Guavus Launches Big Data Analytics App for SPs

Guavus announced the ".. launch of Service Reflex 3: a big data analytics application that enables Service Providers to dynamically improve service quality and enhance customer experience by ingesting, fusing and contextualizing network impacting events with subscriber data in real time.

The application uniquely bridges the gap between Operation Support Systems (OSS) and Billing Support Systems (BSS), helping to: improve operations, reduce the cost of customer care and deliver an enhanced quality of experience.

New key innovations in Service Reflex 3 include support for:

QoE trend drill-down

• Actionable analytics: Anomaly detection, root cause analysis and commonality correlation to uncover previously undetectable, small-scale issues while reducing false negatives and non-service impacting alarms
   
• Health maps: Geographical representation of anomalies allows users to drill-down into root cause context for areas with abnormally high care and network-based events
   
• Improved segmentation for ad hoc analysis on cloud-based services: Real-time insights to continually improve change management processes and reduce testing time from days to hours
   
• Seamless integration with third- party incident management and trouble ticketing systems: Delivers a closed loop application for automated remediation for planned service upgrades, definition scope and change management based on anomaly detection

Geographic health map 

• Performance monitoring: Identifies the impact of outage & maintenance events, software upgrades, etc. on customers and quickly sends alerts for high impact events
   
• Workforce management & field operations: Provides a holistic view of network and care events and identifies when issues can be corrected at the network level to eliminate unnecessary, costly truck rolls; allows technicians to more efficiently address in-home issues the first time and reduce repeat visits; and delivers key insights into technician performance for KPIs, such as on-time rate, in-home test successes and repeat issue rates

See "Guavus Redefines Service Operations Analytics with Launch of Service Reflex 3" - here.

Amdocs Adds Communications-Specific Analytics Applications

Amdocs announced "new communications-specific applications that allow service providers to aggregate data from multiple marketing, network and customer care sources and generate business and customer insights with actionable recommendations..

Amdocs' new big data actionable analytics applications:

• Amdocs High Definition Marketing Analytics accesses the large volumes of usage data, web surfing trends, social feeds and care channels to help service providers transform the practice of customer management and upselling by using dynamic micro-segmentation for improved targeting and contextual analytics to offer customers the most appropriate new product or services. This includes multi-channel engagement and interfaces into the service provider's product catalog and campaign management systems.  

• Amdocs Deep Network Analytics provides a holistic set of network insights from the combination of radio access feeds, deep packet inspection from the network, and customer value parameters from business support systems. The network suite helps service providers to more effectively target their network capital expenditure towards more valuable customers, improve the connectivity experience, identify network issues before they occur and obtain a deeper understanding of the network factors that drive customer satisfaction.
   
• Amdocs Consumer and Business Satisfaction Analytics spans a wide array of data sources which allows executives to break down the siloed approach of different business units in order to assist business managers understand what drives customers' Net Promoter Score (NPS) and resolve issues before they impact customer satisfaction. These analytics also improve the performance of the call center and self-care capabilities helping to deliver an optimal customer experience.

See "Amdocs Introduces New Big Data Actionable Analytics for Service Providers' Marketing, Network and Customer Care Operations" - here.

[Infonetics]: SDM Market Grew by 29%, to $1.4B in 2014

A recent research by Shira Levine [pictured], research director for service enablement and subscriber intelligence, Infonetics Research finds that the "worldwide subscriber data management (SDM) market grew 29 percent in 2014 over 2013, to $1.4 billion, fueled by operator demand for voice over LTE (VoLTE) and subscriber analytics .. momentum around big data and analytics has the potential to have an even more significant impact on the SDM market, as operators seek to break down the data silos that exist within their organizations and better leverage subscriber data to improve the customer experience and drive additional revenue" 

Other findings:

• "Operators are looking to deploy subscriber data management (SDM) as a centralized subscriber data repository that can be integrated with multiple front-end applications potentially from multiple vendors
   
• Virtualization of front-end applications such as home subscriber server (HSS) and policy and charging rules function (PCRF) are well underway, and virtualization of the backend SDM platform is following suit, but concerns about reliability, availability and security persist"

See "Subscriber Data Management Market Up 29 Percent as Big Data, VoLTE Rev" - here.

NI Deployments [354]: Telecom Italia Uses Sandvine for Customer Experience Management

Sandvine announced that Telecom Italia is a customer since 2012. TI was one of the first incumbent fixed carriers to use DPI for traffic shaping, initially with Cisco gear (see "Telecom Italia DPI Policies - Limiting only P2P Traffic" - here), This is the first time that Sandvine publicly names TI as a customer. 

