see a lot of change in policy with SDN and virtualisation that are leading the industry down the path of maximising the value of real-time analysis.”

However, CSPs must learn to extract the value from these insights. “You can produce all the real-time insights you want but if people aren’t equipped to respond to it, it becomes just another report,” warns Thomas, who says Razorsight is seeing an acceleration in deployments of its systems.

www.razorsight.com

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The company has expanded its relationship with T-Mobile US to include additional analytics modules, the integration of Metro PCS which was recently acquired by T-Mobile, and an engagement term extension. In the cable market, Razorsight has won

a similar extension and analytics module expansion with Comcast.

Kodiak Networks, the global provider of push-to-talk (PTT) services to CSPs including Vodafone, KPN, AT&T and Verizon, has also deployed Razorsight predictive analytics to assist its customer experience management.

Razorsight also won a four-year contract to provide Virgin Mobile with real-time and predictive analytics.

“We’re going to help them deliver more proactive customer experience management and have real-time insights into customer behaviour and consumption,” adds Thomas, who is already turning his attention to the next CSP opportunity.

He thinks this will be addressable advertising. “Everyone’s looking at big data and, while it’s an over-used term, it can be used to create a better experience for every user,” he says. “When it comes to advertising, companies want the ability to target users with relevant offers and the technology exists to do that.”

“We see it as a big area of monetisation for mobile operators and cable operators on TV and on Wi-Fi,” he explains. “There’s tremendous potential as can be seen by providers like DirecTV increasing addressable advertising revenue from $100m last year to $600m this year. It’s certainly going to be a burgeoning market for CSPs and all their data can be analysed to provide a personalised experience to the user without violating their privacy.”

VANILLAPLUS BLACKBOOK 2015

BILL & CHARGE Why CSPs can keep control of the billing relationship and enable the order-to-cash process

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ANALYST REPORT

Introduction

T

The author, John Abraham, is senior analyst for Telecoms Software Research at AnalysysMason

he billing and charging market is set for significant changes and upheaval over the next few years. From the time the first modern telecoms billing systems went live in the 1960s, telecoms and technology have undergone massive changes. From a simple monthly billing system mostly developed inhouse for basic communication services, the billing and charging systems at use in communication service providers (CSPs) today have evolved to support a variety of sophisticated real-time use cases. CSPs are increasingly being driven to do more processing in real-time to provide differentiated services and a superior customer experience. This is having a profound impact on the underlying systems used by CSPs and in many cases it requires the transformation of currently installed software solutions and a change to established processes The advent of the internet era and the shift towards IP based traffic from circuit switched has had the most profound impact on billing systems.

Furthermore, the increasing popularity of mobile broadband and the rising penetration of smartphones have posed significant challenges to the way CSPs run their business. The decline in CSPs’ revenue from traditional services has coincided with significant investments in the roll-out of IP networks to support an explosion of data usage. This has put pressure on CSPs to monetise their service offerings more effectively and reduce churn by improving the customer experience.

Cloud On demand charging Shared plans Postpaid real time charging Prepaid charging Monthly charging Figure 1: Overview of the major shifts within CSP charging environment [Source: Analysys Mason, 2014]

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Billing and charging market drivers The billing and charging market was worth around US$4.5 billion in 2013 and is expected to grow moderately over the next five years. But the technical and business requirements will undergo significant changes as CSPs prepare to support new digital economy use cases.

1. Real-time charging for data services Real-time charging systems have been around for nearly two decades, mostly for charging prepaid voice and messaging services. As mobile data consumption soared over the last decade, the application and opportunity for real-time charging services also increased dramatically. Some of the new applications such as on-demand charging, shared bundles, speed boosters and real-time customer notifications require sophisticated real-time charging systems and cannot be supported on traditional platforms. The real-time charging system therefore becomes a critical component in a CSP’s ability to monetise new potential revenue streams. Besides realtime notifications and allowing customers track and control their spending in real-time have become pivotal for improving customer satisfaction.

2. LTE roll-out The deployment of LTE and the increased data speeds that it offers have had significant impact on the billing and charging market. The worldwide mobile data traffic is expected to grow at 47% CAGR over 2014-2018. CSPs are expected to spend significantly on network and spectrum to ensure good customer experience on their network. However, this will also throw up new challenges of monetising the usage to ensure optimised used of network resources. LTE roll-out is expected to trigger investments in billing and charging platforms, especially around data charging use cases.

3. Subscriber personalisation Traditionally, CSPs have offered standardised services to all customers for a limited number of services. However, over past

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decade, changing customer perceptions have led CSPs to invest in better ways to offer personalised service. Subscriber personalisation goes beyond offering a range of services to requiring individualised bundles and pricing options. This puts a substantial burden on the capabilities of the complex rating system to provide support. The need for CSPs is to not only offer personalised services, but also support those offers after they are accepted. While real-time charging is a key element of personalisation, it also calls for integrated customer care and billing systems, to segment, track and support customers more effectively.

4. Consolidation of legacy platforms Many CSPs have a number of disparate billing systems, which may have come together through mergers and acquisitions or to support specific use cases. Managing such a complex billing setup can be expensive and this drives CSPs to invest in a simpler, convergent billing platform. A convergent billing and charging platform allows CSPs to support both prepaid and postpaid users from a single instance. Convergent platforms have gained in popularity over the last decade and today are a necessary part of all new billing system requirements. By breaking down the separate silos between prepaid and postpaid systems, convergent platforms reduce support cost and time to market for new products and promotions. It is also more flexible and can be scaled cost effectively. While most tier one and tier two CSPs already have deployed some form of convergent billing, several smaller CSPs are still using legacy billing platforms. As the cost and complexity of maintaining the legacy billing system increases, many of these CSPs will make the switch towards convergent platforms.

5. Demand for bundled offerings Bundled offerings have offered a glimmer of hope CSPs faced with declining revenues from traditional services. Offering service bundles has helped CSPs, especially in developed regions, to strengthen their average revenue per account (ARPA). Besides, customers subscribing to bundled offers exhibit lower propensity to churn and therefore offer greater

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lifetime value to the CSP. Several CSPs are investing in adjunct billing platforms to support multi-play service offerings.

5.0 4.5 4.0

6. Digital economy use cases The rise of the digital economy will have a significant impact on CSPs’ business models as they seek to adapt to the alwayson, digitally enhanced lifestyles of advanced consumers. CSPs are wary of becoming dumb pipes and are keen to use their network and customer reach to add value beyond providing just connectivity. Partnerships are the key factor in most digital economy use cases and CSPs are expected to invest in sophisticated charging systems that can support complex partner settlement requirements.

3.5 3.0 2.5 2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5

7. Enterprise billing CSPs are increasingly positioning themselves aggressively in the enterprise market using their assets and expertise in connectivity, customer base and data centre management. The main trends in enterprise revenue opportunities for CSPs revolve around the move to mobile, cloud services and increasing reliance on data communicated over the internet.

Services such as M2M and unified communications will deliver strong growth and CSPs are expected to invest in back end support systems to ramp up their service offerings.

