Email a colleague    

February 2016

The Digital Enabler: A Charging, Self-Care & Marketing Platform at the Core of the Mobile Business

interview with Jennifer Kyriakakis

The Digital Enabler: A Charging, Self-Care & Marketing Platform at the Core of the Mobile Business

Since ancient times, the Japanese have used large straw ropes called shimenawa to adorn temples and shrines.

Even today you see these impressive ropes throughout Japan.  Woven from hundreds of strands of straw, they appear at the entrance to places of spiritual power and strength.  In the Japanese sport of sumo, too, the grand champion, during ceremonies, will wear a thick white rope around his waist as a sign of power and his mastery of the wrestling art.

Well, as mobile operators move to a greater reliance on digital services and web-based customer interaction, many are adopting a kind of new age shimenawa.  It’s a central digital enabler platform whose job is to execute and weave together the business threads of charging, self-care, and marketing.

Joining us now to explain the power of digital enablers and why operators like Telstra and Vodafone New Zealand consider these platforms pivotal to their digital strategies is Jennifer Kyriakakis, Co-Founder and VP Marketing of MATRIXX Software.

Dan Baker, Black Swan Editor: Welcome Jennifer.  Can you first give us a quick backgrounder on MATRIXX how you got into the business of supplying these enabler platforms?

Jennifer Kyriakalis: Happy to, Dan.  Back in 2008, our founding team pretty much came out of Portal Software which today is the Oracle BRM product.  The original Portal solution enjoyed quite a success as the first real-time billing product of the early internet days.  Then around 2002 it started getting deployed at wireless carriers for mobile data charging though usage was pretty minimal at that point.

But when smart phones arrived, the old Portal solution ran out of gas because the data volumes really took off: it became impractical to put that on a real-time platform because of the high cost of hardware and other infrastructure needed to handle the volumes.  For instance, if you are watching a video, that could involve thousands of sessions where you need to ping the charging/policy system to get more quota and to check the balance.

Now a couple of Portal customers, who were worried about the data volumes, actually pulled out their real time engines and stuck the data back into their batch systems.  And when we heard that, it sprung the idea: “Hey!  Data charging is really happening now, but there’s no solution out there built for massive transactions volumes and monetizing services in real time.”

So serving this real-time, high volume data services market is what MATRIXX is about.

OK, great.  So why are carriers eager to get these systems?  What are the main functions it performs?

In simplistic terms, it’s a real-time transaction engine that allows you to do smart marketing.  It allows you to serve the customer at the same time you’re driving more business from them.

And if the system is real-time, that’s perfect, because out of the same system I can interact with the customer more and tailor offers for them so they buy more things and top up more often.

You also need to be efficient.  How do I manage a huge number of transactions without requiring one hundred servers?  So building a nimble, low-cost platform is something we’re known for.

And I understand, you also get involved in self-care.  But won’t a telco already have a self-care solution or two?  So isn’t this somewhat redundant?

Well, the trouble with self-care systems, particularly at large carriers, is they are often completely disconnected from any real-time charging engine or even billing system.  Carriers often need massive orchestration to update and retrieve data from, say, 10 different systems in the background.

Several of our customers have a self-care application directly integrated to our online charging system.  So, when the user accesses that self-care app, she gets an accurate balance from the backend database.

And when you want to buy more data, with one click it’s immediately available.  There’s no need to go to an order management system or some middleware to get something provisioned and inform all the other systems that need to know.  All of that happens in true real time through our system.  In fact, we handle all the network traffic coming in from many different self-care portals and digital channels.

Now an integral part of this, of course, is an ability to repackage the way data services are sold via bundles and one-off offers.

Add it all up, it’s like having one central core engine between the network, self-care, and data products sides of the business.

And what about billing and analytics?  How are those functions managed?

Since this is a core charging and policy engine, we replace either a real time or a batch rating engine.  So, we don’t touch the billing part: we sit between the network and the backend billing system.