 

The company declined to comment whether they had displaced Cisco 3 years ago for the traffic shaping tasks as the current announcement is about the network intelligence aspects of DPI: 

"Telecom Italia is using Sandvine solutions as a key part of its service operations center (SOC) and customer experience management (CEM) platform .. using data generated by Sandvine’s Business Intelligence and Usage Management products to generate key performance indicators (KPIs) for their fixed and mobile networks in Italy. The data is fed by Sandvine’s Record Generator directly to big data and SOC/CEM systems used by Telecom Italia’s internal operations, planning and marketing teams". 

"Ensuring a high quality web-browsing and video experience are essential for helping Telecom Italia provide the best possible service to their subscribers. Sandvine provides Telecom Italia with numerous attributes used to measure both web and video quality, so that Telecom Italia can proactively diagnose network issues and identify quality-related network trends before they impact their subscribers".

See "Sandvine Helps Telecom Italia Elevate Customer Experience Management" - here.

Nokia's Big Data Analytics Optimizes QoE

Nokia Networks announced it is "unveiling research that combines newly developed telco-scale big data analytics, artificial intelligence and full process automation to make experience management dynamic. 

The Nokia Networks FutureWorks innovation is the world’s first technique to instantly optimize the individual application sessions of subscribers to deliver high Quality of Experience (QoE) to almost 100% of all sessions, even under high loads. This cannot be achieved by current methods because, without this, an automated, immediate and iterative loop between analytics, decision and optimization has been missing".

The innovation could help operators to increase customer retention substantially. Up to 30% extra capacity can also be created as more application sessions would run simultaneously with high quality, with sessions getting exactly the resources they need. This opens up a variety of potential new use cases. For example, the network could dynamically adapt to sudden use changes, subscribers could be provided with a consistent video experience along a travel route, or service-affecting faults could be corrected in real-time, relieving customer care.

The QoE enhancements can be achieved by utilizing telco-scale artificial intelligence in an analytics and decision engine that immediately pinpoints the cause of issues in a subscriber’s application session and decides automatically on the best corrective action. Machine learning techniques ensure ever more accurate decisions over time even when data is incomplete or new situations arise.

Full process automation is then applied to immediately implement the appropriate action, such as service adaption or traffic steering.

The innovation has been proven by Nokia Networks tests in real network environments using commercial devices. In the future, dynamic experience management could be deployed in multi-vendor 2G, 3G and LTE networks.

See "Nokia Networks big data innovation promises dynamic experience management" - here and "Applying telco-scale big data to dynamic experience management" - here.

[Analysis Mason]: Telco Big Data Analytics Market to Reach $2.3B in 2014

A new report by Justin van der Lande [pictured], Principal Analyst, Analysis Mason covers the big data analytics market for telcos - "Big data analytics (BDA) is not just a passing trend; it is becoming an increasingly important part of every aspect of a communications service provider’s (CSP) operations. The drive for efficiency gains, coupled with the need to personalize customers’ experiences, is driving new installations".

"Analysys Mason estimates the size of the analytics market in the telecoms sector to be US$2.1 billion in 2013, and market growth is expected to be near 9% in 2014. The market is heavily biased towards the developed markets of North America and Western Europe, as depicted in Figure 2. This market size includes only the analytics software and associated visualization functions, and tools for extracting, loading and transforming (ELT) data into an infrastructure and schemas specifically built for the telecoms sector".

"New vendors continue to enter the BDA markets, encouraged by the growing demand by CSPs and the availability of new, low-cost technology that is open source and is increasingly accepted by CSPs. Vendors are categorized into four types based on their history and current capabilities, which provide different view-points on open source and their access to the CSPs. These categories are storage vendors, general-purpose analytics vendors, specialist vendors and new telecoms-specific analytics vendors"

See "The future of big data analytics in the telecoms industry" - here.

How does Netflix Use Big Data to Improve QoE?

Nirmal Govind, Director, Streaming Science & Algorithms, Netflix, explains how "we use big data for deep analysis and predictive algorithms to help provide the best experience for our members ..  the types of problems we're solving [I am quoting 2 of the items]

• Understanding the impact of QoE on user behavior

To improve the streaming experience, we look at QoE metrics that are likely to have an impact on user behavior. One metric of interest is the rebuffer rate, which is a measure of how often playback is temporarily interrupted while more data is downloaded from the server to replenish the local buffer on the client device. Another metric, bitrate, refers to the quality of the picture that is served/seen - a very low bitrate corresponds to a fuzzy picture. There is an interesting relationship between rebuffer rate and bitrate. Since network capacity is limited, picking too high of a bitrate increases the risk of hitting the capacity limit, running out of data in the local buffer, and then pausing playback to refill the buffer. What’s the right tradeoff?