All the above detailed factors are expected to drive a nominal increase in spending on billing and charging systems over the next few years. A significant portion of the spending will be derived from maintenance and support services, with CSPs expected to keep their legacy systems running for the foreseeable future. There will be a noteworthy increase in new billing and charging use cases, driven by the need to support digital economy services. While the CSP spending on systems to support such new services is expected to be limited until the business cases are proved, it will bring about an increase in the number of new billing and charging vendors offering new systems dedicated to these new services.

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0.0 2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

Figure 2: Overall billing systems revenue forecast worldwide (excluding professional services), in US$ 2013–2018 [Source: Analysys Mason, 2014]

Key trends in billing and charging market 1. Service type trends Mobile services remain the dominant recipient of CSP billing and charging investments. This can be explained in that a significant portion of the new potential revenue opportunities for CSPs such as LTE data monetisation and OTT partnerships for content are predominantly in mobile.

Demand for pure-play prepaid and postpaid platforms is on the wane, with most of the investments in this segment coming in from CSPs looking to maintain and support their legacy systems. The maintenance revenue can be a significant amount because of the large, well-entrenched legacy billing systems in

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use at several tier one CSPs globally. Convergent platforms have taken over almost all of the new sales for billing and charging systems, even though most CSPs do not utilise its convergence potential initially as it is used to support selected prepaid or postpaid use cases.

2. Regional trends Region

Outlook

Asia-Pacific

The anticipated wave of LTE network deployments has begun in some countries and will continue to drive spending on systems to support mobile broadband.

The roll-out of broadband infrastructure across emerging economies is also expected to be a driver for spending on revenue management systems.

14% 7%

Latin America

10%

Subscriber numbers continue to increase and there will be increased activity in partner settlements in roaming and third-party content services.

69/% Europe, Middle East and Africa

Mobile PSTN Business Residential Broadband [Source: Analysys Mason, 2014]

Figure 3: Billing systems spending by service type in 2013, worldwide

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LTE deployments have continued to increase in this region and will drive spending on systems to support mobile broadband.

Strong competition and slow recovery from recession has delayed spending on billing systems in western Europe as CSPs are hindered by declining revenue.

The Middle East and North Africa represent a growth region within EMEA, although from a relatively smaller base.

North America

Moderate growth has returned to the region, as LTE roll-outs drive spending from the major mobile CSPs. North America continues a modest move towards prepaid services, which helps to drive sales of new systems.

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ANALYST REPORT

3. Technology trends The software development effort for telecoms has evolved radically over the past two decades towards faster design cycles, less expensive hardware and lower support costs, as development moves from in-house to generic vendor supplied systems.

platforms started gaining traction. Lately, software as a service (SaaS) deployments are attracting CSP interest, driven by a number of factors discussed below. However it must be noted that the traditional billing platform vendors are strongly entrenched in most leading CSPs worldwide and these systems will not be replaced completely for the next several years.

While the adoption and success of SaaS based billing services are some years away, there are several reasons why SaaS deployments hold promise for CSPs.

In-house billing systems

Vendor billing platforms

Network agnostic COTS platforms

SaaS based deployments

Source: Analysys Mason, 2014

Figure 4: Shifts in leading edge CSP approaches towards billing and charging platforms

It must be noted that there are overlaps between each of these phases in the diagram above and they are not mutually exclusive. The first iterations of telecoms billing systems were mostly developed in-house to support monthly billing for basic voice services over POTS. Over the next couple of decades CSPs tilted firmly towards vendor provided platforms as mobile communication took off. As prepaid usage increased, the billing function moved closer to the network as prepaid IN systems gained prominence. Further along, as billing and network complexities increased and the traffic shifted to IP from circuit switched, network agnostic software driven convergent billing

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1. For one, they are capex friendly. CSPs faced with declining voice revenues and high network expansions costs are looking at ways to improve their cash flow. SaaS based deployments incur minimal capex and are mostly based on a pay-as-you-grow business model. This is attractive for many CSPs looking to slash their costs.

2. Support for new business models is another key factor.

The digital economy ecosystem calls for partnerships with a number of different players in a short period of time.

CSPs’ traditional way of doing business is incapable of supporting such requirements. Having a cloud based deployment that is flexible, easily scalable and adherent to standard APIs can drastically cut down on time to market for new partner services.

3. Availability of technical expertise is another reason why CSPs especially in emerging markets are considering SaaS based use cases. Such deployments can be remotely monitored and managed without onsite support.

For all the benefits, there are some significant obstacles that have slowed down any large-scale adoption of SaaS service models: 1. There are strict regulations regarding how and where customer data can be stored and transferred. While most CSPs are not considering SaaS deployments in public

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cloud, even private cloud hosted solutions need to be compliant with security and data protection regulations or the implications can be huge.

2. Network latency for cloud-based services remains a significant issue in most regions, especially emerging markets where there tend to be connectivity black holes. In case of cloud hosted billing deployments, network latency has to be less than 50 milliseconds for real-time charging use cases, which requires dedicated direct connections.

However there is greater flexibility in case of postpaid charging use cases.

Change is in the air The telecoms industry is undergoing a massive shift today with strong competition, declining voice revenues, explosive growth of data and more stringent regulation. Effective data monetisation has become a key pillar of success for CSPs as they battle to stay relevant in the light of competing services from OTT players alongside the need to invest significantly in network upgrades and support systems.

Prepaid and postpaid systems will continue to dominate the billing and charging market for the next several years, with growth almost entirely coming from convergent platforms.

Billing systems have very long active service lives and are seldom completely decommissioned by CSPs. However the number of services supported by a legacy platform will decrease over time though they continue to remain in service.

Mobile will continue to attract the lion’s share of CSP investments in billing and charging as the number of mobile data based digital economy use cases increase (such as sponsored data). Emerging markets will see stronger growth for billing and charging systems driven by new technology deployments such as LTE and fibre broadband roll out.

SaaS based deployments have the potential to have a strong impact on billing and charging systems, mainly as it allows CSPs to take cost out of their operations. While large-scale deployments of SaaS based billing services are some years away, there will be increasing number of small use cases being supported by such services in the medium term. The next few years looks to be an exciting time in the billing and charging market with significant changes and upheaval on the anvil. For more information feel free to contact me at john.abraham@analysysmason.com

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ANALYST REPORT

About Analysys Mason Knowing what’s going on is one thing. Understanding how to take advantage of events is quite another. Our ability to understand the complex workings of telecoms, media and technology (TMT) industries and draw practical conclusions, based on the specialist knowledge of our people, is what sets Analysys Mason apart. We deliver our key services via two channels: consulting and research.

Consulting • •

•

Our focus is exclusively on TMT. We support multi-billion dollar investments, advise clients on regulatory matters, provide spectrum valuation and auction support, and advise on operational performance, business planning and strategy.

We have developed rigorous methodologies that deliver tangible results for clients around the world.

For more information, please visit www.analysysmason.com/consulting.

Research •

• •

We analyse, track and forecast the different services accessed by consumers and enterprises, as well as the software, infrastructure and technology delivering those services.

Research clients benefit from regular and timely intelligence in addition to direct access to our team of expert analysts.

Our dedicated Custom Research team undertakes specialised and bespoke projects for clients.

