Telecoms looking for help to manage flood of big data

Telecom companies are turning to outside help in order to manage the floods of data coming from smartphones, set-top-boxes and other consumer technology. Canada’s biggest telecoms — BCE Inc., Rogers Communications Inc. and Telus Corp. — are working with companies large and small to make sense of the data and put it to use to repair and expand their networks, target advertisements to the right consumers, and build what one expert called a “sticky” business model that uses data to keep and engage customers. “Carriers have no shortage of information in their business,” Joe Levy, vice-president of customer strategy and marketing at analytics-software maker Zettics Inc., said in a phone interview. “What they really struggle with is how to get this information and productively present it to consumers or to marketing, to customer care or for network planning in a way that's really productive.” Levy said Zettics, a 100-person company founded in 2008 and run out of Seattle and Boston, provides wireless carriers with real-time information about data usage that was unthinkable a few years ago. “We process everything a carrier does related to data usage and help give that information back to them in a way that really delivers business value,” he said. “Every customer I've talked to over the past five years is really struggling with how to take their customer information and make the most value of it possible. That's a real clear and present need.” Levy said telecom companies have become increasingly interested in data analytics but don’t necessarily have the internal expertise to put their data to use. “Carriers tend to not be deep experts in building analytics tools themselves,” Levy said. “They have the people and the expertise, but it's not their job to build software.” Zettics works with all four major wireless carriers in the United States, Levy said. His company provides the backbone for AT&T’s sponsored data program, he added, as well as Sprint Corp.’s targeted mobile-advertising service. Jeff Gilchrist, a partner at International Business Machines (IBM) Corp.'s business services and consulting arm who is responsible for the Canadian telecom sector, said in a phone interview that his company uses telecom analytics to help carriers understand "how data can be used to sell more services or provide more value out of the services that are currently being consumed." Although he would not name any clients, Gilchrist said IBM is already breaking down data from Canadian set-top boxes to provide targeted advertisements, such as an ad touting the English Premier League specialty channel to a person who has watched every World Cup match. "For the most part, a lot of the data that has been coming off set-top boxes on a historical basis has been used for network performance," he said. "What data analytics is allowing to happen is that the marketing organization is being able to pull information from the network that they now can use." Gilchrist said IBM was in discussions with multiple partners about alternatives to the traditional ratings system, where a panel of television watchers is surveyed about their viewing habits. "In the new world, if I have that set-top box information, I can actually get a much better understanding of what truly is happening in the marketplace," he said. “The opportunity exists to change the currency used to measure how many people are watching which shows, and that’s a big data opportunity that’s never existed before.” IBM provides analytics software such as SPSS, Gilchrist said, as well as its Netezza brand of integrated analytics “appliances” that provide everything necessary for data analysis, including servers and databases. Yet IBM is not simply a technology provider, Gilchrist said. “We are a consulting-based organization that uses technology often to drive business results,” he said. Gilchrist said the traditional "bifurcation" between telecom companies' network divisions, where quality of service and access is most important, and their marketing divisions, where the incentive is to add more customers and more services, is being eliminated by telecom companies embracing data analytics. "That's being driven by the technology that didn't exist previously," he said, adding that these advanced telecom data analytics only really became possible in 2012. “You can say to an executive you don't need to rely on information that's based on a 0.2 per cent panel of viewing audiences; you have the opportunity to get much better data,” Gilchrist said. “But that requires different parts of the business to talk to each other, and they've never really had the need before.” One of the biggest advances, Gilchrist said, is in the time it takes to ingest and process the data. "We've gone from weeks, to days, to hours, to minutes," he said. "That can be really valuable when you're dealing with things like network performance on a cellphone tower." Gilchrist said telecom companies can use the data to make intelligent decisions about where and when they make infrastructure improvements and perform maintenance, such as targeting towers that are used much less often during business hours for maintenance during the day or putting off unnecessary repairs in favour of urgently needed fixes. "That's an example of where you're merging customer information and network information, which is a relatively new phenomenon," he said. IBM is currently working with Canadian carriers to see how network performance affects churn, Gilchrist said, among other projects, although he would not identify the clients by name. It’s not just about the carrier, Gilchrist said, but the data analytics provide value to the customer as well. He said something as simple as improving the engine recommending shows or movies to the customer can have an impact on consumer satisfaction and make the service “sticky” for its users. Stephan Gatien, global head of the telecom unit at corporate-software giant SAP AG, said in a phone interview that telecom companies can provide value to their customers by using "actionable insights” to narrow and customize their offerings. “With the trend of data accumulation and the enrichment of the data captured on subscribers, we're seeing an evolution from a high-level segmented approach to a more and more refined view of the customer and even this notion of micro-segments.” Gatien said micro-segmentation, or using individual data to create very precise categories of customers, can help predict and anticipate people's actions to which carriers can react — for example, offering deals and incentives to a customer who goes over their data cap for a month, as well as providing targeted, relevant advertising. “You're trying to be finer and finer in your definition of a group that behaves the same way so you can target these customers with more certainty that what you propose will actually resonate,” he said. Gatien said companies need to manage and understand structured information, such as smartphone data usage or television ratings, as well as unstructured information, such as mentions on social networks and news coverage. "All this is creating a mushrooming volume of data that requires attention," he said. "Turning this into something actionable is increasingly difficult." SAP is launching a new so-called rapid deployment solution, a pre-made software package that carriers can add to their existing framework for churn management on July 14, Gatien said. "Increasingly, anticipating the way you engage with customers is something that is at the heart of the strategies of a number of operators,” he said. “They want customer experience to be optimal. To do this, you want to action the data you have.“ Gatien said SAP's 2007 purchase of analytics specialist Business Objects, worth a reported $6.8 billion US at the time, helped expand its business of serving the telecom sector. Through that purchase, SAP now provides wireless network analytics to Rogers, Gatien said, adding that all three Canadian wireless incumbents use SAP’s other business software. Mark Beliveau, vice-president of intelligent business operations at Software AG, which claims on its website to have more than 10,000 customers all over the world, said in an interview at the Canadian Telecom Summit in June that the industry has hit a "tipping point" in terms of adopting data analytics. "The conversations are easier," he said. "Instead of us coming to them, they're already there coming to us and asking for better visibility into what's going on." Beliveau, like Gilchrist, would not name the Canadian telecom companies with which Software AG has contracts, citing vigorous competition in the sector, but said his company is in conversation with many large telecom companies in Canada and the United States. He said the “real-time decisions” enabled by telecom data analytics are the “next big wave” in the industry. “Everybody has these big data projects going on,” he said. “But I think what makes a difference is to operationalize what my analytics on big data gives me. Being able to take multiple streams, that’s next. How do I look at that 200 different ways over millions of transactions every three seconds? It’s unforeseen. That’s what we’re pushing for.” — With reporting by Peter Henderson at phenderson@thewirereport.ca and editing by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca

Telecoms looking for help to manage flood of big data

News | July 2, 2014

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Telecoms looking for help to manage flood of big data

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