TELECOM ASIA SUPPLEMENT l JulY 2013

Telcos uniquely positioned to generate new sources of revenue from customer data

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Editors Letter l 3
BigData&Billing

Big data opportunities & challenges

artner predicts that the nancial demands of storing and managing big data will lead 30% of businesses to directly or indirectly monetize their information assets by trading, bartering or outright selling them by 2016. Lee Joon Seong from Accenture writes in this issues main story that telcos are in a unique position to generate new revenue streams by amassing the huge amount of structured and unstructured data into information-based offerings. He cites a few examples: operators can help nancial services companies improve fraud detection by using geolocation-based data; Verizon Wireless launched Precision Market Insights to help companies understand the characteristics of the audiences for their products and services, enabling them to better reach and serve those customers; and Telefonica partnered with GfK to launch a similar product, which helps organizations measure and understand the number of people visiting an area. Frost & Sullivans Mark Koh argues in a commentary piece that telcos face several challenges associated with implementing big data and the associated analytics. First, the implementation is daunting in terms of both cost and implementation time. CSPs have to prioritize their capital expenditure, and big data initiatives might not make it to the top of CTOs priority lists. Second, the lack of internal big data and analytical talent and the high cost of acquiring and retaining such talent is expected to be one of the largest obstacle of successfully implementing these solutions. To help meet the challenges faced by CSPs, he expects niche solutions providers to emerge to provide out of the box and accessible solutions (solutions that would not require a user to hold a PhD) to complement the offerings from larger big data solution providers, which target the more sophisticated needs of some CSPs. And according to the latest Telecom Asia-Stratecast billing survey, faster time to market for new services continues to be top of mind for telcos, but service quality as well as network upgrades and convergence have surged back as their other main initiatives. A group of software vendors also discusses the pros and cons handling data management and analytics internally vs. using a third party. l Joseph Waring Telecom Asia group editor

Contents
4 Newswire 6 Cover: Big money in big data 9 Analyst View: Frost & Sullivan 10 Billing Survey: Focused on QoS 14 Business Analytics: In-house vs outsource

Published by Questex Asia Ltd. For additional information Big Data & Billing supplement, please visit our website www.telecomasia.net or contact: Managing Director Johnathan Bigelow jbigelow@questexasia.com Group Publisher Gigi Chan gchan@questexasia.com Group Editor Joseph Waring jwaring@questexasia.com Global Technology Editor John C. Tanner jtanner@questexasia.com Online Editor Fiona Chau fchau@questexasia.com Art Director Dick Wong dwong@questexasia.com Production & Web Manager Pauline Wong pwong@questexasia.com Editorial and publishing ofce Questex Asia Ltd 13/F, 88 Hing Fat Street, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong Tel: +852 2559 2772 Fax: +852 2559 7002 Website: www.telecomasia.net Subscription Hotline: +852 2589 1313 Subscription Fax: +852 2559 2015 E-mail: customer_service@telecomasia.net
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4 l Newswire
BigData&Billing

Security leaders must be ready for big data revolution, says EMC

ecurity leaders of global companies must be ready for big data that will be a driver for major change across the security industry and will fuel intelligencedriven security models, according to storage rm EMC. EMC said big data is also expected to dramatically alter almost every discipline within information security. EMC said big data analytics will likely have a market-changing impact on most product categories in the information security sector by 2015, including SIEM, network monitoring, user authentication and authorization, identity management, fraud detection, governance, risk and compliance systems. This year leading security organizations will deploy commercial, off-the-shelf big data solutions to support their security operations, the rm said. Previously, the advanced data analytics tools deployed within security operations centers were custom-built, but 2013 marks the beginning of the commercialization of big bata technologies in security, a trend that will reshape security approaches, solutions and spending over the coming years, it said. Todays hyper-extended, cloudbased, highly mobile business world has rendered obsolete prevailing security practices reliant on perimeter defenses and on static security controls requiring predetermined knowledge of threats. Longer term, big data will also change the nature of conventional security controls such as anti-

malware, data loss prevention and rewalls. Within three to ve years, data analytics tools will further evolve to enable a range of advanced predictive capabilities and automated real-time controls. Thats why security leaders are shifting to an intelligence-driven security model a model that is risk-aware, contextual and agile and can help organizations defend against unknown threats, EMC said. An intelligence-driven security approach, supported by big dataenabled tools, incorporates dynamic risk assessments, the analysis of vast volumes of security data, adaptive controls and information sharing about threats and attack techniques. Quoting security experts from Booz Allen Hamilton, Northeastern University and RSA, EMC also said big data will likely transform nearly all core technology segments in

information security within the next two years. The result of integrating big data into security practices, according to EMC, will be greatly enhanced visibility into IT environments, the ability to distinguish suspicious from normal activities to help assure trust in IT systems and vastly improved capabilities for incident response. The game is changing. More and more data is going onto the internet in automated forms, and that vector will continue. Therefore, a security analysis tool that worked great two or three years ago doesnt work so well anymore. You now have to look through a whole lot more data, and you have to look for threats that are far more subtle. Commercial tools are changing to take advantage of these big data streams coming online, said William H. Stewart, SVP of Booz Allen Hamilton. l