For more information, please visit www.analysysmason.com/research.

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COMPANY PROFILES

Company summary Founded

1876

HQ

Kista, Stockholm, Sweden

Employees

115,000

Revenue

US$34.9 billion (2013)

Customer

Over 500 customers in more than 180 countries. Key customers include AT&T, Comcast, MTN, Rogers, Saudi Telecom (STC), Telefónica, T-Mobile, Turkcell, Vodafone, Verizon, BT, BskyB, Swisscom, Time Warner, Sprint, Orange and Telenor.

Partnerships

Accenture, HP, IBM ESRI

Financial Status

Publicly Traded

Revenue management products Converged Billing in One (CBiO)

Ericsson’s CBiO offers a flexible modular architecture and includes standard public interfaces and integration to external systems such as CRM, ERP and point-of-sale. The solution offers real-time, end-to-end functionality for accurate billing and charging. It enables CSPs to offer converged services with a single bill and single point of customer care. CBiO comes pre-integrated with Ericsson’s Telecom CRM product and integrates with Ericsson Catalog Manager as well, offering service agility. The solution also supports dynamic and personalised service bundles, tiered pricing and shared plans.

Ericsson Expert Analytics

Ericsson Expert Analytics is a horizontal data analytics solution that correlates metrics and events from network nodes, probes, OSS/BSS and other sources. It supports multi-vendor environments and includes an SDK and API that allows flexibility in adapting new data feeds. It also supports purpose-built applications such as Customer Experience Assurance (CEA) and Expert Analytics for Marketing (EAM).

Multi-Mediation

Multi-Mediation provides a single platform and interface for post-processing systems that can handle traditional off-line, CDR-based, billing mediation and bi-directional, real-time mediation and event-based mediation.

Yield Management

Yield Management is a tool that supports innovative tariffs to increase network revenues and optimise network utilisation. It controls the inventory and targets the right customer at the right time with the right tariff.

Key differentiation Ericsson offers a robust end-to-end BSS and OSS product portfolio, provided as pre-integrated suites or standalone modules.

These products enable CSPs to develop automated processes, offer personalised services and dynamically build and manage contextually relevant services. The product offerings are backed by a strong global services group with deep understanding of network and system infrastructure and also a wide partner ecosystem. These solutions are further supported by a comprehensive analytics platform that drives real-time insights that help achieve higher levels of customer experience and loyalty. For CSPs seeking to transition towards digital service providers, the company offers a clear vision for building the programmable infrastructure of the future using NFV, SDN and cloud technologies. Ericsson’s customer base includes several tier one mobile network operators and cable companies worldwide.

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COMPANY PROFILES

Company summary Founded

2008

HQ

Mountain View, California, USA

Employees

95

Revenue

Undisclosed

Customer

Swisscom, Teleena, Telstra, tier one APAC mobile operator, European MVNO

Partnerships

Aria, Atos, CapGemini, F5, IBM, Sicap, Tech Mahindra, Unico, MDS, KPMG

Financial Status

Privately held

Revenue management products Converged Billing MATRIXX Unified Policy and Charing

MATRIXX Unified Policy & Charging combines the functions of an online charging system (OCS) and policy and charging rules function (PCRF) into one real-time product that has been engineered to deliver predictable performance under load in demanding LTE and LTE-Advanced deployments. It supports rating, balance management, online charging and makes network and customer policy decisions for all services, payment methods and line-of-business segments. The solution also includes MATRIXX Catalog Builder, which is a graphical user interface tool that combines product, pricing, discounting, policy and configurations and allows creation of sophisticated customer offers across multiple products and services.

Administrators can reuse pricing and policy data across product catalogues through a unique ‘set up once, reuse anywhere’ approach, which allows new offerings to be quickly rolled out. Centralising pricing and policy configurations reduces likelihood of errors and allows easier support for new policy and charging use cases such as sponsored data and optimised OTT video packages.

Key differentiation The MATRIXX unified policy and charging solution offers inherent scalability and low latency. The solution was engineered from the ground up as a unified platform and MATRIXX claims unrivalled performance based on benchmarking and live customer implementations. The system uses patented technologies such as Contention-free In-Memory Database, Parallel-MATRIXX processing, Algebraic-Decision Engine and Parallel-MATRIXX Clustering. It allows CSPs to offer tailored price plans and allows customers more control in real time through accurate notifications. The solution can be quickly deployed and new products and promotions can be configured in-house without professional services, which reduces time to market. It also offers significant hardware cost savings as it can run on low-cost commoditised hardware without requiring third party database software.

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TA L K I N G H E A D S

Petter Järtby: Pricing is the strongest lever to impact profitability

Strategic pricing can be the answer to secure CSPs’ future profitability

P

etter Järtby is head of business unit BSS at Ericsson. In this interview, he tells Vanilla Plus that many CSPs have embraced innovations in both products and customer service, and are now adopting business-model innovations to help them deal with evolving ecosystems. But by themselves, these approaches are still not delivering the kind of revenue increases CSPs want and need. Arguably that can only come from an area of innovation that, historically, is not on many CSPs’ radar: pricing.

L

Järtby proposes the concept of experience-based pricing (EBP). This enables CSPs to charge for the value of the overall experience delivered than solely for network connectivity. This concept requires a high degree of customer intimacy combined with analytically-derived insights into the customers’ experience and preferences

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TA L K I N G H E A D S

It’s better to provide customers with the option to have a reliably consistent experience at a greater cost than it is to provide a dissatisfying and unpredictable experience

VanillaPlus: Can you explain a little more about the concept of experience-based pricing and why CSPs should be interested in it?

Petter Järtby: Put simply, experienced-based pricing is about charging based on the perceived value of the customer’s experience within a given context, rather than based on solely the network access.

Experience-based pricing may be the only feasible solution to the challenging business outlook facing many CSPs today. Specifically, Ericsson predicts that network traffic will grow ten-fold by 2019 whereas the GSMA predicts CSP revenues to grow by only 20% over the same period. We also see that newly deployed LTE networks are loaded shortly after they are completed because user demands are constantly increasing.

This business outlook results in an unacceptable ROI for CSPs and their shareholders, impacting their ability to invest in their infrastructure and properly serve their customers. They need solutions, and EBP can be part of that solution. As a long term partner to CSPs, Ericsson wants to help them explore potential solutions to address this situation, hence why we are discussing the concept of EBP. CSPs have looked into many different areas to address this situation.

They’ve cut costs, they’ve targeted new business models to grow revenues, and they’ve looked at product and service innovation.

Everything except pricing innovation has been considered and that’s odd because research from McKinsey and company indicates that pricing is the strongest lever to impact profitability. This research found that when you increase average price by as little as 1% you impact the bottom line by 11% on average.

Many CSPs are offering unlimited access to a finite resource and as a result we are starting to see pricing wars emerge – which is the start of a downward spiral to low profitability. What’s more, customers are only served well if the service provider is profitable enough to fund research and development and ensure the services they offer are of high quality and attractive to users.

VP: What is needed to enable CSPs to charge based on the value of an experience? Is there a danger of charging at too high a rate and causing people to not use services?