• Determining what movies and shows to cache on the edge servers based on member viewing behavior [see "Netflix CDN Customers have More Fun" - here]

A set of big data problems also exists on the content delivery side. Open Connect is Netflix's own content delivery network that allows ISPs to directly connect to Netflix servers at common internet exchanges, or place a Netflix-provided storage appliance (cache) with Netflix content on it at ISP locations. The key idea here is to locate the content closer (in terms of network hops) to our members to provide a great experience.

One of several interesting problems here is to optimize decisions around content caching on these appliances based on the viewing behavior of the members served. With millions of members, a large catalog, and limited storage capacity, how should the content be cached to ensure that when a member plays a particular movie or show, it is being served out of the local cache/appliance?

See "Optimizing the Netflix Streaming Experience with Data Science" - here.

Ericsson Launches Big Data Analytics Platform

Ericsson announced "..Ericsson Expert Analytics, a powerful, real time, big data analytics platform that enables operators to derive actionable insights from big data and to turn those insights into appropriate actions in real time. Expert Analytics is a fully configurable, horizontal platform that can support a wide variety of use cases for marketing, customer care, operations and network, based on fresh data from network nodes, OSS/BSS, probes, terminals, social media and others sources.

.. Expert Analytics gathers, normalizes and aggregates vast amounts of network data and data from operations, customer and business systems. This enables operators to move away from batch data processing silos and take advantage of real-time, automated analytics and actionable insights that generate value and improve subscriber experiences. Data is gathered at the individual customer and session level in order to provide the high levels of service demanded by today's consumers and enterprises".

See "Ericsson introduces Expert Analytics" - here.

Amdocs Expands its Big Data Analytics Offering (with something)

Amdocs announced the ".. expansion of its big data analytics capabilities to become the first end-to-end provider of communications-specific big data solutions encompassing business and operational support systems (B/OSS), network and social media. The Amdocs big data analytics offerings include:
Amdocs big data applications .. Amdocs Insight Big Data platform ..  Amdocs DSaaS and Amdocs BI and Data Warehousing Services".

Somehow similar to a previous announcement from February - "Amdocs Announces Big Data, Hadoop Based Solution" - here. Unfortunately, it is not clear what are the new features and some of the new products mentioned above are not presented in the site.

See "Amdocs Announces Industry’s First End-to-End, Communications-Specific Big Data Analytics Portfolio" - here.

[ABI]: Big Data Analytics Moves from IT to Telecom Vendors

 
A new report by Sabir Rafiq [pictured], Research analyst, ABI Research finds that "Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) collect large amounts of data from their network, but the use of the data collected is what really counts .. MNOs and Communication Service Providers (CSPs) are actively looking into Big Data and Analytical solutions. They need tools that can impact their businesses and find new ways to reduce costs, improve efficiency of the networks, increase and generate new revenue streams, and increase QoE.”

Big Data Analytics are no longer the exclusive province of IT Software, as leading telecom vendors such as Astellia [see deployments with Eastlink, Bouygues, Zain, Orange, 3], Ericsson, Nokia Solutions and Networks, and Huawei have stepped up. Software vendors, including Citrix [see "Citrix Adds Zettics' Big Data Analytics to ByteMobile" - here] and Guavus [see "Guavus: Characterization of OTT Traffic without DPI" - here], offer big data and analytical solutions to help telecoms collect and analyze data effectively”

See "Telco Big Data Analytics is the New Frontier as Mobile Traffic Hits 200 Exabytes in 2019" - here.

Amdocs Announces Big Data, Hadoop Based Solution

Amdocs announced the availability of "Amdocs TeraScale, a carrier-grade, big data solution designed to cost-efficiently store, manage and extract real-time charging usage data for analytical use cases. The new solution leverages big data storage technologies based on the Hadoop ecosystem, and enables deeper, more rapid real-time analytics through innovative usage data modeling and embedded ETL (extract, transform and load) processes. Amdocs TeraScale is a new offering within the Amdocs CES 9.1 product suite.

