Using Subscriber and Network Data For Better Business Visibility

Executive Summary
Convergencethe buzzword of the information, communications and entertainment industry means many things to many people. Theres the convergence of infrastructure (around IP technology), the convergence of offerings (video, mobile and data services), and the convergence around applications and services, in which services that used to be discrete are being combined to create new value for the customer. A basic purpose of convergence is simplicity for the consumer; however convergence can obscure an operators view of the subscriber, the service and the network. This is due to the underlying mixture of legacy technologies, business silos, and even the infrastructural remnants of former mergers and acquisitions that ultimately deliver the service. Next generation networks embody the convergence vision, offering service providers a once in a generation opportunity to provide attractive new services to customers. Some of these services involve combining network capabilities with third party applications and content to create exciting new propositions. All involve a growing range of digital devices that leverage the capabilities of high speed internet connections to keep business and consumers seamlessly connected with their services. If service providers are to do more than just provide the access to connect subscribers to convergent services, they must understand the complete customer experience. This requires insight into the types of services people use, how they are accessed, network status, service experience and consumer preferences for services. However, the complexity of collecting information across multiple access networks, where the service is frequently disaggregated from the network, poses a serious challenge to enterprise visibility. Addressing this challenge will require the real time usage collection of data streams from heterogeneous network elements; the capacity to aggregate these events and transactions into meaningful and accurate accounting records; and the enrichment of these records by correlating usage and subscriber information with static and dynamic data from CRM, Billing, subscriber databases, payment systems and other sources. The industry term for data collection and correlation is mediation. Mediation is well placed to meet the visibility needs of service providers by collecting data from the network and augmenting it with subscriber information from IT and external sources. Done badly, mediation represents lost competitive position, and higher costs. If it is poorly conceived or implemented, there will be revenue leakage, expensive technology platform duplication, lost opportunities to act on time-sensitive customer information and a poorer customer experience, a classic case of technology, limiting marketing and commercial execution. Done well, mediation can unlock latent assets (Figure-1) with its critical role in providing a complete view of subscriber activity. Complete and timely information is a key success factor to many initiatives sales programmes, loyalty plans, data integration, revenue assurance, and cost management. The cornerstone to such a strategy is a best-in-class, convergent mediation solution combined with network edge expertise.

Introduction

As businesses look to cleanly execute their strategic plans, they need to have accurate and timely data as to who their customers are, what services are being used, and the status of the network. One of the best sources of this data is created by the network - from the switches, routers, application servers etc. as it provides the truest view of how a customer uses and experiences the service. Personalization of the network means that increasingly, data must be shared between the network, where service usage occurs, and IT, where customer data is managed

However, as the service layer becomes increasingly decoupled from the network layer, files that are able to provide that data are often incomplete or go uncollected. In some cases, IP network elements do not generate usage records at all, meaning usage information about how much data was sent, to where and when has to be assembled across systems. Moreover, even if the information is collected, it is often kept in functional silos within heterogeneous business and operational support systems. To have visibility of customers across all dimensions, such as network platforms, geographies, services a strategy is needed to centralize data collection from multiple networks.

To develop comprehensive subscriber profiles, that data must be enriched with subscriber data, federated from other sources, to answer a wide variety of operational questions including:

a shield to protect the billing system from the diversity of usage record formats from multiple network elements. Over time, however, the mediation function began to evolve. Standalone mediation systems became increasingly capable of collecting usage data from a much greater number and variety of network systems. And service providers began to recognize that they could use that data for far more than simply generating a bill, using information to feed fraud, revenue assurance and online bill presentment systems. Mediations ability to act as a centralized, reliable source of data from an ever more heterogeneous network led to its evolution into a way to gain a consolidated view of network activity. Mediation solutions can help operators better understand the behavior of their subscribers, and business At the same time, the concept of a service has undergone some fundamental changes. In the past, the service was essentially equivalent to the network that it ran over; if the network failed, the service would fail and obviously the customer would be affected. However, the advent of IP technology and IP-based services has disaggregated the service from the network, driving the need for systems that can correlate network activity with service and customer information that resides in various IT systems in order to gain visibility into how the service is behaving and how the subscriber is actually experiencing the service. Mediation provides that visibility by collecting data from the network and augmenting it with subscriber information from IT and external sources. In this way, mediation solutions can help operators better understand the behavior of their subscribers, and business, across multiple networks and services.