PJ: EBP is about taking into account much more than just network connectivity – such as utilising complex value propositions to understand what the customer is prepared to pay based on the value of the service to them in a specific context.

For example, it’s unlikely that a consumer will pay a premium simply to watch a YouTube video on their phone at home. But imagine that customer was at the World Cup Final, and willing to pay much more than the standard rate to send a video to friends – to share the experience with them. Pricing of that experience could then be based upon supply and demand at that moment.

Where there’s a difference in delivered experience there is a difference in value. The experience is different at the grocery store than it is at the World Cup Final. The context therefore matters because in the latter scenario, you’re at a ‘once in a lifetime’ event but from a CSP perspective there is constrained capacity at that event because everyone in the stadium wants to send videos during the same time period. The CSP must consider how to serve those customer demands profitably to optimise their return on investment.

It’s better to provide customers with the option to have a reliably consistent experience at a greater cost than it is to provide a dissatisfying and unpredictable experience – such as throttling – at the standard rate. By employing yield management concepts such as EBP, you are establishing equilibrium in the supply and demand of connectivity and capacity. Users who are not willing to pay the higher price during capacity constrained conditions opt out and give that opportunity to those who value a higher quality experience at that moment. This is very similar to yield management techniques that have been used for decades in the airline and hotel industries.

L

To get started an operator would first need to develop a pricing strategy based on the following primary inputs: • Micro-segmentation – the process by which you analyse your customer base and uncover smaller and smaller segments with different priorities; theoretically, getting to a ‘segment of one’ • Insightful Information – the analytical insights that are exclusively traversing CSPs’ networks and systems and can be used to develop personally relevant offers at an acceptable profit • Mathematical models – that incorporate the micro-segmentation, insider information and market and competitive information to determine the optimal price point for individual services and various

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combinations that result in a ‘win-win’ situation for the CSP and the customer.

VP: How will CSPs use the data they collect about their customers to extract insights to enable them to make relevant propositions to customers and partners? Is EBP about more than charging the consumer according to experience?

PJ: While EBP does propose that CSPs charge for the experience, it also provides a way to uncover additional value for the customer. Scenarios exist in which there is a service a consumer might value but doesn’t know what it will cost them so they don’t use it for fear of bill-shock.

Take international roaming for example. Currently, greater than 70% of international travellers turn off mobile broadband when they roam due to the uncertainly of the charges, even though many of them indicate that international access would be valuable to them. CSPs could determine their average cost for providing international roaming for a day and then offer it as a service to their customers at a flat price, giving customers what they need at a price that is acceptable to them and at a profit that is appropriate for the CSP. This can be extended to OTT partners that might wish to pay CSPs for delivering their services or for the insights into how customers are using the OTT service. If a CSP is employing micro-segmentation, it knows which OTT services and apps are being used and can make that information available to its partners. The CSP has more information than the OTT partner does and can buy in bulk from the OTT partner and deliver a service at a specific cost. There is the potential for CSPs to resell and profit from this as well.

VP: Why have CSPs been slow to adopt EBP or other yield management techniques? What are the barriers to adoption?

PJ: If a CSP wants to deploy EBP, they certainly need the technological capabilities I’ve mentioned, but organisational readiness is also a significant challenge.

Historically, CSPs have not used pricing as a

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differentiator and haven’t developed and systematically evolved their pricing strategies as have other industries such as airlines, hospitality and now online retail. CSPs would have to treat pricing strategy development and execution with the care as they currently do product development and execution.

An interesting point is that many CSPs have invested in robust technical capabilities but still have not used them to their full potential. One reason for this situation is that the organisational readiness for pricing strategy development is not in place. Of course, market and competitive considerations must also be carefully weighed and included in the pricing strategy development.

VP: What do you see as the prospects for EBP as it becomes more widely understood and deployed?

PJ: CSPs have to be convinced EBP is a viable pricing strategy. Based on the economic theories of supply and demand, EBP uses sophisticated yield management techniques that have been used successfully in other industries for decades. The telecoms industry is experiencing some of the same market conditions that these industries experienced before they began to use yield management techniques. We believe concepts like EBP will enable CSPs to gracefully transition to the dynamic, real-time, ever-increasing demands that mark the Networked Society; just as similar pricing concepts helped airlines and online retailers successfully transition.

As the market shifts away from traditional, singleconnection contracts, we’re seeing watershed offerings such as the emergence of shared data plans and ‘nocontract’ post-paid plans that create more of a ‘free market,’ bringing CSPs closer to dynamic pricing and EBP. As mentioned earlier, many have already deployed integrated charging and analytics, but they simply don’t use them to their full potential. The irony is that of all the consumer facing industries, telecoms has the richest source of data about customers. It’s time CSPs made profitable use of it for the benefit of themselves and their customers.

www.ericsson.com

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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: www.orga-syste www.orga-systems.com ms.com | communicati communication@orga-systems.com on@orga-systems.com

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

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ANALYST REPORT

Introduction

B

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

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,

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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 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:

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• 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.

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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

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ANALYST REPORT

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

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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

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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

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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. CSPs’ 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

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ANALYST REPORT 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).

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

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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?

Advanced analytics is critical for CEM 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.

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

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help drive optimum decision-making for their most valuable customers will prove vital to achieve their vision of delivering on optimum customer 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

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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.

10000

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Total Big Data Analytics Market in Telecom

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Figure 10: Advanced analytics market size in telecom by region

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.

Big Data & Analytics Market Size

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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: 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

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ANALYST REPORT

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. 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.

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.

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).

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.

Conclusion

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.

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

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

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COMPANY PROFILE

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.

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COMPANY PROFILE

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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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.

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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.

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“...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

L

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.

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“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

88

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 BLACKBOOK 2015

DIRECTORY 2015

DIRECTORY 2015

Cerillion Technologies

CSG International

Sectors: Billing (Utility) | Billing & Customer Care | Product Catalogue | Revenue Management | PCC- Policy Control and Charging | Customer Relationship Management | Cloud Computing | Credit, Cost & Debt Control | Roaming Clearing & Settlement | Order Management | Machine to Machine (M2M) | Partner Settlement | Billing (Interconnect & Wholesale) | Billing (Retail) | Partner Relationship Management | Mediation & Collection | Billing (Convergent Pre- & Post-paid)

Sectors: Roaming Clearing & Settlement | Machine to Machine (M2M) | Risk Management | Revenue Management | Revenue Assurance | Revenue Management | Other | Customer Relationship Management | Partner Relationship Management | Mediation & Collection | Partner Management | Billing (Retail) | Billing (Convergent Pre- & Post-paid) | Customer Care | Billing & Customer Care | Billing & Charging

Cerillion is a leading provider of billing, charging and customer management systems with more than 20 years' experience delivering its solutions across a broad range of industries including the telecoms, finance, utilities and transportation sectors. These are used to price and bill subscriptions and variable usage for wholesale, retail and white label services; B2B and B2C offerings and multi-country service provider portfolios.

Cerillion Skyline combines this heritage of providing high performance billing and transaction processing engines with an intuitive online user interface to provide a complete Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) billing application for the next generation of digital and non-digital services.

