Where are the best waves?

There are several ways for CSPs of all sizes to ride the Big Data wave. Some strategies require significant investment, while others can be achieved with minimal upfront cost by partnering with a platform provider.

Advanced analytics

Advanced analytics refers to a class of data contextualization that enables advanced insight into customer, network and device behavior. The best solutions correlate information from many data sets to deliver valuable, actionable intelligence and can be further refined to influence business strategy. Some of the questions that might be answered are:

• What kind of customer-experience impact is created by a business decision to throttle mobile video streams on Android smartphones during a Major League Baseball game at, say, Yankee Stadium.
• How often do security or hardware issues arise when CSPs execute over-the-air updates between the hours of 2 and 3 AM versus 4 and 5 PM?
• Would it make more sense to service a high-congestion area during rush hour by adding small cells with Wi-Fi or a 4G LTE macro cell?
• Are a CSP’s male customers in zip code 60647 more likely to respond to an advertisement for a service upsell while using a sports-related app or Facebook?
• Let’s say a cell site in Boston is overloaded and malfunctioning, and capacity won’t be restored until the corresponding CSP can reprovision a neighboring tower. What kind of incentive should the company include in a text message to its customers in order to maintain and possibly even improve their loyalty?

The immediate value that advanced analytics represent for a CSP includes more efficient network planning, faster response times, improved security, better-targeted sales opportunities, and enhanced service provisioning, plus corollary improvements in customer experience and loyalty. And the long-term value includes greater agility, faster time to market (TTM) with desirable services and a leaner, smarter business strategy.

Gartner and Forrester Research point to advanced analytics as one of the leading applications of Big Data, and according to IBM, corporate IT executives rate business intelligence (BI) and analytics as their top priorities. Numerous solutions providers dot the advanced-analytics landscape with offerings of varying complexity, specialization and cost. Large data players such as SAP, Oracle and IBM have been very active in the market, and niche solutions exist courtesy of Quiterian, cVidya and Pervasive Software.

Third-party platforms

Perhaps the fastest way for a CSP to monetize its unique assets—network, subscriber, device, and location data—is to jump into the cloud economy and expose this data to third-party solutions. Effective partnerships with content providers can be enriched by such data.

For instance, YouTube doesn’t have enough visibility into the network or device to create value-added premium offerings with guaranteed quality of service (QoS), but a CSP partnership that comes with data-sharing privileges might enable an on-demand “sure stream” service. The CSP can even serve as the billing portal, as we’ve seen in direct-to-carrier billing deals that Verizon and Telenor made with Google Play last year. Leveraging the CSP’s assets in this manner opens up a limitless number of business cases, and companies such as CHR and Aepona furnish solutions that enable operators to become cloud-services brokers.