What services are being accessed? Where and when are subscribers using services? What are the critical metrics on data being transferred,
such as time, volume and duration? content accessed? experiencing? data?

What are the subscribers interests based on service/ What is the quality of service that subscribers are Are front/back-office systems using the most current
Personalization of the network means that increasingly, data must be shared between the network, where service usage occurs, and IT, where customer data is managed . Going forward, progressive service providers are rightly looking to more dynamic service offerings, involving real-time transaction intelligence, for differentiation and revenue growth. The starting point for supporting and managing complex transactions is visibility of subscribers, networks and applications.

Its not a service unless you can bill for it a fairly basic tenet in any industry. For telecom service providers, this has historically meant being able to collect customer usage data from the network, doing any processing or correlating of that data that may be required, then passing it to the billing system. While early billing systems received usage data directly from the switch, the evolution of the multi-vendor network led to the need for a middleman between the billing and IT systems and the network systems. Mediation assumed that role, acting as

The Evolving Role of Mediation

Figure 1: Latent assets of a service provider

Bridging the Data Divide

Real-time data collection: While network data has

historically been collected on a batch basis, many next-generation network elements create records which must be captured on a real-time basis or be lost.

The Network department and the IT department have historically been separate entities within the service provider, with distinct roles and requirements. The Network side has been concerned with ensuring that the network and the service are working correctly, which has led to a focus on issues such as network availability and latency. On the IT side, the primary focus has been the support of business operations, where concerns for customer management and monetizing services drive investments in systems such as billing and customer relationship management. The advent of next-generation services and technology has begun to break down that divide and spur interest in the concept of IT/network convergence. Operators are recognizing the value of adopting IT technology to improve efficiencies in the world of telecommunications infrastructure, including standardized servers and middleware, commercial storage and software-based devices such as soft switches and media gateway, and these IT-based devices are increasingly being used to supplement or even replace the role traditionally played by network elements.

IP-based network complexity: IP networks range

widely in their ability to generate usage records; while most next-generation IP equipment generate event detail records in some sort of standardized format, older IP gear is more likely to generate proprietary records or even be unable to generate a record at all. IP network gear also generates a wider range of fields than traditional switches that must then be collected and managed. associated with extracting IP usage information combined with the explosion of digital events created by next-generation services necessitates that mediation systems be able to process far more events, and do so far more efficiently and quickly than in the past.

Scalability: The higher processing requirements

Integration of third-party data: As service providers

Mediation serves as an enabler to bridge the gap between the network and the IT realms

bring other entities into the service mix, such as interconnect partners or content providers, they must also be able to process any usage data produced by those partners.

Cross-platform data collection: As operators build

At the same time, new offerings that expand beyond the traditional metered voice services necessitate closer integration between the IT and network departments. For example, the launch of prepaid wireless services blurred the line between network and IT in the late 1990s, eventually requiring active/real-time mediation systems, to process the massive amounts of network events in real-time with low latency. Today, as new breeds of entertainment and multimedia services and new business models come on stream, the real-time collection and correlation of information across network and the IT systems is essential to effective business operations. Sophisticated mediation systems possess all the capabilities that are needed to perform cross-platform data collection function. Mediation serves as an enabler to bridge the gap between the network and the IT realms, collecting usage data from network elements and devices, normalizing and correlating that data and sending it to the billing system for processing. (Figure 2) While these processes have typically been fairly straightforward and simple in the circuit-switched, voicebased world, next generation network architectures and business models have imposed new requirements on mediation systems, including the following: Figure 2: Mediation bridge between network and I.T. out their multi-play offerings, they must be able to collect and correlate data across multiple network types, including circuit-switched and IP-based networks.

Mediation is able to collect network data on a real-time basis, across different technology and access platforms. It can then correlate that data with information from IT systems, including federating customer and service data, and use that integrated information to provide business departments with visibility into service, subscriber and network activity.