Email: Phone: Fax: Website: Website:

info@cerillion.com +44 20 7927 6000 +44 20 7927 6006 www.cerillion.com www.cerillionskyline.com

Company

CSG International is a market-leading business support solutions and services company serving the majority of the top 100 global communications service providers, including AT&T, Comcast, DISH, Orange, Reliance, SingTel Optus, Telecom New Zealand, Telef贸nica, Time Warner Cable, T-Mobile, Verizon, Vivo, and Vodafone. With more than 30 years of experience and expertise in voice, video, data, and content services, CSG International offers a broad portfolio of licensed and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based products and solutions that help clients compete more effectively, improve business operations and deliver a more impactful customer experience across a variety of touch points.

Email: Phone: Website:

heidi.halliday@csgi.com +44 1483 745800 www.csgi.com

Website

Company

2Ergo

2ergo.com

Communications co.)

BT

business.bt.com

4th Screen Advertising

4th-screen.com

Argogroup (an Ascom company) argogroup.com

Business Logic Systems

businesslogicsystems.com

ABITEL Consulting GmbH

abitel.de

Aricent

aricent.com

Bytemobile

bytemobile.com

Accanto Systems

accantosystems.com

Arieso

arieso.com

Capgemini

capgemini.com

Accedian Networks

accedian.com

Arkipelago

arkipelago.com

Casewise

casewise.com

Accenture

accenture.com

ARRIS

arrisi.com

CA Technologies

ca.com

Accipia Ltd

accipia.com

arvato finance

arvatofinance.com

CBOSS Corporation

cbossgroup.com

ACES

aces-co.com

Ascom Group

ascom.com

CellVision AS

cellvision.com

Acision

acision.com

Aspect Software, Inc

aspect.com

Centile

centile.com

ACL

acl.com

Aspiro

aspiro.com

Ceragon Networks

ceragon.com

Acme Packet

acmepacket.com

Astellia

astellia.com

Cerillion

cerillion.com

acoreus AG

acoreus.com

ATDI SA

atdi.com

CGI

cgi.com

ACS

acsdallas.com

ATIO

atio.com

Check Point Software

checkpoint.com

Actix

actix.com

Atlas Interactive Germany

atlasinteractivegroup.de

Technologies Ltd

Adapt

adaptplc.com

Atos Origin

atosorigin.com

Ciqual

ciqual.com

Adare

adare.com

Audilog Groupe Ericsson

audilog.com

Cisco

cisco.com

Aepona

aepona.com

Autonomy etalk

etalk.com

Clarity Integration Ltd

clarity-integration.com

Affiniti

affiniti.com

Averox

averox.com

Classifeye

classifeye.com

Aicent

aicent.net

Azoft (a division of DonRiver, Inc) azoft.com

Clearswift

clearswift.com

AIRCOM International Ltd

aircominternational.com

Barcoding, Inc

barcoding.com

Comarch AS

comarch.com/telecommunications

Airwide Solutions

airwidesolutions.com

BaseN

basen.net

CommScope

commscope.com

Aito Technologies Oy

aitotechnologies.com

Basset Global

bassetglobal.com

CommSolv

commsolv.com

Aktavara

aktavara.se

Bercut Ltd

bercut.com

CommuniGate Systems

communigate.com

Aladdin Knowledge Systems Co.

aladdin.com

Billing Components GmbH

billing-components.com

Communications Fraud

cfca.org

Albany Software

albany.co.uk

Bivio Networks

bivio.net

Control Assoc

Alcatel-Lucent

alcatel-lucent.com

Blue Coat

bluecoat.com

Comptel Corporation

comptel.com

Allot Communications

allot.com

Blue Star Infotech

bsil.com

Computaris

computaris.com

Allround

allround.net

Bluestreak Technology

bluestreaktech.com

Compuware

compuware.com

Amdocs

amdocs.com

Bluetab

bluetab.net

Comsearch (a Commscope co.)

comsearch.com

Amdocs Interactive

changingworlds.com

BMC Solutions

bmcsolutions.co.uk

Comverse

comverse.com

Analysys Mason

analysysmason.com

Boku

boku.com

Comviva

comviva.com

Anritsu A/S

eu.anritsu.com

Brighterion

brighterion.com

Condico

condicomobile.com

Apex CoVantage

apexcovantage.com

BroadHop

broadhop.com

Connectiva Systems, Inc

connectivasystems.com

Arantech (Tektronics

arantech.com

BroadVision

broadvision.com

Consona CRM

consona.com

90

Website

Company

Website

VANILLAPLUS BLACKBOOK 2015

DIRECTORY 2015

Dynamic Design

FTS

Sectors: Network Management | Enterprise Resource Planning | Backhaul Management | Enterprise Resource Management | Network Discovery & Optimisation | Inventory, Asset & Element Management | Network Configuration Management

Sectors: Policy Management | Billing (Utility) | Mobile Virtual Network Enablers | Inventory, Asset & Element Management | PCC - Policy Control and Charging | Partner Settlement | Partner Management | Machine to Machine (M2M) | Partner Relationship Management | Customer Relationship Management | Mobile Virtual Network Operators | Billing (Convergent Pre- & Post-paid) | Billing (Retail) | Billing (Interconnect & Wholesale) | Customer Care | Billing & Charging | Billing & Customer Care | eBilling, ePayment & ePresentment FTS, a Magic Software Group company, works with telecoms, content, M2M and payment service providers globally to help them manage complex transactions and relationships with greater flexibility and greater independence.

Dynamic Design is a leading software vendor providing OSS/BSS solutions for telecoms networks supporting communication service providers and infrastructure service providers. Dynamic Design`s flagship solution is ConnectMaster, a market leading ‘Off The Shelf Standard’ Service & Inventory Management Platform that integrates physical inventory for OSP (outside plant) and ISP (inside plant) and logical inventory (logical link management for all kind of transmission technologies) seamlessly with GIS (Geographical Information System) to a comprehensive all-in-one solution. Dynamic Design has offices and partners throughout Europe, Asia Pacific, Africa, US and Latin America.

Email: Phone: Fax: Website:

info@dynamic.design.com +43 7242 73043 0 +43 7242 73043 4000 www.dynamic-design.com

Analysing every transaction from a business standpoint, FTS offers end-to-end and add-on telecoms billing, charging, policy control and payment solutions to customers worldwide, and services both growing and major providers. FTS implements solutions, including convergent billing platform installations, in mobile, wireline, broadband, MVNO/E, payments, e-commerce, M2M, mobile money, cable, cloud and content markets. FTS’ solutions dramatically lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) for telecoms and content service providers.

Email: Phone: Website:

Company

info@fts-soft.com +972 9 952 6500 www.fts-soft.com

Website

Company

Website

Company

Website

Consult-Hyperion

chyp.com

EMC Ionix

emc.com

FTS

fts-soft.com

Continuous Computing

ccpu.com

Emida

emida.net

Gemalto

gemalto.com

Convergys

convergys.com

Empirix, Inc

empirix.com

GENBAND

genband.com

CopperEye

coppereye.com

empolis arvato

empolis.com

generationE Technologies

generationetech.com

Cordys

cordys.com

End2End

end2end.net

Generic Software Consultants Ltd generic-software.com

Creanord Ltd

creanord.com

Endace Ltd

endace.com

Genesys (an Alcatel-Lucent co.)

