Telcos striving for unified view of customer data

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 10 February 2009 00:28

IT Industry - Market

According to Steve Dietch - HP's VP of marketing for communications and media - one of the greatest challenges facing telcos today is obtaining a real time unified view of all information pertaining to a customer.

"Gathering real time information about their customers so they can personalise the services they deliver is the holy grail for telcos," Dietch told ITWire. "The ability of an operator to create a unified real time view of a customer is really fundamental, but just about impossible today....No operator has the ability to gather all that information in real time and use it or make it available to their application partners."

Telcos, he said, were being forced to deliver high value at low cost. "In the past you could be either a value provider or a low cost provider, and that is traditional in any industry, but telcos are being forced to be both at the same time: give customers a great experience at a reasonably low cost."

While they have transformed siloed legacy infrastructure into unified IP infrastructure, their ability to fully exploit this is being constrained by this lack of real time customer information, according to Dietch. "The concept of personalisation is a really big one. There is no an operator around the world that is not thinking about personalisation. This is a final piece of the puzzle.

"Once you have all those piece you can really innovate in a very cost effective way. It becomes much easier to add new services very fast because you don't need to give applications access to all the subscriber data."

This in turn reduces the risk of innovation, Dietch said. "You have created an environment where risk taking is not a doomsday scenario, you have driven the cost of experimentation much lower. Before if you rolled out a new service and if it failed to generate top line revenue, as most do, you had to throw away that investment."

According to Dietch there are to approaches being taken to obtain this unified view. "One would be that you physically consolidate all the data that you have in your network about a subscriber. There are a lot of problems with that. It will be very costly and could be very risky. A lot of operators don't like the idea of mucking around with mission critical data like that in the HLR [home location register of a mobile network].

"Another approach is a federated approach where you leave the data in its existing repository and create a data mediation layer to allow you to provide a unified view of the data which continues to reside in the same places. Then all the data about a subscriber would be centrally accessible."

HP's offering to carriers is called Personalisation Manager and is being deployed with a number of carriers. Not all can be named but Dietch held up Hutchison Austria as one of the most advanced in implementation and exploitation of personalisation. "They are implementing as we speak. There are several others doing the same sort of thing but they are not public yet."