PLDT has revealed plans to establish a Center of Excellence for Big Data in the ASEAN region to develop carrier-grade analytics infrastructure, and market-attuned Big Data services to include platforms, real-time analytics, and insights.
The public sector and the retail industry are expected to benefit most from the plan. The company said use cases for the public sector include transport planning, route optimization, and traffic monitoring.
“By employing sophisticated algorithms to analyze anonymous cellphone signals on the move, cities and roadway authorities can get a view of the traffic situation without deploying costly road sensors,” it said.
Meanwhile, in retail, big data is used to measure foot traffic, analyze transactions, and mine loyalty card activity to better understand customers. Through this enhanced understanding, retailers are able to personalize offers, design campaigns, plan staffing-levels, manage inventory, and get the right products on shelves.
Our group-wide big data initiative will enable game-changing capabilities and insights for our clients, most especially in the Enterprise space. We are very enthusiastic about the transformative power of this technology in enabling our corporate customers to optimize operations and more importantly, to engage with their consumers in ways previously not thought possible,” said Eric Alberto, PLDT Executive Vice President for Enterprise & International and Carrier Business Group and ePLDT President and CEO.
PLDT recently joined the Open Data Platform (ODP), a worldwide consortium of Big Data global technology leaders that aims to standardize the core platform and accelerate Big Data delivery across markets.
The ODP has a membership of 15 global companies including GE, Hortonworks, IBM, Infosys, Pivotal, SAS, Altiscale, Capgemini, CenturyLink, EMC, Teradata, Splunk, Verizon Enterprise Solutions, and VMware.
Currently, PLDT’s big data service lines include Platforms-as-a-Service, Data Warehousing-as-a-Service, and Insights-as-a-Service among others. These services provide the analytics infrastructure as well as the data science expertise to unlock actionable insights from data sources and to process data feeds in real time.