Addressing the Visibility Challenge

The majority of operators understand the importance of data-driven decision making to their operations, particularly with regard to marketing and customer management. However, despite having a wealth of data at its fingertips in the form of call detail records, telecom lags behind other industries with regard to its ability to leverage that data, due to the following factors:

The OSS/BSS challenge: Changes in network

Limited distribution of data: While the telecom

network generates a huge volume of events and transactions, that data has historically been for the exclusive use of the Network organization. As business units look to build richer customer profiles, the limited distribution of that data needs to be expanded to include other functional units. led to large operators commonly having multiple IT systems and data repositories for various networks and services. These silos often remain separate due to factors such as the cost of integration, limited internal resources and internal politics. However, the existence of these silos makes it difficult, if not impossible, to generate a single view of a service or a customer across multiple network types, geographies, lines of business, etc.

elements can result in changes in the usage records being produced by those elements; e.g. minor changes to a network element, such as a switch upgrade, can cause a ripple of software change requests across the entire organization, affecting data timeliness and quality of data sent to downstream business systems. Mediation can shield the OSS/BSS environment from these factors, enabling the operator to make changes at the network level while ensuring that the operations systems receive the data that they require.

Data silos: Telecom and cable M&A activity has

A greater reliance on analytical data-driven decision making, combined with an increasingly competitive communications market and continued pressure to reduce internal operations costs, are driving investment in analytics and business intelligence. However, any analytics initiative is ultimately only as strong as the quality of its source data, which necessitates a system that is able to quickly and accurately collect and correlate data from network and IT systems.

Data inconsistencies: The existence of multiple

Any analytics initiative is ultimately only as strong as the quality of its source data

disaggregated data silos also means that data is often represented differently in different systems. For example, if a customers name is spelled one way in one system and even slightly differently in another, the operator has no way of knowing that it is, in fact, the same subscriber, and thus loses the valuable opportunity to build a complete usage profile of that individual. The best possible location in which to address these discrepancies in the data is before it is fed into the data warehouse or the data mart for analysis, which necessitates a mediation system that is able to normalize and correlate any relevant records and account for any discrepancies. conducted by research firm Stratecast*, a division of Frost & Sullivan, operators rely on billing as their chief source of data for analytics purposes. Eightysix percent of operators surveyed named billing as a primary data source, and one-third listed billing as their only source of marketing campaign data. While the billing system represents a rich source of data for service providers, relying solely or primarily on billing data means that the operator is often making decision based on batch data that may be weeks old or incomplete. By combining billing data with information from other IT systems, operators can gain a more complete view of the subscribers experience, providing data that is fit for purpose, in this case supporting functional management in their decision making.

Visibility through Network Data

Limited data sources: According to a recent survey

Gaining visibility into network and service operations Gaining visibility into network and service operations is critical for operators in an increasingly competitive market. Even more important going forward will be their ability to integrate various files and records from networks, services and subscriber activities to provide visibility at the customer level. As the communications market continues to evolve, progressive operators will take an active role in the creation and delivery of nextgeneration services, or risk becoming the dumb pipe. In the emerging ecosystem for the creation and delivery of next generation services, operators must assert ownership of their customers. As networks have become commoditized, the customerand all of the information associated with the customerhas become service providers most valuable, if still latent, asset.

* Predictive Analytics Powers Communications Service Provider Marketing Strategies Stratecast (July 2007)

Convergent mediation can play a key role in optimizing these latent assets. Operators can gain a better understanding of who their customers are and how they are using a service at a granular level by combining network data with additional information from other sources, including the following:

Customer Value Management: While average

Billing systems Third party resources, including data on consumer

credit, demographic data and psychographic/lifestyle data

Point of sale systems, including retail stores and kiosks Product catalogs CRM systems, including call transcripts and call center
metrics

revenue per user (ARPU) has long been the standard metric by which operators are evaluated, there is growing interest in the concept of customer profitability, which takes into account not just how much a subscriber spends, but also how much keeping that subscriber actually costs. By combining network data with metrics from systems such as CRM or finance, an operator could create a comprehensive picture of a customer that includes information on whether he regularly pays his bills on time, whether he frequently overuses network resources with high-bandwidth downloads, whether he makes an inordinate number of calls to customer care, etc, then use that information to determine his total value as a customer. That evaluation could then be used to decide whether to attempt to sell him more products and services.

Web site, including clickstream data, Web-based

order information and data from any channel partner sites

Advertising: While advertising has long been a basic

component of the cable TV industry, it is a relatively new concept in the IPTV and wireless spaces, where operators are focusing their attention on how to attract and monetize advertising opportunities. By collecting network utilization data and augmenting it with additional information such as billing data, subscriber location information and data from CRM systems, plus any external demographic data, these service providers can offer considerable value to advertisers looking to target specific customer segments or tailor their marketing campaigns.

