There are a few areas to consider when evaluating the advantages of in-house capability vs an outsourced approach to monitoring networks and analyzing customer behavior.
Eric Bourland, director of BI strategic services at Teradata International, asks: do telcos need to invest in the technical capacity required to store and process information or can this be done through a third-party? In addition, do telcos need to have their own teams to handle analytics?
Bourland notes that data protection guidelines are a compelling reason to store data in-house as is the likely high cost involved in transferring data to a third-party.
Christopher King, senior director of product marketing at Oracle Communications, also suggests that telcos develop the in-house skills and retain this data internally.
"Customer data is typically extremely sensitive and often protected by law. If a CSP moves customer data into other company's computers or across international borders they must take care not to violate data privacy laws."
Matti Aksela, VP of analytics at Comptel, agrees the benefits of in-house analytics are that the knowledge stays in-house and the telco develops the ability to utilize deep insight.
However, he says there is a known lack of talent in the data science space and an in-house team is not really able to learn from the errors of others, possibly leading to sub-optimal approaches being taken.
"Third-party vendors don't, by default, have that very detailed knowledge of local conditions, but benefit from working with multiple CSPs, and can hope to evolve their approaches from learning globally," he says. "Also vendors operating in this space can have a very skilled team behind their analytics solutions, and knowledge on integration and decision-making based on the analytics, and can quickly achieve benefits for CSPs. It may be even easier to ‘tear down the silos' coming from the outside than just working internally."