STRATEGY GUIDE

Fast Data Applications to Help Telcos Disrupt the Disruptors

Telco, Communications Service Providers (CSPs) and Mobile operators are seeing their markets disrupted by Over-the-Top (OTT) providers, including Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Their subscribers are changing allegiance, switching carriers, cutting cords and moving to new technologies — many offered by OTT providers like Skype, Google and Slack — to communicate with others.

Still, Telco incumbents need to maintain investments in infrastructure. They’re managing costs via improved OSS and BSS systems, reducing infrastructure costs with NFV and SDN, and offering greater value with improved services via LTE, 3/4/5G and other initiatives. Adoption of a real-time fast data management platform to reduce dependence upon legacy RDBMS products and gain the advantages of high-speed, asynchronous memory-centric data processing is table stakes.

Telco Data PipelinesTelco applications need a fast data stack that not only captures and pipes streaming data, but also enriches that data by adding context and personalization, acting on it before it becomes data at rest.

Implementing a fast data solution opens Telco incumbents to the benefits of instant insight into inbound data streams, with the ability to take actions in real time on live data, millions of times a second, on millions of data events per second. This flexibility to ingest vast inflows of data, analyze it in real-time, and make per-event decisions — while meeting latency requirements— can create immediate, sustainable business value.

STRATEGY GUIDE

2 FAST DATA APPLICATIONS TO HELP TELCOS DISRUPT THE DISRUPTORS

Disrupting Applications We’re presenting you with this guide to 5 Fast Data Applications to Help Telcos Disrupt the Disruptors to introduce you to five application families where you can implement fast data at a practical, application level quickly. The five application areas we will describe include:

1. Correct Billing (OSS & BSS)

2. Personalization

3. Subscriber Management

4. SLA Management

5. Session Management

These high-velocity applications require the ability to ingest, analyze and transact on streams of data from thousands to millions of sources, in real time. These applications are the tip of the iceberg in terms of managing disruption and slowing the impact of disruption on your enterprise. Master the Telco fast data pipeline with these apps, and you’ll be better prepared to meet the opportunities of the future: SDN, NFV, 4/5G, and industrial and medical IoT.

Billing — Making OSS/BSS Applications Faster

Telcos rely on business support systems (BSS) and operations support systems (OSS) software to handle policy management, billing management, and bill mediation to minimize expenses and reduce the costs of bringing new services to market. For these applications, real-time analytics on streams of data are invaluable. Fast data solutions enable real-time analytics on vast streams of incoming data, enabling the automated, real-time decisions mandatory for OSS/BSS applications.

VoltDB is the only solution capable of ingesting, analyzing and acting on real-time data from OSS and BSS systems streaming massive volumes of data through the network; using that data to track activity such as network usage for many millions of users simultaneously; and performing real-time actions such as policy management, balance management, and real-time billing — meeting or beating the same latencies and tolerances a telco network requires — under 50ms.

Read about how Openet uses VoltDB to ensure precision in billing, while meeting tough latency SLAs, in the case study.

Personalization

Telcos and CSPs use VoltDB to deliver increased customer interaction, satisfaction and revenue via hyper-personalization of offers at enterprise scale. Carriers have an opportunity to better connect with current and targeted customers, using personalized applications as a key differentiator for generating subscriber growth and ARPU.

Delivering personalized content to subscribers means tapping into customer of data in real-time — the moment it arrives. Operators with the ability to track billions of events, generate real-time triggers from those billions of events, and take the right action at the right time through the right channel instantaneously will have the advantage over competitors.

VoltDB delivers the in-memory analytics and massive scalability to enable operators to engage with customers faster and seize opportunities to enhance revenue while improving the customer experience. Operators can build applications that act on real-time triggers to personalize responses to customer needs and actions instantaneously.

Read the Personalization Solutions Brief to learn more. (NEED HYPERLINK HERE)

1

2

STRATEGY GUIDE

3 FAST DATA APPLICATIONS TO HELP TELCOS DISRUPT THE DISRUPTORS

Subscriber Management

One of the many challenges telecom companies face is providing a better customer experience via subscriber data management.

VoltDB provides real-time analysis of subscriber data based on event triggers such as the end of a call, use of the mobile device in a specific location, or a user hitting a data usage threshold. These insights are then used to initiate real-time campaigns and communications that are delivered while the customer’s device is still in hand. Timely and relevant offers, improved service response, and proactive updates on billing/ usage result in a superior customer experience.

Real-time subscriber management and personalization increases subscriber satisfaction, reduces churn and increases loyalty. Providers who manage customer relationships in real time can improve retention and build ARPU.

Read about how Openet uses VoltDB for subscriber management.

SLA Management

Telcos impose strict guidelines for network efficiency SLAs (in most cases 50ms or less, 99% of the time) to authenticate billing and complete the call cycle. If a billing authorization request does not receive a timely response, the call is connected to maintain customer satisfaction— without billing the customer, significantly impacting revenue. Another undesirable option is to refuse to connect the customer, which results in a de facto network outage.

VoltDB can help telcos meet latency requirements while also simplifying deployments with its ACID consistency and built-in high availability. When a call is requested, it does not lock and delay response, nor does it create duplicate queries for billing authentication. This reduces server and memory requirements and delivers real-time responses to call requests while meeting strict SLAs 99.99% of the time.

Session Management

Competition is forcing higher levels of service and user experience to attract, retain and monetize new subscribers. As consumer devices proliferate, CSPs are upgrading their offerings to provide a unified and personalized user experience across devices to deliver an interactive, personalized user experience to any device.

Managing user sessions in real time to ensure a personalized continuous experience requires fast processing of user data from the network. Service providers need the ability to monitor and analyze user sessions and behavior of millions of users in real time on a per-event and per-person basis, in milliseconds.

VoltDB enables continuous per-event processing to make instant, value-based decisions in milliseconds. Real-time personalized user experiences delivered to any device increase subscriber satisfaction, reducing churn and increasing loyalty. In addition to the ability to do real-time user targeting, service providers can quickly build new service offerings and promotions to increase revenue.

3

4

5

© VoltDB, Inc. 209 Burlington Road, Suite 203, Bedford, MA 01730 voltdb.com

About VoltDB

VoltDB is the only in-memory transactional database for modern applications that require an unprecedented combination of data scale, volume, and accuracy. Unlike other databases, including OLTP, Big Data, and NoSQL, that force users to compromise, only VoltDB supports all three modern application data requirements: 1. Millions — VoltDB processes a relentless volume of data points from users and data sources. 2. Milliseconds — VoltDB ingests, analyzes, and acts on data in less than the blink of an eye. 3. 100% — Data managed by VoltDB is always accurate, all the time, for all decisions. Telcos, Financial services, Ad Tech, Gaming, and other companies use VoltDB to modernize their applications. VoltDB is preparing energy, industrial, telco and other companies to meet the challenges of the IoT. VoltDB was founded by a team of world-class database experts, including Dr. Michael Stonebraker, winner of the coveted ACM Turing award.

ConclusionFast data is a challenge and an opportunity. Unlike other data management problems, fast data solutions can yield immediate business benefits to Telcos and CSPs by increasing customer interaction and engagement; preventing fraud; and enabling real-time, high value offers via targeted interactions.

Put fast data to use to disrupt the OTTs and other disruptors. Download VoltDB today to see how this fast, scalable, cloud-ready operational database can help you Innovate, disrupt, and make a difference.