  .. The solution is capable of streaming the massive volumes of usage data generated by Amdocs Convergent Charging directly into TeraScale data clusters based on Hadoop, providing fresh, granular data for analytics applications. Amdocs TeraScale allows service providers to explore and visualize usage data using optimized usage queries and extracts as well as native Hadoop query tools. Amdocs TeraScale can be initially deployed as a side-by-side solution alongside existing usage data storage and ETL solutions, with no impact on charging and billing operations".

See "Amdocs Announces Carrier-Grade Big Data Solution for Real-Time Usage Data Management and Analytics Enablement" - here.

Hitachi: Big Data Analytics Enables QoE, QoS and Monetization

Hitachi Data Systems announced it that  ".. Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) and several telecommunications partners [Brocade, JDSU, SeaChange] will demonstrate the ability of big data applications in telecom to lower network and operations costs, reduce customer churn protecting existing business revenues, and create new revenue streams. World-class quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) is possible only through the integration of a streaming data platform technology for real-time data, and the use of Hadoop and database technologies for batch and online data.

Demos:

• Fine-Grain Analytics for Video Premium Services (With JDSU)

• Carrier-Hosted Analytics – Backhaul Services (With JDSU)
• Virtual Network Platform
• Multiscreen Video Delivery (With SeaChange)

• Brocade Deterministic Networks with Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) for Media (With Brocade)

• Hitachi Content Platform and Hitachi Cloud Services
• The Internet of Things and Network Function Virtualization
• RAN-Aware Video Traffic Optimization
• Advanced M2M Network Solution 

See "Hitachi Data Systems to Showcase Leading Network Analytics Technology at Mobile World Congress 2014" - here.

Citrix Adds Zettics' Big Data Analytics to ByteMobile

Citrix announced the ".. establishment of a strategic partnership with Zettics .. leverage Zettics’ best-in-class analytics capabilities to enhance the ByteMobile portfolio of traffic management and analytics solutions for mobile network operators. The agreement is expected to result in new product offerings during the first half of 2014 .. will improve operators’ ability to capture and analyze all of the data usage on their networks and to take action based on that analysis. The partnership will further enable the combination of rich experiential data from ByteMobile platforms and subscriber-centric data from other network sources to deliver sophisticated new mobile analytics solutions"


See "Citrix Boosts Mobile Analytics Capabilities with Zettics Partnership" - here.

AdaptiveMobile Uses Big Date to Defend ISPs in Real-Time

  

AdaptiveMobile announced the "..launch of Tethra™, a Hadoop-based “Big-Security” threat analytics platform designed to defend service provider networks. Tethra provides powerful real-time continuous monitoring of threats, evaluating the billions of events occurring every day within the typical mobile and fixed line service provider. Unlike traditional approaches to network security, which rely on daily feeds to databases of signatures and categorisation decisions, Tethra™ is uniquely able to respond immediately to new threats as they emerge within the network".

See "AdaptiveMobile Launches Tethra™, the Industry’s First Big-Security Platform Designed to Protect Service Providers" - here.

[Juniper Research]: Analytics May Save MNOs $9B by 2018

Great savings for MNOs are just around the corner: while SDN will save them $4B by 2017 (here), big-data analytics will do more than twice: $9B.

A new report by Juniper Research finds that "The continued deployment of analytics platforms is expected to deliver combined savings and incremental revenues to MNOs (Mobile Network Operators) totaling more than $9 billion by 2018, .. Greatest savings are expected to result from reduced customer churn and more efficient capex allocation, with MNOs also able to derive significant revenues through the licensing of opted-in subscriber data to third parties".

"Some operators – such as Telefonica [see "Telefonica to Monetize on its Mobile Analytics Data" - here] and Verizon – have established in-house business units to offer aggregated subscriber data to enterprise customers, while in the UK, Everything Everywhere (EE), Telefonica O2 and Vodafone have founded the advertising joint venture Weve".

See "Harvesting ‘Big Data’ Offers Network Operators a $9bn Cost Savings & Revenue Opportunity by 2018: Juniper Report" - here.

[Operators Survey] Big Data will Generate New Business Models; Currently 10% of IT Budget

A new research by Julio Puschel [pictured] Informa Telecoms & Media (based on a survey conducted with approximately 120 operators in June 2013) finds that "The telecoms industry is starting to witness the initial Big Data implementations. Although these first examples are still far from building a solid proposition, they are providing a good opportunity for operators to test new applications that will influence how Big Data will evolve in the future"

".. Big Data is still ranked as a low priority by operators (see fig. 1) as most of their focus is still on efficiency, network optimization and customer experience management (CEM) .. 58% of the operators interviewed in the Informa survey agreed that the main long-term driver for Big Data will be generating new business models. However, the short-term drivers are believed to focus more on solving internal challenges, such as improving data warehousing, increasing loyalty and customer experience management".