Newswire l 5
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Big data fuels subscriber data management spending: Infonetics

he global subscriber data management market, including software and services for mobile and xed-line networks, grew 45% in 2012 to $792 million. A report from research rm Infonetics Research also said global operators are increasingly looking to take on the role of a trusted identity provider, handling authentication and authorization transactions between customers and third parties such as retailers, banks and over-the-top providers As the big data trend continues to inuence the telecom sector, operators are becoming more

aggressive with their subscriber data management strategies, including expanding beyond the network to incorporate data sources such as OSS, billing and customer care, said Shira Levine, directing analyst for service enablement and subscriber intelligence at Infonetics Research. The analyst said this is driving demand for solutions that enable better consolidation of subscriber data and spurring interest in the tight integration between SDM and policy, allowing operators to close the loop and make more focused and targeted policy decisions.

Though slow to achieve widespread traction, the 3GPPs UDC (user data convergence) standard is gaining momentum in developed markets, the research rm said. Infonetics further noted that Oracles acquisition of Tekelec strengthens its position in the SDM space by providing database and analytics technology as well as network and IT data sources. As analytics become a key part of operators SDM strategies, those SDM suppliers with strong analytics capabilities will assume a leadership role, it added. l

Wipro invests in big data rm Opera Solutions

ipro Limited has signed an agreement to enter into a strategic partnership and take a minority position in Opera Solutions, a global big data science company. Wipro will invest $30 million in the company, which is privately held and headquartered in Jersey City, US. Big data represents an unprecedented opportunity for business value creation but many enterprises do not have the right technology or the science to access its power, WiPro said. Opera Solutions supplies these critical capabilities in a form that allows

organizations to rapidly turn raw big data into strategic advantage, prot, and productivity. Wipro said Opera Solutions has one of private industrys largest groups of scientists specializing in machine learning. The company applies its machine learning science to the worlds big data ows to extract predictive patterns, or signals. It offers a range of solutions, delivered as a service, that turn these signals into prescriptive best actions that signicantly improve front-line productivity and bottom-line growth, the company said. This strategic partnership with

Opera Solutions will help us further extend our leadership in the big data analytics space, as it combines Opera Solutions machine learning expertise, pre-discovered predictive signals and algorithms with Wipros proven domain and technology expertise combined with global delivery model to create industryspecic big data analytics solutions. It also enables our customers to maximize the ROI of big data analytics implementation through faster adoption, said K.R Sanjiv, SVP and global head of analytics and information management at Wipro. l

6 l View Point
BigData&Billing

The rise of big data presents a unique opportunity for operators seeking alternative sources of revenue because they hold a treasure trove of customer data By Lee Joon Seong, Accenture

View Point l 7
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elcos around the world face a common challenge: margin erosion and revenue shrinkage in their core businesses. They also confront a new breed of competitors resulting from convergence, where lines blur and companies diversify outside of their original markets. Intense competition and commoditization of communications services are driving increased network trafc and usage, but not a corresponding rise in operators revenues. In fact, studies show that operators revenues are gradually decoupled from network trafc where bandwidth requirements are far exceeding revenue growth. This puts tremendous pressure on operators to cut costs (see chart 1). Its no wonder that telecom operators must rethink their business models in search of new sources of revenue growth. In light of this, the question is: Is big data monetization the crown jewel for telecom operators? Big data is simply dened as generation of unprecedented amounts of both structured and unstructured data at a speed that is beyond the ability of a typical database to process. Convergence is contributing to the data glut, driven by the rise in mobility, and cloud, and digital and social networks, all of which require broadband networks to manage the data volumes. With explosive growth in data volumes, the decreasing cost of data storage, and more companies recognizing the value of data, big data analytics and monetization is a top-ofmind issue for those in the C-suites. In fact, the rise of big data presents a unique opportunity for telecom operators seeking alternative sources of revenue. Here is why: telecom operators hold a treasure trove of big data. Anything that passes through an operators network from voice calls to data usage to apps download leaves behind a digital footprint that could be analyzed and converted into valuable insights. Telcos have a unique opportunity to generate new revenue streams by amassing this huge amount of structured and unstructured data into information-based offerings, which leads to big data monetization. Gartner predicts that the nancial demands of storing and managing big data will lead 30% of businesses to directly or indirectly monetize their information assets by trading, bartering or outright selling them by 2016. In the US overall demand for information services is expected to exceed $600 billion by 2015, according to research by Accenture. This represents a sizeable and attractive market, and big data monetization may be a tipping point for those that seek to break away from traditional business models. For example, operators can help nancial services companies improve fraud detection by using geo-locationbased data. In this case, fraud detection algorithms can be augmented by the location of a customers mobile phone when making online transactions. When the location of a mobile phone is different from a customers transaction location, it implies a potential fraud. Telecom operators can also provide retailers with geo-demographic information of their potential customers. Unlike the

