This year’s TM Forum Live event in Nice is focused on the telco digital-transformation agenda. Real-time analytics is one of the major themes at this year’s event, with big-name vendors such as AsiaInfo Linkage and Ericsson announcing new product and service launches. These announcements emphasize the increased demand from telcos for real-time analytics capabilities, which enable delivery of personalized offerings based on customers’ contextual information.

AsiaInfo and Ericsson announce new offerings for real-time analytics

AsiaInfo Linkage and Ericsson have announced new products and partnerships aimed at enabling telcos to respond agilely to the needs of customers:

• AsiaInfo Linkage kicked off the event with the launch of its Veris Real Time Intelligence (Veris RTI) customer-engagement engine for its Veris BSS product suite. Veris RTI extends the capabilities of the Veris C3 product (part of the Veris BSS platform), which builds a contextual awareness of the customer based on the customer’s smartphone service usage.
• Ericsson has taken the partnership path to bring real-time analytics capabilities to telcos, announcing a partnership with PegaSystems to deliver consistent omnichannel retail experience. Pega Systems will be combining its Next Best Action capabilities from its Pega Marketing application with Ericsson’s existing OSS/BSS product and service portfolio. Through this partnership, Ericsson will be enriching its consulting and system-integration capabilities in bringing data-driven marketing and customer-care operations to telcos.

Exploiting information for business insights was ranked as the most important IT trend for telcos in Ovum’s recent ICT Enterprise survey of almost 400 telco executives. Telco business units such as marketing and customer care need to obtain insights on customers to deliver better services. Analytical results based on real-time data obtained from infrastructure such as network elements, network probes (using deep packet inspection), and intelligent network systems (providing services such as current balance) are relevant to these units.

Combining data from these sources with customer-profile data from BSS systems such as billing and CRM systems provides more-detailed information about the user over the customer lifetime. Real-time analytics offerings that can perform advanced analytics such as microsegmentation, data mining, and prediction in real time are critical to telcos’ ability to improve the customer experience.

Greater competition within the Internet and communications arena means telcos must continue to develop more sophisticated product, tariff, marketing, and customer-support strategies, which are critical to provide smarter customer segmentation and to reduce churn and increase customer loyalty. As the telecoms market landscape evolves and as new players come to the forefront, resulting in a plethora of options, customers will be willing to churn to any telco that promptly meets their needs. The announcements from AsiaInfo and Ericsson underline how analytics will become more important as telcos seek to deliver improved experience to customers through consistent and personalized services across all channels.

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