CreditCall

creditcall.com

ENTEREST GmbH

enterest.eu

Gensym (a Versata Enterprises co.) gensym.com

CRM Technologies

crmtechnologies.com

Entuity

entuity.com

GeoCentric

geocentric.com

CSG International

csgi.com

Envivio

envivio.com

Getronics NV

getronics.com

CSR

csr.com

Equinox IS

equinoxis.com

Gintel

gintel.com

CTI Group

ctigroup.com

Ergon

ergon.ch/en/telecom

GIPS Group

gips.net

Current Analysis

currentanalysis.com

Ericsson

ericsson.com

Global 360, Inc

global360.com

Customer Value Partners

cvpcorp.com

eServGlobal

eservgobal.com

Google

google.com

cVidya Networks

cvidya.com

ESKADENIA Software

eskadenia.com

GRUPO DELAWARE

grupodelaware.com

CyberSource

cybersource.com

ETI Software Solutions, Inc

etisoftware.com

GSMA

gsma.com

Cycle30

cycle30.com

EuroMACC Ltd

euromacc.com

Harris Stratex Networks

harrisstratex.com

Devoteam

devoteam.com

Eurotime Solutions Ltd

eurotimesolutions.co.uk

HP

hp.com

Data Track Technology PLC

datatrackplc.com

Evidian (a Groupe Bull co.)

evidian.com

Horsebridge Networks

horsebridge.net

Dataflow Communications Ltd

dataflow.net

Evistel

evistel.com

Huawei

huawei.com

deCarta, Inc

decarta.com

Evolved Intelligence Ltd

evolved-intelligence.com

i-conX solutions Ltd

iconxsolutions.com

Dialogic Corporation

dialogic.com

Evolving Systems

evolving.com

i2 (a Silver Lake Sumeru co.)

i2.co.uk

Diginotar

diginotar.com

Excentis

excentis.com

IBM Corp

ibm.com

Digital Fuel Technologies, Inc

digitalfuel.com

EXFO

exfo.com

ICare

icare.it

DigitalRoute

digitalroute.com

Experian

experianplc.com

Identify Networks

identifygroup.co.uk

Dimension Data

dimensiondata.com

Experian Payments

experianpayments.com

IIR Telecoms & Technology

iir-telecoms.com

DNS

dns.co.uk

EyeBill Interactive Solutions

eyebill.net

ILOG

ilog.com

DragonWave

dragonwaveinc.com

F5 Networks

f5.com

Incognito Software

incognito.com

EastWind

eastwind.ru

FICO

fico.com

Indra Sistemas

indra.es

Easynet

easynet.com

FIQAS Software BV

fiqas.nl

Info Directions

infodirections.com

ECI Telecom

ecitele.com

Fiserv

fiserv.com

Infonova

infonova.at

ECT - Telecom

ect-telecoms.com

Flash Networks

flashnetworks.com

Infor

infor.co.uk

eGain

egain.com

Fluke Networks, Inc

flukenetworks.com

Informa Telecoms & Media

informatm.com

Elitecore Technologies Ltd

elitecore.com

FML

fmlsolutions.com

Informatica Corp

informatica.com

Eltel Networks

eltelnetworks.com

FROX communication

frox.com

Information Engineers

idest.co.uk

VANILLAPLUS BLACKBOOK 2015

genesyslab.com

91

DIRECTORY 2015

Infonova

InfoVista

Sectors: Product & Service Management | Mobile Virtual Network Operators | Credit, Cost & Debt Control | Application Lifecycle Management | Billing (Utility) | Order Management | Customer Experience Management | Revenue Management | Product Lifecycle Management | Machine to Machine (M2M) | Partner Relationship Management | Mediation & Collection | Partner Management | Billing (Retail) | Billing (Convergent Pre- & Post-paid) | Application Management | Billing (Interconnect & Wholesale) | Partner Settlement | Customer Care | Billing & Charging Infonova, founded in 1989, is a premium BSS vendor to the telecoms, media and convergent industries. Infonova s R6 is a proven E2E MultiTenant Concept-to-Cash BSSPlatform. R6’s unique business architecture supports multiple tenants to be enabled on a single platform with individual access to the full range of R6 functionality, thereby enabling consolidation of various business segments and brands on one platform. R6 enables a fast implementation of digital economy business models at the same time. Infonova s R6 has been implemented for fixed line incumbents, tier 2 aggregators / attackers, cable TV, mobile MVNO bureau, utilities and content players supporting both Telco 1.0 and Industry 2.0 business models.

Email: Phone: Fax: Website:

marketing@infonova.com +43 316 8003 +43 316 8003 1480 www.infonova.com

Company

Website

Company

Infosys Technologies

infosys.com

InfoVista

infovista.com

Ingenico

Sectors: Network Performance Management | Application Performance Management | Backhaul Management | Network Discovery & Optimisation | Service Assurance InfoVista is the leading provider of IP and RF planning, assurance and optimisation software solutions and services that enable efficient network and IT transformations. Our award-winning solutions empower communications service providers and IT-intensive enterprises to deliver high-performing and differentiated services while cost-effectively planning, operating, optimising and monetising their network.

InfoVista’s combined expertise and technology innovations in radio and IP networks provide more than 550 customers worldwide with a new level of network intelligence, visibility and control across the entire network life cycle. Using InfoVista’s solutions, they deliver optimal quality of service, ensure a high-quality user experience, invest appropriately and consolidate their OSS/BSS ecosystems while keeping total cost of ownership as low as possible.

Email: Phone: Fax: Website:

sales@infovista.com +33 (0)1 64 86 79 00 +33 (0)1 64 86 79 79 www.infovista.com

Website

Company

Website

Kineto Wireless

kineto.com

Mobilis Networks Ltd

mobilis.com

Kobil

kobil.com

Mobipay International SA

mobipay.es

ingenico.com

Kognitio

kognitio.com

mobivention

mobivention.com

Ingres Corp

ingres.com

Kroll Ontrack

krollontrack.co.uk

Mojiva

mojiva.com

Inline Telecom Solutions

inlinetelecom.ru

KXEN

kxen.com

Moneybookers

moneybookers.com

InnoPath Software

innopath.com

Leostream

leostream.com

MoreMagic Solutions, Inc

moremagic.com

Innopay

innopay.com

Lionbridge

lionbridge.com

Moriana Group

morianagroup.com

Integralis AG

integralis.com

Logica

logica.co.uk

Motive (an Alcatel-Lucent co.)

motive.com

Integration Consortium

integrationconsortium.org

LogicManse

logicmanse.com

Motorola Solutions

motorolasolutions.com

Inteligentis

inteligentis.com

LogiSense

logisense.com

Movius Interactive

moviuscorp.com

Intelliden, Inc.

