Operators facing dwindling revenue from wireline subscribers, fierce tariff wars and exploding mobile data traffic are continually being pressured to do more for less. Spending on infrastructure is increasing as they look to provide better service within slender budgets.
In these tough times telcos have to devise new and innovative strategies and make judicious technology choices. Two promising technologies, cloud computing and analytics, are shaping up as among the best choices to make.
Cloud architecture does away with the worry of planning the computing resources needed, the real estate, the costs of the acquiring them and thoughts of its obsolescence. It allows the CSPs to purchase processing power, platforms and databases almost as a utility like electricity or water.
Cloud consumers only pay for what they use. The magic of this promising technology is the elasticity that the cloud provides - it expands to accommodate increasing demands and contracts when the demand drops.
The cloud architectures of Amazon, Google and Microsoft – currently the three biggest cloud providers - vary widely in their capabilities and features. These strengths and weaknesses should be taken into account while planning a cloud system. Each is best suited for only a certain class of applications unique to each individual cloud provider.
On one end of the spectrum Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) provides a virtual machine and a wealth of associated tools for storage and notifications. But the trade-off for increased flexibility is that users must take responsibility for designing resiliency into their systems.
On the other end is Google’s App Engine, a highly scalable cloud architecture that handles failures but is a lot more restrictive. Microsoft’s Azure is based on the .NET architecture and in terms of flexibility and features lies between these two.
When implementing such architecture, an organization should take a long hard look its computing software inventory to decide which applications are worthy of migrating to the cloud. The best candidates are processing intensive in-house applications that deliver standardized functionality and interface, and whose software architecture is made up of loosely coupled communicating systems.
Applications that deal with sensitive data should be retained within the organization’s internal computing infrastructure, because security is currently the most glaring issue with the cloud. Cloud providers do provide various levels of security to users, but this is an area in keen need of standardization.
But if the CSP decides to build components of an OSS system – rather than buying a pre-packaged system - it makes good business sense to develop for the cloud.
A cloud-based application must have a few essential properties. First, it is preferable if the application was designed on SOA principles. Second, it should be loosely coupled. And lastly, it needs to be an application that can be scaled rapidly up or down based on the varying demands.
The other question is which legacy systems can be migrated. If the OSS/BSS systems are based on commercial off-the-shelf systems these can be excluded, but an offline bill processing system, for example, is typically a good candidate for migration.
Mining wisdom from data
The cloud can serve as the perfect companion for another increasingly vital operational practice – data analytics. The cloud is capable of modeling large amounts of data, and running models to process and analyze this data. It is possible to run thousands of simultaneous instances on the cloud and mine for business intelligence in the oceans of telecom data operators generate.
Today's CSP maintains software systems generating all kinds of customer data, covering areas ranging from billing and order management to POS, VAS and provisioning. But perhaps the largest and richest vein of subscriber information is the call detail records database.
All this data is worthless, though, if it cannot be mined and analyzed. Formal data mining and data analytics tools can be used to identify patterns and trends that will allow operators to make strategic, knowledge-driven decisions.
Analytics involves many complex areas like predictive analytics, neural nets, decision trees and classification. Some of the approaches used in data analytics include prediction, deviation detection, degree of influence and classification.
With the intelligence that comes through analytics it is possible to determine customer buying patterns, identify causes for churn and develop strategies to promote loyalty. Call patterns based on demography or time of day will enable the CSPs to create innovative tariff schemes.
Determining the relations and buying patterns of users will provide opportunities for up-selling and cross-selling. The ability to identify marked deviation in customer behavior patterns help the CSP in deciding ahead of time whether this trend is a warning bell or an opportunity waiting to be tapped.
Tinniam V. Ganesh is senior architect at Infinite Computer Solutions -- [email protected]