More and more, this is the model big operators with a heavy infrastructure want to have.  And one reason for that is it’s a great way to support the launch of multiple digital brands or a new set of digital services.

To be honest, they don’t need a full-blown billing system.  Sure, they want us to do some basic AR, GL, and light invoicing, but the model is more: charge the customer’s credit card, so they don’t need a full-blown billing/invoicing process.

Now as to analytics, our platform is a great enabler of that because we deliver a more complete commercial product catalog and self-care platform.  Since we track and aggregate many types of information and integrate directly with the analytics engine, analytics has a path for triggering actions.

For example, we integrate to IBM’s data analytics solution.  One use case might be to watch the consumption patterns of Netflix users over a 48 hour period, and then have the analytics suggest which video to offer the customer next.  Of course, we also offer the capability to provision the add-on product and handle the purchase.

What about prepaid versus postpaid, how much of your business do you estimate is the kind of coming from each of those types of delivery?

About 70% postpaid and 30% prepaid I would say.  And that’s about to change, we think, because larger prepaid operators in Asia are eager to get rid of their IN systems which are quite cumbersome if you intend to be a digital provider.  So six months from now, I would expect these numbers to shift to 50/50.

But whether it’s prepaid or postpaid, what all these mobile providers want is the great customer interaction that a digital enabler like ours gives them.

You need to have that two-way conversation going on to really harvest the customer’s value and gently nudge them toward products and services that make sense.

OK, Jennifer, you prepared a couple diagrams to compare the traditional method of interacting with customers with the modern method needed in the digital services age.  Let’s discuss that now.

Sure, Dan.  Let’s start with the Traditional Customer Lifecycle that so many mobile operators are using today. 

MATRIXX Traditional

Typically, this is a low touch, high cost model where the idea is to:

  • Acquire customers, typically through a retail store,
  • Then the customer will Use the services, and,
  • Unfortunately there are very few opportunities to Engage with the customer because the customer interaction mechanism is not highly automated or is very limited.  Thus, when you do engage with the customer, it’s often when the customer runs out of minutes, or they call to discuss an issue, or they spent too much and get bill shocked.  In other words, the engagement is not usually favorable, and,
  • Finally the goal is to Retain customers often as a last minute step to prevent them from churning.  And if the price was lowered to get them to stay, that of course hurts the bottom line.

The other issue with the traditional approach is that if you are not constantly engaging with the customer, you leave money on the table.  Compared to other operators who have an organized means of enticing customers to use more network services, the traditional approach earns a lower return on their network investment.

OK, let’s now compare the traditional with the Digital Customer Lifecycle approach.

MATRIXX Traditional

And the first advantage we gain by having a digital enabler is we are no longer limited to retail store interactions.  By going digital we open many more ordering and interaction channels.  People can order a phone online, and when the phone shows up, they get on-boarded directly from the device, so everything happens through a mobile app versus costly calls to customer support.

Now as an example, two of our customers, Telstra and Vodafone New Zealand, were eager to sell more data to get full value from the LTE networks they were deploying.

And what they did was to create a nice portal through a mobile app.

The benefit is they created a cycle of constant customer engagement.  It has absolutely helped them sell more data, and enables any DSP to use more of its network, and drives things like the Net Promoter Score.

And a key reason it’s effective is the customer gets to take action or get issues resolved right away through the digital channels.

Another key benefit — and we’re seeing this in prepaid markets of Asia — is that the digital enabler allows us to fine tune offers to meet the needs of the market.  For instance, a prepaid customer doesn’t want to commit to buying a large chunk of data, say 5 GB.  They may not even want to spend a dollar to buy 500 megabytes because they are not really sure what that represents in terms of usage, and therefore whether they are getting their money’s worth.  But what you can do is offer then a 2-hour pass, a day pass, or weekend passes for specific types of content or services.

