Big Data and how to best benefit from it is a hot topic and will continue to be so in 2016 and for many years to come. Nowadays, there is no sector or industry that is not channeling huge efforts and resources into this area.
Modern computing aided by artificial intelligence is capable of capturing, storing and processing prodigious amounts of data not formerly possible. And more importantly, all this may now be done at an affordable price. This way, big data has become a highly valuable asset to any organization that would like to uncover new tendencies, understand their customers better, improve their services, etc.
Understandingly, with this backdrop, in most B2C sectors, including telecoms, the focus early on was on business related data from the sales and marketing departments. This was mainly due to the opportunities for cross-selling, the potential for improvement in fraud detection and an eagerness to create more efficient promotions and campaigns or smarter pricing strategies. This is perfectly valid and something companies especially in the consumer markets should still keep doing if this means improving their bottom line all while keeping their customers satisfied.
The telecom industry, albeit a wide and heterogeneous sector, is far from any exception when it comes to embracing advanced analytics or big data techniques. Actually, operators have long been among the most active companies working out how they may make the most of what has long been considered as one of their main asset; their subscriber data bases.
But as experts in telecom networks serving predominantly network equipment vendors and mobile operators, BlueTC’s focus is very different. We don’t stop at the customer and subscriber databases. In fact, these are of limited or very little interest to us if analysed separately. We believe there is a huge, and in many cases untapped, potential in any operator’s network and system data. This is information that is highly heterogeneous; normally data created or captured in different periods of time, stored in multiple places (siloed) and formats and it is normally unstructured in nature. Finally, it represents enormous amounts of data. And this is where the gold lies, from an operator and also a Network Operations Centre (NOC) point of view, we maintain, provided of course that you are able to extract its value and create actionable insights.
So, in what way may an Operator or NOC extract and use their network and system data in benefit of their customers and in the end their own bottom line? This was the question our Innovation Team asked itself in early 2013. And rapidly they concluded that the possibilities and opportunities were many in the network area alone. So they started discussing, in particular with our operator customers in Europe, and with their input and needs developed several Use Cases within areas like Network Operations and Network Optimisation & Planning.
Our set of Use Cases has since grown quite large and has been given a name that better reflects what we can do today; Network & System Analytics. Because if analysing network, subscriber and traffic data has proved useful, when our Innovation Team found ways to normalize and employ many other relevant data from support systems and other diverse databases in their analyses, the picture was complete and the results provided even more powerful to our customers.
In the video we have created and that is shown below, you can learn more about how we do Root Cause Analysis and Alarms Prioritization in a NOC, using one of the largest NOCs in Europe as an example. You also get to know about other areas in which our solution may be applied, often in near real-time, as listed in the end of the video.
But do you think BlueTC will stop here? No, is the clear answer! Our Innovation Team is set to apply our advanced analytics techniques and methodologies to new and potentially interesting areas for telco organisations. We have already defined M2M Active Service Monitoring and Service Analytics as two new areas in which to experiment further, with high expectations.
We will keep breaking down the walls of siloed data repositories and make sure we are up-to-date with what the telecom sector demands. So stay tuned to our blog and Website if you want to know how the story continues from here and what kind of actionable insights we will be providing in the near future!
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