Decoupling of network traffic and operator revenue

Chart 1

Operator Costs Current Model

Voice Dominates

Operator Revenue s Customers

Data Dominates

Time

Source: Accenture

traditional customer segmentation approach based on postal codes often used by retailers which are static or represent a one-time snapshot telcos can help retailers understand customer segments behaviors on a more realtime and dynamic basis, based on real-time, geo-locationbased data. Some telcos have taken a leap of faith into big data monetization. For example, Verizon Wireless launched Precision Market Insights last October to help companies such as outdoor media companies, sport venues and other marketers understand the characteristics of the audiences for their products and services, enabling them to better reach and serve those customers. For instance, one of the services provided is Outdoor Media Measurements, where advertisers will be able to understand the demographic, geographic and psychographic makeup of their target audience in close proximity to a billboard where the ad is placed. As a result, advertisers can learn what kind of mobile content its target audience is most likely to consume, for more effective cross-selling and up-selling. Telefonica, on the other hand, partnered with GfK to launch a similar product called Smart Steps, which will help retailers, local government councils, sporting arenas, major event organizers, public safety bodies and other organizations measure and understand the number of people visiting an area. Retailers can use Smart Steps to understand footfall the number of people visiting a

8 l View Point
BigData&Billing
with each industry vertical, data enhancement and additional product. Ideally, once a common analytics platform is established, the same data can be used across multiple products and use cases.

Accentures View on Information Value Tiers

Chart 2

Acquire the right skill sets

Data monetization requires new sets of skills that telecom operators do not always possess. Apart from analytics, telcos need skills to develop strategy and planning, products and partnerships, and technology platforms, and drive organization changes. For example, signicant effort is required to ensure data is clean and data validation algorithms are accurate. Telcos will need to nd the right talents and skill sets to achieve those goals.

Choose partners carefully

Partnerships are essential to further enrich operators data, increase sales potential and bridge knowledge decits. Data monetization requires a new set of capabilities that can be sourced from partners to improve value propositions and its economics.

Formalize the data strategy

It is critical to ensure that data privacy, legal and external publicity issues are reconciled in advance of launch. Data governance and privacy is very important, and there are several related issues that must be managed. For example, operators need a clear view regarding the legality of using data, based on local law, and opt-in conditions. From a customer experience perspective, there is also a need to ensure opt-in/optout strategies are in place to maximize data collection. And an external publicity plan must be carefully crafted before launch to pre-empt issues regarding data privacy.

Source: Accenture

shop or a chain of shops in a period of time across their locations, tailor product promotions in existing stores, determine the best locations and formats for new stores and measure the impact of marketing activity on footfall. These are examples of early attempts made by telcos in piloting big data monetization information services. However, this is just the beginning of how telcos can take advantage of the signicant potential and scope of monetizing big data. For those hoping to jump on the data monetization bandwagon, there are several guidelines to follow.

Build a separate infrastructure

Big data requires a separate and scalable technology infrastructure compared with traditional analytics and business intelligence tools, such as relational database management systems, which simply cant handle the huge amount of data at speed and scale. Instead, telecom operators must plan to support their data monetization efforts with a separate infrastructure. The big data monetization opportunity for telcos is real and the potential is huge, especially as convergence continues to drive the collection and dissemination of data everywhere in every industry. While operators with similar data sets may end up having similar products ideas, its clear that the rst movers will set the rules. The real differentiation will come from superior execution that stems from a holistic strategy from the very onset of delivering these new, data-driven services. l Lee Joon Seong is managing director for Accenture Management Consulting, Sales & Customer Services, ASEAN region

Decide where to play

The value of data exponentially increases as one moves up the information value tiers according to Accenture (see chart 2 above). Telcos should compete at the top end of the information value tiers, where there is signicant revenue and competitive advantage. Instead of selling raw or processed/normalized data, there is more value creation in selling insights, providing recommendations or participating in executing those recommendations for customers. One example would be to offer insight-driven advertising via their mobile or TV advertising platform.