So serving those offers up, pushing them out into the digital marketplace, and one-touch provisioning them is what the digital enabler is all about.

It’s a beautiful explanation of where mobile operators need to be.  Incidentally who does MATRIXX compete with in this digital enabler business?

Dan, mostly we go up against the bigger guys who have dominated the space for a long time.

We just finished a market trial in Southeast Asia.  The trail was run simultaneously among all vendors, which is kind of unusual, but they had a fairly central IT organization which allowed that to happen.

At MATRIXX, we brought one guy on-site who configured all their use cases and had the system up and running in six weeks with a footprint of eight small servers.

Two traditional B/OSS vendors, meanwhile, brought in 40 people and by the time three months were up, they still hadn’t configured all the use cases.  And they trialed the solution with 128 large servers.

Gee, that’s an astounding difference in hardware requirements.

And the main reason MATRIXX can achieve that, Dan, is our heritage as a company.  Back in 2008 we built everything based on new technology, equipment, and databases.  Others are running Oracle underneath, but we are not.  We run our own in-memory database.  Now Oracle guys can add that capability through Java, scripting languages, etc.  However, the older technology just doesn’t scale efficiently.  You really need to start from scratch, and that’s what we did.

The older technology limits what you do to the number of clicks, 6-second increments, and other hard-coded constraints.

But with a modern charging and policy engine such as ours, it’s easy to develop a package, for one hour or 5 gigabytes.  It’s as simple as a configuration in our system, whereas the older approach requires quite a bit of coding.

What results are customers seeing with the platform?

Well, look at Telstra.  By number of subscribers, they are no way near as large as an AT&T, but their operation is still highly complex and Telstra recognized that as they transition to becoming more digital, they simply had to be more nimble and to lower their cost-to-serve.

They went with MATRIXX because it allowed them to deliver smaller packages to their digital channels at a much cheaper price point.  They took our charging and policy platform, did no customization on it at all, and then integrated it with 50 different systems.  They use our out-of-the box functionality and configuration for everything and that serves all their needs.

What are you spending R&D on now?

We spend a lot of our R&D time these days figuring how to deploy stuff quickly.

People involved in large-scale IT transformations know how painful that process is, so we don’t want to be in that bucket.  And one way you improve time-to-market is you provide tools to manage everything from a single control point.

When you can speed things up, it allows the operator to try stuff out, see what works, and adjust on-the-fly accordingly.  So instead of a two- to three-year digital transition program, you can accomplish it all in just a two-month pilot.

At Telstra they were able to put in true real-time notification for all of their postpaid customers.  But perhaps the happiest surprise was that their call center traffic — people calling in to ask questions and complain — dropped by 40%.

Wow, lowering customer care calls by 40% — that’s great.

It is great, but of course it didn’t happen overnight.  Telstra has been pushing forward their digital transition since 2011, and early in 2015 they hit a benchmark where 50% of all of their customer transactions are now through the digital channel.  So, it’s not just huge savings in the customer care area.  The greater real-time engagement with customers via the digital channel is driving big revenue gains as well.

MATRIXX Traditional

Copyright 2016 Black Swan Telecom Journal

 
Jennifer Kyriakakis

Jennifer Kyriakakis

Jennifer Kyriakakis has been working in the Communications Industry for over 15 years in Marketing, Sales and Systems Delivery.  Prior to MATRIXX, Jennifer worked for Portal Software (acquired by Oracle) where she was responsible for the global marketing strategy of Portal’s product suite for the broadband and mobile markets.

During her 7 years with Portal and Oracle, she also held positions in Services Marketing, Customer Programs, and Sales Engineering.  Before joining Portal, she worked with Verizon International Wireless managing large implementations of billing and customer care solutions for their global operating partners.

