Big Data: Needles, Haystacks and Where to Find Magnifying Glasses

The term "Big Data" reflects this major challenge CSPs face today and the result is an expensive data management bill. But big data is an unavoidable hurdle on the path towards profitability. And furthermore, it can be used to the advantage of providers through unified subscriber information, to eliminate redundancy in records, and provide up-to-the-minute accounts for reference by users, which reduces bill shock and enables subscribers to proactively plan in step with their usage—in effect, forging profitable and beneficial relationships with their end customers. All of these goals can only come to fruition with effective mediation.

Mediation hasn’t historically been viewed as an opportunity for business improvement by CSP organizations. In the past, CSPs have largely understood it as a standard software workforce inside the BSS, linking activity on the network with subsequent processing by customer relationship management (CRM) and billing. But in the era of big data, mediation is set for a crucial role in ensuring future commercial success. This is because the today’s leading platforms can aggregate, process, clean and move vast amounts of data downstream efficiently and cost-effectively, with unlimited scalability, and on commodity hardware. Thus, mediation is the key to improving customer experience, for instance when users see their real-time account data. And satisfied customers mean an opportunity to reduce subscriber turnover and thereby increase profitability, which are real points of concern for every organization.


How can you leverage mediation?

Mediation’s benefits reaches beyond the management of exponentially increasing data loads. Service providers encounter the challenge of managing increasingly complex networks and their BSS and operational support system (OSS) infrastructures, as well. They implement new networking elements and services every day, and these need to be linked with revenue management, business intelligence and service assurance architectures without downtime or negative effects to service. The choice to use multiple platforms instead of syncing these services would risk increasing operational and capital expenditures to unsustainable levels. At the same time, the inefficiencies in platforms would negatively affect the time-to-market.