A survey from Informa Telecoms & Media showed impressive numbers of big data adoption among telecom companies. According to the study conducted with approximately 120 operators in June 2013, 48% of carriers said they are already implementing big data projects.
However, Informa notes that the lack of clear business propositions and skilled teams are still major barriers. In the short-term, big data solutions are expected to focus more on solving internal challenges, such as improving data warehousing, increasing loyalty and customer experience management.
The consultant firm also stated that operators are in a good position to generate new opportunities with the data collected daily through their different customer touch-points, including their network.
Julio Puschel, co-author of the study, said that it makes sense for operators to use big data to understand key challenges and improve customer experience. He mentioned optimizing processes and improving quality of services as examples of how telcos can benefit from big data and find new business opportunities.
Other survey findings:
- Fifty-eight percent of operators agree that the main long-term driver for big data will be generating new business models.
- Seventy-two percent of current big data implementations are focused on specific business applications rather than on end-to-end solutions.
- Operators said that big data currently represents 10% on average of their total IT budget. This share is expected to increase to approximately 23% in five years.
More news from the telecom analytics market:
- Telenor Pakistan, the second largest mobile telecom operator in Pakistan, received the best practice award in the category of advanced analytics in the annual competition sponsored by The Data Warehousing Institute. Telenor Pakistan has more than 30 million subscribers and holds a 25% market share. It is owned by Telenor ASA, a multinational telecommunications company.
- Chid Kollengode, director for cloud computing at Nokia, recently wrote an article on why big data is so important to Nokia and what the company is doing to innovate fast. He noted that Nokia began its big data journey about three years ago.
- Intel plans to customize chips for big data applications. The company is looking to solve software gaps with on-chip accelerators and cores.
The telecom analytics series provides weekly insights on trends, new products and other topics that touch on the advantages and  monetization opportunities of analytics tools for telecom operators, including big data, business intelligence, customer experience analysis and management, business analytics and network analytics.