Jennifer began her career in the Communications Practice at Accenture where she developed billing, invoicing, and payment processing applications for wireless operators.  She holds a Bachelors Degree in Information Technology and Operations Management from the College of William and Mary.   Contact Jennifer via

Black Swan Solution Guides & Papers

cSwans of a Feather

  • The Digital Enabler: A Charging, Self-Care & Marketing Platform at the Core of the Mobile Business — interview with Jennifer Kyriakakis — The digital enabler is a central platform that ties together charging, self-care, and marketing.  The article explains why leading operators consider digital enablers pivotal to their digital strategies.
  • Crossing the Rubicon: Is it Time for Tier Ones to Move to a Real-Time Analytics BSS? — interview with Andy Tiller — Will tier one operators continue to maintain their quilt works of legacy and adjunct platforms — or will they radically transform their BSS architecture into a new  system designed to address the new telecom era?  An advocate for radical transformation discusses: real-time analytics, billing for enterprises, partnering mashups, and on-going transformation work at Telenor.
  • Enabling Telecoms & Utilities to Adapt to the Winds of Business Change — interview with Kirill Rechter — Billing is in the midst of momentous change.  Its value is no longer just around delivering multi-play services or sophisticated rating.  In this article you’ll learn how a billing/CRM supplier has adapted to the times by offering deeper value around the larger business issues of its telecom and utility clients.
  • Billing As Enabler for the Next Killer Business Model — interview with Scott Swartz — Facebook, cloud services, and Google Ads are examples of innovative business models that demand unique or non-standard billing techniques.  The article shows how flexible, change-on-the-fly, and metadata-driven billing architectures are enabling CSPs to offer truly ground breaking services.
  • A Cynic Converted: IN/Prepaid Platforms Are Now Pretty Cool — interview with Grant Lenahan — Service delivery platforms born in the IN era are often painted as inflexible and expensive to maintain.  Learn how modern SDPs with protocol mediation, high availability, and flexible Service Creation Environments are delivering value for operators such as Brazil’s Oi.