By enriching network event and transaction information with additional data that is either owned by various systems within the IT department or acquired from third parties, operators will be better able to understand subscriber behavior and, more importantly, act on it. This capability becomes particularly important when placed in the right hands within service providers. Historically, analysis of network data has been done in enterprise data warehouses and data marts, with access restricted to expert users. However, as operators begin implementing profitability initiatives and rolling out innovative new services, it becomes increasingly important for access to analytics functionality to be placed directly in the hands of decision makers, particularly those individuals responsible for functions such as customer acquisition and retention, service introductions and marketing. Enriched network data is critical for analytics, because it provides operators with the building blocks necessary to create a timely an endto-end view of the network, the service and the customer and make decisions accordingly. Some examples of how enriched network data can be used in analytics applications include the following:

Product Management: Waiting for billing data to

assemble customer usage information, especially for new services, can take too long and introduce unwanted lag into the decision-making process. Sales figures from CRM systems, while providing timely sales information, typically does not provide detailed insight on the subscriber experience. Mediation using data generated directly from the network can be used to quickly deliver data on usage patterns and trends. It provides detailed quality of experience information, to help generate a better understanding of how products are being used and problem points.

Promotions: Operators can use enriched network

Customer Profiling: The promise of triple- and

quad-play service bundles has long been a unified experience across multiple network types, but few operators have actually delivered on that promise, in part because customer and service data remains stored in separate silos. However, by collecting and correlating data from multiple networks, a multi-play operator can identify patterns of customer behavior, such as matching TV viewing behavior with Internet data usage. That information can then be used to help the operator identify cross-sell or upsell opportunities.

data to match subscriber profile information with product/offer profile data, enabling them to use every customer touch point as an opportunity to suggest additional products and services for customers much as Web sites such as Google and Amazon.com are currently able to do.

Enriched network data is critical for analytics

Conclusion

Communications service providers have no lack of data available to themdata from the network, data from IT systems, data from retail outlets and websites, and data that can be acquired from third party sources. The challenge lies in collecting that information on a real-time basis, organizing and correlating the data, and putting it in the hands of those who can actually use it. Far too often, the data remains segregated in silos, which preclude any sort of holistic, integrated view of operations, customers and overall business. And that integrated view is critical if operators are to succeed in this emerging Web 2.0 environment. In the current competitive market, incumbents are just as likely to be competing against new, more agile entrants unencumbered with legacy infrastructure and systems as against other traditional operators. As they go headto-head against these new players, operators hold a significant advantage in their longstanding relationships with customers and their ownership of networks and systems that generate a tremendous amount of valuable information. However, in order to effectively leverage those assets, operators must implement mediation systems and processes that are able to collect and manage heterogeneous network data on a real-time basis, then combine that data with subscriber and service data, as well as any third-party information. These systems must also feature standardized interfaces that enable integration with upstream systems, as well as potentially feed into a higher-level data warehouse or data marts as required. The walls that exist among operators various internal organizations, including network, IT and marketing, have limited their ability to do any comprehensive analysis of data derived from multiple sources, preventing them from fully exploiting the next generation of communications services. The answer is to implement a data management strategy that provides enterprise-wide visibility of network, service and subscriber information, enabling the operator to better understand the services it offers and the context in which subscribers use them. The cornerstone to such a strategy is a best-in-class, convergent mediation solution.

Personalization of the network means that increasingly, data must be shared between the network, where service usage occurs, and IT, where customer data is managed. Going forward progressive service providers rightly look to more dynamic service offerings, involving real-time transaction intelligence, for differentiation and revenue growth. The starting point for supporting and managing complex transactions is visibility of subscribers, networks and applications.

Openet As Your Technology Partner

Openet is the network-edge solution expert. Its event-processing and transaction-management solutions are used by many of the worlds largest and most innovative service providers in the world, including AT&T, BT, Orange, Telstra, Verizon Wireless, and others, to leverage transactional intelligence and extract value from the activity on their diverse networks. At the heart of its solution offerings is FusionWorks, a platform for event-processing and transactionmanagement. FusionWorks is a modular software platform that delivers the performance, scalability, and flexibility required in todays provider networks. The modules are pre-integrated to ensure interoperability. Currently, Openet solutions process more than 20 billion events and transactions every day and bill more than $10 billion in revenues each month.

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