Big data, analytics at TM Forum

Big data and analytics were top-of-mind at TM Forum’s conference in Nice and across the industry this week, with several major platform announcements aimed at telcos.
Steve Hateley, head of marketing at Comptel, told RCR Wireless News at the TM Forum event that there is a transition going on to evolve toward what he called “practical big data.”
“Service providers are no longer just concerned with the volume of the data, the variety of the data coming in,” Hateley said. “But they really are now looking for the value they can get in terms of how they can make it actionable.”

Rick Lievano of Microsoft spoke of an operator handing big data volumes and customer demands for insight by making the data sources more available. While noting Microsoft’s role in the telecom space as a provider of services such as Bing and Skype, Lievano added that the company has worked with mobile operator Telstra in changing the way the operator manages its massive amounts of data.
Telstra, he said, had more than seven data warehouses and various analytics tools for reporting purposes, and an IT bottleneck that made it difficult for end users to get the insight that they needed from the network.
Telstra and Microsoft were able to put  a system in place so that end users had better direct access to data, he said, rather than Telstra doing all the work with the data itself.
“This is the consumerization of data,” Lievano said. “Now users are able to go create their own solutions, harvest their own data, create their own insights in ways that IT would’ve never envisioned.”

Also this week, SAP launched a new solution to make it easier for telcos to take their data to market as a potential revenue stream. Ericsson introduced a new big data analytics platform, Expert Analytics, for telecom operators which focused on the use of big data internally to improve network operations, marketing and customer care.
Software-defined networking and network virtualization also play into supporting the necessary systems to make big data analytics a reality in LTE and LTE-Advanced networks, through flexibility in resources that can be allotted to different network functions, according to Redknee’s CEO Lucas Skoczkowski. He said the company handles over 30,000 transactions per second for its biggest customer, and is scaling to be able to handle 100,000 transactions per second for a single service provider.

Watch more of RCR Wireless News’ coverage from TM Forum here.