Related Articles

  • Subex’s New HyperSense AI-Platform Aims to Turn Telcos into Agile, Analytics-Driven Ubers and Rakutens — interview with Rohit Maheshwari — An expert explains why telcos must swiftly adopt the AI/analytics methods of hyperscaler firms.  Giving telco examples where cross-company data sharing can make a difference, he explains the 12 key features of a new platform designed to deliver more agile and collaborative intelligence across a telco.
  • Subex’s COO: Machine Learning, Disruption & Adaptive Biz Models to Impact Telecoms in 2020 — interview with Shankar Roddam — In our dynamic and digital-driven world, telecoms and enterprises face many business risks.  So what can you do to plot a successful future?  Hear 5 prophecies on 2020 telecom trends from the Chief Operating Officer of Subex.
  • TELUS Analytics Users Get Productivity Boost from Internal Team of Data Access & Showcasing Experts-for-Hire — interview with Mange Kumarasamy — How a large organization with hundreds of analytics users gets help from an  internal Big Data team who sources multiple back-end databases; builds tailored reports; and drives campaigns that answer strategic questions for users.
  • Non-Verbal Speech Analytics: Monitoring Voice Calls in Real-Time for Customer Care, Sales, Retention & Onboarding — interview with Yoav Degani — Non-verbal speech analysis studies the emotional context of voice qualities like intonation, tone, emphasis and rhythm.  A pioneer in voice analytics explains how its technology benefits customer care, sales, retention and onboarding.
  • Telecom CVM: From Scattered Campaigns to Unified & Consistent Communication with Customers — interview with Cretièn Brandsma — Despite the many failures Customer Value Management has faced in telecom, CVM’s future is very hopeful.  A carrier expert explains why telecoms have faltered, how customer experience programs can be revitalized, and where telecoms should invest in better tactics and technology.
  • The Key to Driving 4G Profit: Sell Value, Not Bandwidth — by Miri Duenias — Are you struggling to earn a profit on your 4G investments?  Many operators are failing today on the marketing side.  But aligning 4G products with a customer’s personal preferences and desires provides the necessary sizzle to boost sales and earn a handsome ROI.
  • Will Real-Time Decisioning Save Big Data Analytics from Overblown Hype? — interview with Tom Erskine — Telecom analytics is more than just collecting and analyzing data.  It’s also about taking action — correct action — often in real-time and across a complex provisioning environment.  In this interview you’ll hear how next best actions are creating value in retention and upselling through a more flexible, business-process driven approach.
  • A Big Data Starter Kit in the Cloud: How Smaller Operators Can Get Rolling with Advanced Analytics — interview with Ryan Guthrie — Medium to small operators know “big data” is out there alright, but technical staffing and cost issues have held them back from implementing it.  This interview discusses the advantages of moving advanced analytics to the cloud where operators can get up and running faster and at lower cost.
  • The Customer Engagement Era: How Personalization & Backend Integration Leads to a Richer Mobile Biz — interview with Rita Tochner — How does a mobile operator move its subscribers to higher levels of spending and profit?  Fierce competition, social media scrutiny, and the high cost of new networks all conspire against these goals.  In this interview, however, you’ll learn how engaging better with customers, getting more personal, and being more sensitive to their individual needs is the path forward.
  • Telecoms Failing Badly in CAPEX: The Desperate Need for Asset Management & Financial Visibility — interview with Ashwin Chalapathy — A 2012 PwC report put the telecom industry on the operating table, opened the patient up, and discovered a malignant cancer: poor network CAPEX management, a problem that puts telecoms in grave financial risk.  In this interview, a supplier of network analytics solutions provides greater detail on the problem and lays out its prescription for deeper asset management, capacity planning and data integrity checks.
  • Batting for More Churn Reduction and Revenue Assurance Home Runs — interview with Peter Mueller — What’s it like to transform an IT shop to big data and cloud?  In this interview, the CTO of a boutique revenue assurance explains how his firm made the leap.  He shows how project-oriented programs and working with carrier customers to explore RA and churn reduction “hunches” is where much of the action is.
  • History Repeats: The Big Data Revolution in Telecom Service Assurance — interview with Olav Tjelflaat — The lessons of telecom software history teach that new networks and unforeseen industry developments have an uncanny knack for disrupting business plans.  A service assurance incumbent reveals its strategy for becoming a leader in the emerging network analytics and assurance market.
  • From Alarms to Analytics: The Paradigm Shift in Service Assurance — interview with Kelvin Hall — In a telecom world with millions of smart devices, the service assurance solutions of yesteryear are not getting the job done.  So alarm-heavy assurance is now shifting to big data solutions that deliver visual, multi-layered, and fine-grained views of network issues.  A data architect who works at large carriers provides an inside view of the key service provider problems driving this analytics shift.
