Sometimes, even operators who understand the possibilities of big data still don’t realize the value of the data they’re sitting on. However, says Samir Marwaha, VP of Products & Platform Management at Tektronix Communications, that’s changing and changing fast as operators find fresh ways to use it - and monetize it.
Big Data Insights: What is your focus in the big data world?
Samir Marwaha: Telecom operators are almost universally under pressure to reduce capex and opex, lower customer churn, and create new revenue streams. Our focus is helping them address these challenges by providing unique insights from correlating and analyzing big data, which in turn enables them to make more powerful decisions. You’ve been working with big data for many years - what’s changed the most over the years?
For decades we’ve been working with operators monitoring voice and data sessions, whether that be 3G or LTE. But for the most part we’ve worked with network operations and engineering teams providing insights for troubleshooting performance issues. And we’re still the world leader in this, but our focus has evolved to predictive analytics, enabling our customers to proactively manage subscriber experience and service performance.
Today we’re addressing the needs of new stakeholders within operators, particularly marketing and commercial teams whose focus is on monetizing data. This is something we’re really excited about - there are just so many opportunities to build new revenue streams.
Why is the data you can provide worth so much to operators?
With so much pressure on ARPU, competing with OTT players and so on, it’s really important that operators find new ways to make money and deliver highly efficient business practices. The data we can provide does both.
Let me give you some examples before I get into what’s in the data to make it so valuable: building revenue by leveraging geo-location data in marketing campaigns. Or, improving network capex payback by basing it much more closely on actual subscriber behavior. Or, reducing opex by solving customer and network problems more quickly and proactively.
Taking your specific question about what makes our data so valuable: firstly, [it’s] the data profile itself, i.e. it’s’ depth, breadth, and richness. “Data depth” comes from collecting and providing real-time, subscriber-specific packet level data from the network as opposed to the more common flows and KPIs. This gives a very accurate view of what’s happening and, coupled with our embedded Deep Packet Classification solution, provides really accurate in-depth service insights.
“Data breadth” means we cover the network end-to-end including RAN, core and IMS, user plane and control plane, and data, video, voice, and messaging services. So, one fully integrated solution gives complete infrastructure vendor-independent visibility, which is hugely important. Also, it isn’t in any way biased by metrics or KPIs that come from these various network vendors so it provides most reliable and accurate insight.
By “data richness,” I’m referring to the additional dimensions that really make it so much more valuable, including specific subscriber, location, service, network, technology, and device information.
Secondly, the openness and flexibility of our data which integrates with operators’ other systems where they have their own data lakes or other big data platforms.
Overall, what this means to operators is they can monetize the data themselves particularly by building relationships with enterprises and other third parties. This is an area we’ve been doing a lot of work in, helping to build a multitude of use cases on top of the data lakes.