intelliden.com

LogNet Systems

lognet-systems.com

MTS Ltd

mtsint.com

Interactive Intelligence, Inc

inin.com

Loyalty Partner Solutions GmbH

lpsolutions.com

MYCOM

mycom-int.com

International Turnkey

its.ws

LTC International

ltcinternational.com

Myriad Group

myriadgroup.com

M2M Now magazine & portal

m2mnow.biz

Nagravision

nagravision.com

Systems (ITS) Intersec

intersec.com

MACH

mach.com

Nakina Systems

nakinasystems.com

InterSystems Corp

intersystems.com

Mahindra Satyam

mahindrasatyam.net

Narus, Inc

narus.com

INTRACOM TELECOM

intracom-telecom.com

Mala Communications

mala-communications.co.uk

NEC

nec.com

Invivo

invivosoft.com

MATRIXX Software

matrixxsw.com

NeoMedia

neom.com

Ipanema Technologies

ipanematech.com

MaxBill Ltd

maxbill.com

Neptuny

neptuny.com

iPass

ipass.com

mBlox

mblox.com

NetCracker Technology

netcracker.com

iisy

iisy.de

MDS

martindawessystems.com

NetEvidence

net-evidence.com

ITU

itu.int

MDS Lavastorm Analytics

lavastorm.com

Netezza (an IBM co.)

netezza.com

IXIA

ixiacom.com

MegaSys Computer

megasys.com

Netformx

netformx.com

Ixonos

ixonos.com

Technologies

NetNumber

netnumber.com

JDSU

jdsu.com

Metastorm

metastorm.com

NetQoS

netqos.com

Jones Cyber Solutions Ltd

jonescyber.com

Metaswitch Networks

metaswitch.com

NetScout Systems

netscout.com

Junifer Systems

junifersystems.com

Metracom

metracom.fr

Netsize

netsize.com

Juniper Networks

juniper.net

MetraTech Corp

metratech.com

NetSocket

netsocket.com

Kabira Technologies

kabira.com

MGt plc

mgtplc.com

Network Cadence

networkcadence.com

Kalido

kalido.com

Micro Focus International

microfocus.com

Neural Technologies

neuralt.com

KANA

kana.com

Microsoft

microsoft.com

NeuStar

neustar.biz

Kansys Inc

kansys.com

MIND CTI

mindcti.com

NewBay

newbay.com

Kapsh

kapsch.net

Mi-Pay

mi-pay.com

Nexagent (an EDS business)

nexagent.com

Kcom

kcom.com

Moba Consulting

mobaconsulting.com

Nexus Telecom AG

nexustelecom.com

Keynote

keynote.com

Mobile Distillery

mobile-distillery.com

nicholson Search & Selection

nicholsonintl.com

92

VANILLAPLUS BLACKBOOK 2015

DIRECTORY 2015

MDS

Orga Systems

Sectors: Billing & Customer Care MDS is a mid-tier provider of convergent real-time billing and customer management solutions, enabling service providers to monetise and bill any product and service rapidly and accurately.

Sectors: Billing & Charging | Loyalty & Churn Management | Revenue Assurance | Customer Relationship Management | Billing (Retail) | Customer Experience Management | eBilling, ePayment & ePresentment | Revenue Management | Mediation & Collection | Billing (Convergent Pre- & Post-paid) | Customer Care

The MDS platform helps service providers unlock new revenue streams without impacting existing IT systems, to rapidly launch compelling new multi-service propositions. Our cloud managed service solutions support customers and deliver a low total cost of ownership, with a single view platform that enhances the customer experience.

Headquartered in the UK, MDS managed service solutions support customers across Europe and North America, including ACN, BT, eircom Business, Gogo, TalkTalk Business and Telefónica UK. Email: Phone: Website:

marketing@mdscem.com 01925 462300 www.mdscem.com

Orga Systems is a leading software vendor for convergent charging and billing, with an international customer base in telecoms, utilities and automotive markets. For more than two decades, Orga Systems’ real time billing technology has been enabling customers around the globe to quickly launch and monetise enhanced offerings. With integrated order and revenue management, service providers can drive a new agenda for launching, selling, and monetising products. Orga Systems’ GOLD product family provides embedded policy control, real time charging and billing and order management, all driven by a central product catalogue. Best-in-class consulting and implementation services for convergent billing and utility billing guarantee customer satisfaction and immediate ROI. Email: Phone: Website:

Company

AFreund@orga-systems.com +49 5251 8749 3061 www.orga-systems.com

Website

Company

Website

Company

Website

NMS Communications

nmscommunications.com

Pivetal

pivetal.com

Sapient

sapient.com

Noetica

noetica.com

Polystar

polystar.com

SAS

sas.com

Nokia Siemens Networks

nokiasiemensnetworks.com

Pontis

pontis.com

Scorecard Systems

scorecardsystems.com

Novarra

novarra.com

Portrait Software

portraitsoftware.com

Seeker Wireless

seekerwireless.com

The Now Factory

thenowfactory.com

Practiv

practiv.com

Segala

segala.com

NTG Clarity Networks

ntgclarity.com

Praesidium

praesidium.com

Service2Media

service2media.com

Nuance Communications, Inc

nuance.com

(Consulting division of WeDo)

Servista

servista.com

OASIS Systems

oasissystems.com

PRAGMATEK Consulting Group

pragmatek.com

Sevone

sevone.com

Objective System

osi.com

PRD Technologies

prdtechnologies.co.uk

Shenick

shenick.com

PricewaterhouseCoopers

pwc.com/gx/en/communications

Sicap

sicap.com

On Demand Group

ondemand.co.uk

Prime Carrier Ltd

primecarrier.com

Sierra Wireless

sierrawireless.com

OneAccess

oneaccess-net.com

Prior Analytics Ltd

prior-analytics.com

Sigma Systems

sigma-systems.com

OneVu

onevu.com

Prism Technology

prismtechnology.net

Simon Kucher & Partners

simon-kucher.com

Ontology Systems

ontology.com

Pro:Atria Ltd

proatria.com

Singularity

singularity.co.uk

Onyx Software

onyx.com

Progress Software

web.progress.com

SITRONICS Telecom Solutions

sitronicsts.com

Open Text Corp

opentext.com

Pronto Networks

prontonetworks.com

Sixth Sense Media

sixthsensemedia.com

OpenCloud Ltd

opencloud.com

PSD

psdgroup.com

Skuku

skuku.com

Openet

openet-telecom.com

PSI AG

psi.de/en

SL Corporation

sl.com

OpenTrust

opentrust.com

Psytechnics Ltd

psytechnics.com

Sofrecom (a France Telecom

sofrecom.com

OpenWave

openwave.com

Qualcomm

qualcomm.com

–Orange Group co.)