  • The Shrink-Wrapped Search Engine: Why It’s Becoming a Vital Tool in Telecom Analytics — interview with Tapan Bhatt — Google invented low cost, big data computing with its distributed search engine that lives in mammoth data centers populated with thousands of commodity CPUs and disks.  Now search engine technology is available as “shrink wrapped” enterprise software.  This article explains how this new technology is solving telecom analytics problems large and small.
  • Sharing Intelligence, Services, and Infrastructure across the Telecom Galaxy — interview with Gary Zimmerman — The telecom industry is an industry of sharing.  In fact, the rise of mobile broadband is driving a greater reliance on real-time intelligence, services trading, and infrastructure exchange.  In this article, a leading info exchange provider explains the value of its services portfolio and points to other interoperability and sharing ideas under development.
  • Data Monetization: Why Selling Intelligence is a Hot New Revenue Stream for Mobile Carriers — interview with Joe Levy — Data monetization is a revenue dream come true for mobile carriers: a highly profitable sideshow where the carrier analyzes and sells data it already collects for other purposes.  In this article you’ll learn how operators monetize their data through use cases in corporate advertising and media branding.
  • Harvesting Big Data Riches in Retailer Partnering, Actionable CEM & Network Optimization — interview with Oded Ringer — In the analytics market there’s plenty of room for small solution firms to add value through a turnkey service or cloud/licensed solution.  But what about large services firms: where do they play?  In this article you’ll learn how a global services giant leverages data of different types to help telcos: monetize retail partnerships, optimize networks, and make CEM actionable.
  • Raising a Telco’s Value in the Digital Ecosystem: One Use Case at a Time — interview with Jonathon Gordon — The speed of telecom innovation is forcing software vendors to radically adapt and transform their business models.  This article shows how a deep packet inspection company has  expanded into revenue generation, particularly  for mobile operators.  It offers a broad palette of value-adding use cases from video caching and parental controls to application-charging and DDoS security protection.
  • Radio Access Network Data: Why It’s Become An Immensely Useful Analytics Source — interview with Neil Coleman — It’s hard to overstate the importance of Radio Access Network (RAN) analytics to a mobile operator’s business these days.  This article explains why the RAN data, which lives in the air interface between the base station and the handset --  can be used for a business benefit in network optimization and customer experience.
  • Back Office Streamlining to Enterprise Support: The Many Flavors of Wireline Analytics — interview with Tom Nolting — Mobile analytics gets plenty of press coverage, but analytics is just as crucial for wireline operators.  In this article, a billing VP at a leading wireline operator discusses several diverse uses of analytics in billing, enterprise sales/retention, and network partner margin assurance.
  • Analytics Biology: The Power of Evolving to New Data Sources and Intelligence Gathering Methods — interview with Paul Morrissey — Data warehouses create great value, yet it’s now time to let loose non-traditional big data platforms that create value in countless pockets of operational efficiency that have yet to be fully explored.  This article explains why telecoms must expand their analytics horizons and bring on all sorts of new data sources and novel intelligence gathering techniques.
  • B/OSS Mathematics: The Quest to Analyze Business Problems & Drive Operating Decisions — interview with Matti Aksela — Analytics is the glory of mathematics brought to practical use.  And in telecom, analytics has merely stratched the surface of its full potential.  In this article, you’ll learn how machine learning is being combined with the power of CDR number crunching to optimize mobile top-ups, control churn — and in the future, help telecoms make critical network and operating decisions.
  • Leveraging the RA/FM Platform to Deliver Business Insights to Finance & Marketing — by Amit Daniel — Carrier professionals using RA and fraud management tools are getting requests from internal customers who want the role of RA/FM platforms expanded to deliver up-to-date analytics data for finance and marketing purposes.  This article advocates a cross-product layer to serve such broader use cases.  The effect would be to transform the existing RA/FM platform into a combined business protection and business growth analytics engine.
  • A Mobile Marketer Service: Bridging Personalization & B/OSS Flowthrough — interview with Efrat Nakibly — Marketing analytics is a prescriptive program for driving  actions such as sending a timely promotion to a mobile subscriber.  But completeness demands that you also be able to provision that treatment, qualify the promotion, and keep billing fully in the loop.  This article shows how a managed services program can deliver such an end-to-end process and manage customer life cycles on a one-to-one basis.
