Service providers have invested in a variety of analytic applications over the last decade. From customer analytics to fraud management to revenue assurance, niche value-add solutions have been implemented to collect, manage, analyze and act on customer, service and network data.
While this piecemeal approach to analytics has been convenient and also been widely successful within individual buying centers, it has been grossly sub-optimal from the enterprise perspective. Although all of these applications use the same pool of data to address different business problems, there is no easy way for them to share data, business logic and other common components that can help the service provider get full visibility into costs, revenues and value of customer relationships. It has also resulted in a vast proliferation of redundant layers for data collection, stewardship and presentation and has severely limited service providers from effectively managing and leveraging the goldmine of customer usage data.
What service operators need today is a next generation analytic applications framework that is capable of collating and correlating data from disparate platforms into a single data store, can help analyze the data set to derive relevant insights and then provide for front-office and marketing personnel to act on these insights in real time, near real time and batch models. Such an approach increases reusability, enhances user adoption and considerably lowers over-all deployment in terms of both capital and operational expenditure.