"The research also shows that 72% of current Big Data implementations are focused on specific business applications rather than on an end-to-end solution .. Big Data currently represents 10% on average of their total IT budget. This share is expected to increase to approximately 23% in five years, demonstrating how Big Data is becoming a strategic priority for the telecoms operators"

See "48% of operators say they are already implementing Big Data" - here.

Guavus Acquires IPDR Technology

 
Few months after acquiring Neuralitic Systems, Guavus announced the "..acquisition of Pipeline, the market leader in the cable industry for collecting, analyzing and mediating IPDR (Internet Protocol Detailed Records) data to understand bandwidth consumption and network activity. 

With this acquisition, Guavus becomes the first big data analytics solutions company to provide Multiple System Operators (MSOs) with a comprehensive view of their networks, services, devices and subscribers as they evolve their product offerings, improve the customer experience and drive new revenues .. Created by Applied Broadband, R&D specialists in broadband network architectures and software systems, Pipeline is currently licensed by seven of the top ten MSOs in North America as the IPDR solution for millions of broadband cable subscribers"

Benefits for the MSO industry include: "Capacity Management, Generate new revenue streams, Effectively manage churn & deliver a better customer experience" and more.

See "Guavus Acquires the Market Leading Pipeline™ IPDR Collection & Mediation Technology from Applied Broadband" - here.

Astellia - Partnership w/DigitalRoute; 24% Revenue Increase

   

Astellia and DigitalRoute announced that "Astellia is integrating DigitalRoute’s MediationZone platform into its real-time Nova monitoring solution .. DigitalRoute’s MediationZone provides strong processing and aggregation capabilities that support Nova’s multi-dimensional data manipulation (network elements, cells, group of subscribers, handsets, mobile applications and services)".

Recently, Astellia reported its ".. 2012 revenue of 42.2 M€, an increase of 24% compared to the previous year. International activity represented 85% of the 2012 revenue, reaching 36M€, a 41% increase compared to 2011" (here)

Astellia - visualization of network performance,

See "Astellia picks DigitalRoute for expert mediation in its Nova 4G monitoring solution" - here.

HP Big Data Solution Helps CSPs with Monetization and Congestion Management

HP announced ".. new solutions that help Communications Service Providers (CSPs)—or telcos—manage, understand and act on massive amounts of information (Big Data) to deliver services to subscribers and improve their satisfaction levels .. by leveraging analytics to gain real-time insight into subscriber usage patterns, preferences and interests, CSPs can capitalize on business opportunities and partner more effectively with these new providers"

  

"HP Telco Big Data and Analytics provide insight into real-time network conditions, so CSPs can enhance network utilization and address traffic congestion situations .. HP Telco Big Data and Analytics are available now worldwide".

The following offerings are included in the new portfolio: HP Smart Profile Server, HP Actionable Experience Management and HP Ad Experience Personalization.

See "New HP Solutions Help Telcos Leverage Big Data to Deliver New Subscriber Services" - here.

Guavus: Characterization of OTT Traffic without DPI

 
Guavus announced it will "..demonstrate its Reflex Big Data Analytics platform, along with a suite of analytics applications tailored for cable operators' needs in customer experience management, network capacity planning and content & media optimization. At a glance, various use cases include:

• Characterization of OTT traffic without deep packet inspection (DPI)
• Subscribers' quality of experience via second-screen apps (iPad, Android and IP)
• Customer care interaction drivers (calls, tickets and truck rolls)
• Churn impact based on usage behavior, subscribed services and customer care interactions
• End to end visibility to content delivery and performance metrics

"The Guavus Reflex platform (chart below) is an end-to-end solution that provides actionable, contextually aware insights into customer behavior, network performance and application usage to enable timely, optimal decisions"

In February Guavus announced "..with growing traction in the US, Guavus currently counts three of the top four mobile operators and three of the top five Internet backbone operators as key accounts .. n addition, Guavus recently raised $25 million in a series-B growth round led by Intel Capital, Artiman Ventures and Sofinnovia Ventures" (here)

See "Guavus to Demonstrate Big Data Analytics Applications at The Cable Show" - here.