  • Science of Analytics: Bringing Prepaid Top Ups & Revenue Maximization under the Microscope — interview with Derek Edwards — Prepaid subscribers are the customers that carriers know the least about.  The operator is not interacting with prepaid customers on a monthly basis.  You’re not sending a bill, nor do you have detailed profiles on these customers, especially in the developing world where customers are buying SIMs at a grocery store.  This interview explains how contextual marketing meets the unique analytics challenge of prepaid customers.
  • Connecting B/OSS Silos and Linking Revenue Analytics with the Customer Experience — by Anssi Tauriainen — Customer experience analytics is a complex task that flexes B/OSS data to link the customer’s network experience and actions to improve it and drive greater revenue.  In this article, you’ll gain an understanding of how anayltics data needs to be managed across various customer life cycle stages and why it’s tailored for six specific user groups at the operator.
  • Profitable 3G: China’s Mobile Operators Monetize Networks with Retailers & Partners — interview with Kevin Xu — Mobile operators are at the center of explosive growth in wireless services.  But to exploit this opportunity requires IT ingenuity and a broader view on how the mobile user can be served.  In this article you’ll learn the innovative techniques Chinese operators use to monetize 3G networks via analytics and partnerships with retailers, social networks, and advertisers.
  • Customer Analytics: Making the Strategic Leap From Hindsight to Foresight — interview with Frank Bernhard — Are your company’s analytics programs scattered?  Is there a strategy in place for customer analytics?  This interview with a leading telecom analytics consultant explains why strategy and planning around the analytics function is crucial to getting your money’s worth.  Topics discussed include: hindsight vs. foresight; an advanced analytics program; and the interface sophistication required to support high end vs. low end analytics users.
  • Meeting the OTT Video Challenge: Real-Time, Fine-Grain Bandwidth Monitoring for Cable Operators — interview with Mark Trudeau — Cable operators in North America are being overwhelmed by the surge in video and audio traffic.  In this article you’ll learn how Multi Service Operators (MSOs) are now monitoring their traffic to make critical decisions to protect QoS service and monetize bandwidth.  Also featured is expert perspective on trends in: network policy; bandwidth caps; and  customer care issues.
  • Analytics Meditations: The Power of Low-Cost Hardware and the Social Network Within — interview with Ken King — Analytics didn‘t arrive yesterday.  Data warehousing and BI have been in the telecom vocabulary for twenty-five or more years.  In this interview, you’ll gain a perspective on why “big data” changes the game and why social network (or social circles) analysis promises the next level of insights.  Other interesting topics include: segmenting the analytics market, engaging with carrier clients, and upgrading from older- to newer-style methodologies.
  • LTE Analytics:  Learning New Rules in Real-Time Network Intelligence, Roaming and Customer Assurance — interview with Martin Guilfoyle — LTE is telecom’s latest technology darling, and this article goes beyond the network jargon, to explain the momentous changes LTE brings.  The interview delves into the marriage of IMS, high QoS service delivery via IPX, real-time intelligence and roaming services, plus the new customer assurance hooks that LTE enables.
  • Shared Data Plans: The Challenge of Managing a Family of Pricing, Revenue Assurance, Fraud, and Network Policy Issues — by Amit Daniel — Verizon Wireless‘ recent announcement of its move to shared data plans for families shook the mobile industry.  In this column, cVidya’s Amit Daniel shines a spotlight on the knowhow and analytics tools that operators now deperately need to offer the right  shared data price plans, ensure bandwidth throttling is handled correctly, and address new fraud concerns.
  • Analytics Guru: Are Telecoms Ready for the Biz Intelligence Explosion? — interview with John Meyers — Business intelligence is evolving from the creation of dashboards and reports to taking action based on a deep knowledge of the environmental context.  The article explores the implications of “big data” in terms of IPTV, storage requirements, hardware, event collection, and deep packet inspection.
  • Social Networking for Telecoms: How To Enlist Friends and Family as Mobile Marketers — interview with Simon Rees — Social Network Analysis (SNA) is about exploiting data on “friends and family” connections to combat churn and win new CSP business.  The article explores how an analysis of the ebb and flow of CDRs, phone calls, and messages, can identify key influencers and drive powerful marketing campaigns.
  • Making the Strategic Leap From Billing to Merchandising — interview with Humera Malik — Today billing/charging technology has progressed to the point where the usage intelligence, the charges, the user behaviors, and the analytics can all come together in near real-time.  This article discusses the organizational and marketing strategies that enable a operator to create a true “merchandising” system that can revolutionize a CSP’s business.