The need for service providers to evolve their business models and overcome declining revenues in their traditional services of voice and data usage is well-documented. All through the telecom boom, the service providers had a major grouse that while video and value added services were growing, it was Over-the-Top service providers who were walking away with the subscriber’s revenue. Now, with the explosion of data services, rich media and bandwidth-hungry applications, it is mandatory that service providers become (service) innovators to drive future revenues and profitability.
In order to do this, service providers need to make use of the large amount of data that resides in their network, and in turn learn from their network activity. Through this, telcos will be able to get useful data of both their valued customers and potential ones. They will be able to know the status of their peering relationships with current customers, while at the same time, gain a competitive advantage of knowing what new customers want.
Unfortunately, in an evolving business climate where every second counts, the traditional network reporting solutions do not have the necessary scale or architecture to provide insights in a timely fashion. Data which is not received immediately becomes inadequate and knowing what your network did months ago is of limited value.
The explosion of data services, rich media and applications presents another challenge for telcos. In order to enable and exploit these next generation data services, service providers need to ensure a compelling Quality of Experience (QoE) by delivering unprecedented scalability, reliability and versatility, while minimising the (Operations support systems/Business support systems)burden on their operations. This is where the network edge comes in.
The good news is that after years of struggling to manage these humongous data volumes, the service providers are finally beginning to realise the potential of Big Data as an ally. Big Data which was once the most misunderstood phenomenon in the telecom space is now being looked at as a great business opportunity and a beacon of hope!
It is more than just a huge chunk of matter. Big Data is a gold mine of information that already exists within the realms of the service providers.
Service Providers now realise that this is an opportunity to get back into the game and regain the lead in customer experience by building operations that capture data, add analytics and offer a proactive and a contextual end-user experience. Big Data can help service providers by providing near real time streaming analytics that will help increase speeds of business and network decisions. Activities which once took weeks can now be reduced to hours. This will help bring deep insights to service provider networks and help make networks more agile, efficient and more responsive to actual customer usage.
The marriage of Big Data Analytics and the telcos is a match made in heaven. While the service providers could always learn a lot from their network activity and identify their most valued customers, they now can actually derive a personality sketch of the customer, complete with his or her preferences, purchase habits or spending patterns.
The network edge is a crucial piece of the foundation that will enable service providers to deliver high performance, low latency, personalized services and ultimately place a service provider ahead of their competition. As service providers evolve, and become service innovators, they will need to rethink the network edge in terms of both architecture and business model transformations. Service providers prepping for the future should include a robust set of services-, cloud- and experience-ready definitions to their infrastructure selection criteria in order to ensure their new edge networks are ready for whatever the future delivers.
In addition to providing network analytics and end user information , a robust network edge could help explore other revenue streams like cloud CPE , Network function virtualisation and intelligent service chaining with the help SDN architectures
By assuring that their edge network architectures and business models are service ready and future-proof, telcos need not worry about their future revenue streams and can continue delivering services that meet their ROI requirements. This will avoid expensive rip and replace cycles for their edge networks and allow them to cost effectively accelerate new services to meet the needs of marketing and product development, and achieve cost-efficiency and breakthrough economics.
Ultimately, the experience-ready edge supports innovation across the entire ecosystem where all parties benefit.
By having a robust Network edge in place along with the addition of Big Data Analytics, telcos will be able to be future ready and deliver an unmatched customer experience. At the end of the day, we have to remember that the end consumers of the service provider’s offerings are no longer just subscribers, they are effectively an audience - that is knowledgeable and empowered with a need to be both compelled and entertained.