Opteq International

opteqint.net

Qualitative Change

qualitativechange.com

Softrax (AFS Financial Solutions) softrax.com

Opus Advance Business Solutions opusabs.net

Quova

quova.com

Software AG

Oracle

oracle.com

Radialpoint

radialpoint.com

Solera Networks

soleranetworks.com

Orga Systems GmbH

orga-systems.com

RadioFrame Networks

radioframenetworks.com

Sonus Networks

sonusnet.com

Outbox

outbox.pl

Rapid Mobile

rapid-mobile.com

Sopra Group

sopragroup.com

Ovum

ovum.com

Red Bend

redbend.com

Spirent Communications plc

spirent.com

Panviva

panviva.com

Redknee

redknee.com

Starhome

starhome.com

Parallels

parallels.com

Redwood Systems Ltd

redwoodsystems.co.uk

Steria

steria.com

Partner Telecom

partnertelecom.com

Roamware

roamware.com

Stork Ltd

storkltd.com

Passlogix

passlogix.com

Rodopi Software

rodopi.com

Strand Consult

strandconsult.dk

Patni

patni.com

Round (UK) Ltd

round.co.uk

StreamServe

streamserve.com

Pega

pega.com

RR Donnelly

rrdonnelley.com

Subex

subexworld.com

Persistent Systems

persistentsys.com

Samsung

samsungnetwork.com

Sun Microsystems

sun.com

Pilat Media Global PLC

pilatmedia.com

Sandvine

sandvine.com

Sunrise Telecom

sunrisetelecom.com

Pitney Bowes Business Insight

pbinsight.com

SAP

sap.com

SunTec Business Solutions

suntecgroup.com

Integrators (OSI)

VANILLAPLUS BLACKBOOK 2015

softwareag.com

93

DIRECTORY 2015

Redknee

VanillaPlus

Sectors: Billing (Interconnect & Wholesale) | Policy Management | Billing (Utility) | PCC - Policy Control and Charging | Loyalty & Churn Management | Billing (Retail) | eBilling, ePayment & ePresentment | Mediation & Collection | Partner Settlement | Customer Experience Management | Billing (Convergent Pre- & Post-paid) | Billing & Customer Care | Billing & Charging

Email: info@vanillaplus.com Website: www.vanillaplus.com Prestige Media Ltd, Suite 138, 70 Churchill Square Kings Hill, West Malling, Kent ME19 4YU, UK

Redknee is a leading global provider of innovative communication software products, solutions and services. Redknee's award-winning solutions enable wireless, multi-service and alternate service providers to monetize the value of each subscriber transaction while personalising the subscriber experience to meet mainstream, niche and individual market segment requirements. Redknee's revenue generating solutions provide advanced converged billing, rating, charging, policy and wholesale settlement for innovative data offerings, messaging, and voice services to over 200 communications service providers in more than 90 countries.

Email: Phone: Website:

info@redknee.com +1 905 625 2622 www.redknee.com

Cherisse Jameson, Business Development Director Phone: +44 (0)1732 897646 Email: cherisse@vanillaplus.com Mark Bridges, Business Development Manager Phone: +44 (0)1732 897645 Email: mark@vanillaplus.com Nathalie Bisnar, Digital Editor Phone: +44 (0)1732 808690 Email: nathalie@vanillaplus.com Jeremy Cowan, Editorial Director Phone: +44 (0)1420 588638 Email: editorial@vanillaplus.com VanillaPlus is the leading global magazine and web portal dedicated to communications BSS and OSS. It covers billing, customer care, fraud control, network, service and revenue management. Now in its 16th year of publication, VanillaPlus provides news, views and features on systems for profitable communications, digital media and entertainment.

It is available on free subscription to qualifying readers, and on paid subscription to all others. The print edition is circulated worldwide six times a year to 5,641 named directors and senior managers within communications network operators and service providers, and distributed at more than 50 key events on 5 continents each year.

VanillaPlus.com gives you and 28,000 other online readers free access to exclusive C-Level video interviews, news, blogs, reviews, webinar podcasts, digital editions of the magazine, and an online directory.

Company

Website

Company

Website

Company

Website

Suntech Technologies, Inc.

suntechtechnologies.com

SurfKitchen

surfkitchen.com

Telsis

telsis.com

Veraz Networks SARL

veraznetworks.com

Tempest Technology

tempest-technology.com

Verimatrix

Sword ciboodle

verimatrix.com

sword-ciboodle.com

Teneo Ltd

teneo.co.uk

Verint

verint.com

Swyx

swyx.com

TEOCO Corporation

teoco.com

VeriSign, Inc

verisign.com

Sybase (an SAP company)

sybase.com

Teradata

teradata.com

Verizon Business

verizonbusiness.com

Sygnity

signity.pl

Tescom

tescom-intl.com

Vertek Corp

vertek.com

Symantec Corp

symantec.com

Tevron

tevron.com

VISA

visa.com

Symsoft

symsoft.com

Thales

thalesgroup.com

Visionael Corporation

visionael.com

Synchronica

synchronica.com

The Billing College

billingcollege.com

Visiongain

visiongain.com

Synchronoss Technologies, Inc

synchronoss.com

Theta Networks

thetanetworks.com

Vistorm (an EDS company)

vistorm.com

Syniverse Technologies

syniverse.com

TIBCO

tibco.com

Vitria Technology, Inc

vitria.com

T-Systems

t-systems.com

Tieto

tieto.com

Voice Objects

voiceobjects.com

Tail-F Systems

tail-f.com

Tilgin

tilgin.com

VOSS Solutions

voss-solutions.com

Talisma Corp

talisma.com

TM Forum

tmforum.org

WeDo Technologies

wedotechnologies.com

TM Solutions Ltd

tmsols.co.uk

Wipro

wipro.com

tango.ie

TMNG Global

tmng.com

XAL

xal.co.uk

Tanla Solutions Ltd

tanlasolutions.com

TNS, Inc

tnsi.com

Xelas Software

xelas.com

Tata

tatacommunications.com

Tollgrade Communications, Inc

tollgrade.com

XINTEC

xintec.com

Tech Mahindra

techmahindra.com

Transverse

gotransverse.com

XIUS-bcgi

xius-bcgi.com

Technology Research Institute

technology-research.com

Triad

triad.co.uk

xwave (a division of Bell Aliant)

xwave.com

Tecnotree

tecnotree.com

Trigyn Technologies Ltd

trigyn.com

Yahoo!

yahoo.com

Tekelec

tekelec.com

TTI Telecom

tti-telecom.com

ZOHO Corp

zohocorp.com

Tektronix Communications

tektronixcommunications.com

(a TEOCO Corp company)

ZTE Corporation

zte.com.cn/en/

Telarix, Inc

telarix.com

TUFF-Telecoms UK Fraud Forum tuff.co.uk

Telchemy, Inc

telchemy.com

Turkcell Teknoloji

turkcellteknoloji.com.tr

Telcotec

telcotec.com

Ukash

ukash.com

TeleBilling

tele-billing.com

Ulticom

ulticom.com

TelecityGroup

telecitygroup.com

Upaid

upaid.net

Telecom Inventory LLC

telecominventory.com

UshaComm

ushacomm.com

Telehouse Europe

telehouse.net

Valimo (a Gemalto company)

valimo.com

Telemac Corporation

telemac.com

Value Team

valueteam.com

Telepin

telepin.com

VanillaPlus magazine & portal

vanillaplus.com

Teligent Telecom Group

teligent.se

Velti

velti.com

Tellabs

tellabs.com

Ventraq

ventraq.com

Telmap

telmap.com

Verax Systems

veraxsystems.com

(an nGenera company) Tango Telecom

94

VANILLAPLUS BLACKBOOK 2015

BLACK BOOK 2015 www.vanillaplus.com