Big Data for SMBs

The Amdocs Incubation Lab imagines a telco Big Data service called “Business Insights” that provides real-time, useful actionable intelligence on consumer usage habits ranging from location to hobbies and spending patterns by combining telco data with additional, outside sources like real estate listings for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

Imagine a small-business owner who wants to open a coffee shop. In the near future a CSP will be able to offer a cloud-based, searchable service that supplies intelligence to inform everyday business decisions that concern location, marketing and more. The service will even perform a search for storefront real estate that can be narrowed based on criteria such as the number of potential coffee-drinking customers in a given area between the hours of 9 AM and 2 PM. Do you want to reach customers with a healthy lifestyle? What age range do you want to target? What kinds of music do your customers download? The data available at the network level through this type of service can be sliced and diced any number of ways and prove to be an invaluable resource to anyone in business.

Although the technical requirements that can make this sort of robust, elastic, database-on-human-growth-hormone service possible are still a ways off, it’s exactly the direction being pursued by some of the biggest and baddest telcos in the world.

“Business Insights is a big data vision,” Eli Itin, who has the heady title of Amdocs Innovation Evangelist. “While this specific concept focuses on selling anonymous and aggregated customer trends to businesses to enable analytics-based business decision making, big data has other implications on revenue and cost reduction for telcos. We believe can be meaningful to service providers in terms of revenues, stickiness and introduction of innovative solutions in the market. We are currently in the process of validating the concept with our key customers and to prioritize and fine-tune specific use-cases.”

Telefónica Dynamic Insights

Telefónica, for instance, is trying to stake its claim in the Big Data services market with Telefónica Dynamic Insights, whose initial offering, Smart Steps, measures foot traffic in any given area, which happens to be of particular interest to retailers. European market-research firm GfK was the first to jump on board with the CSP’s new business unit.

“Big Data is one of the key building blocks of the digital economy,” said Stephen Shurrock, CEO of new business ventures at Telefónica Digital, in a press release announcing the launch of Dynamic Insights last October. “Approached in a smart and responsible way, it has the potential to transform every part of business and society, providing economic growth and improving people’s lives. Smart Steps will help retailers better understand and meet their customers’ needs, reduce costs through improved efficiency and make better-informed decisions. It will help retailers to determine the best locations and formats for new stores and tailor product promotions in existing stores.”

Measuring foot traffic is one of the specific opportunities mobile networks can provide. Knowing where a retailer’s customers are can help it with marketing, staffing, supply-chain management—you name it. As Big Data analytics services evolve to include richer data points like web-browsing tendencies in addition to location, a startlingly accurate picture of potential customers starts to emerge.