Build a progressive product roadmap

Multiple products based on the same underlying data are needed to achieve substantial revenues from a data monetization business. Business value increases

Analyst View l 9
BigData&Billing

The next wave of investments in business analytics

Niche providers will develop out of the box and accessible solutions that complement offerings from major big data players Mark Koh, Frost & Sullivan

s we move into an era characterized by rapid generation of large volumes of data, many are looking at how such data can be leveraged more effectively to give their organization a competitive advantage. To many telecom service providers, big data is a natural evolution of business intelligence -- one that started in the early 2000, with ofce applications being used to analyze customer billing and business support information. As telecom services matured, business intelligence and business support solutions evolved from focusing on systems and database integration, for the purpose of reporting historical organization performance, to providing timely information of how the organization is performing. The next stage of the evolution of business intelligence and analytics would be to provide real-time and forwardlooking information that could be automated into existing decision processes. With data being generated at an unprecedented scale from a variety of sources and in a variety of formats, many CSPs are faced with the challenge of managing, organizing, storing and computing this ood of data in a timely manner. As large amounts of structured and unstructured data are generated in the network from numerous sources, like billing systems, CRM, machine-to-machine data sources, OSS and social media, CSPs have to be able to store this information to quickly analyze it without loss of data delity. That is where the promise of big data comes in. Many companies have started providing a myriad of solutions to help CSPs with their data woes. These range from Hadoop and MapReduce to in-database analytics and in-memory database to text mining. Over the past few years vendors like IBM, Oracle and EMC have gone on an acquisition spree to acquire big data and analytical companies to beef up their current portfolio to compete with newer players like Splunk, Cloudera Ontology and Tableau. This trend of incorporating big data capabilities is expected to continue as more solution providers jump onto the bandwagon and new companies emerge to cater

to specic data and analytical needs of CSPs. Although internet companies have been some of the earliest to adopt big data, other industries will need to follow suit quickly. This is especially true for CSPs faced with increasing competition from over-the-top players. CSPs traditional business models are under threat and they will have to evolve to meet with challenges associated with the digital era. Although growth of mobile data and the current provisioning of LTE data services may provide some respite from declining traditional revenues, CSPs will have to look for ways to monetize their other assets, like network information and subscriber information, to maintain protability in the future. However, CSPs are expected to face several challenges associated with implementing big data and the associated analytics. First, the implementation is daunting for many CSPs both in terms of cost and implementation time. CSPs have to prioritize their capital expenditure, and big data initiatives might not make it to the top of CTOs priority lists. Second, the lack of internal big data and analytical talent and the high cost of acquiring and retaining such talent is expected to be one of the largest obstacle of successfully implementing these solutions. To be able to effectively extract the most from big data solutions, these professionals would need to be conversant with IT, statistical and business domain knowledge. Such a combination of skill sets will be in short supply. To help meet the challenges faced by CSPs, it is expected that niche solutions providers will emerge to provide out of the box and accessible solutions (solutions that would not require a user to hold a PhD) to complement the offerings from larger big data solution providers, which target the more sophisticated needs of some CSPs. l Mark Koh is a senior industrial analyst with Frost & Sullivans ICT practice, Asia Pacic. For more information contact Jessie.loh@frost.com

10 l Billing Survey
BigData&Billing

Fixated on

QoS

Despite much talk about improving the customer experience, intense competition makes service quality and network upgrade initiatives top priorities

Billing Survey l 11
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aster time to market for new services continues to be top of mind for telcos, but service quality as well as network upgrades and convergence have surged back as their other main initiatives, according to the latest yearly Telecom Asia-Stratecast survey. And as operators reinforce the heavy emphasis on old projects, the global industrys revenue landscape continues to call for a shift in priorities. The persistent focus on network service quality and network technology updates may be a cause for concern, considering that these functions have been the industrys main focus for years, practically since it all started a century ago. With continued decreases in voice and text messaging revenues

in all areas of the world, a trend toward less emphasis on the network and more on what can be done to improve the customer experience (and hopefully the willingness of customers to spend more) would be the order of the day, said Karl Whitelock, director of OSS/BSS strategy at Stratecast. Survey results from the previous ve years show that among telco initiatives, faster introduction of new services was the top pick (See chart 1 below) for the second year in a row, with 54% of this years respondents putting it on top. Emphasis on service quality jumped back to No. 2 (52%) after moving down to fth in last years survey. This initiative was top of list from 2009 to 2011. Network upgrades and
Chart 1

What are your most important company initiatives?

Source: Telecom Asia and Stratecast

12 l Billing Survey
BigData&Billing
Which business functions are receiving the most attention?
Chart 2

Which OSS/BSS functions need attention to better address the needs of your cloud service offerings?

Chart 3

convergence jumped back to third after placing sixth last year. Support for cloud services was again listed at fourth. Whitelock said the regained dominance of network technology initiatives is attributed to the intensied focus on competitive forces and the changing communications marketplace. As in the previous year, this is also seen as matching well with the need to better support customers with personalized service offerings. Stratecast attributes the resurgence of network initiatives partly to customers not caring about which operators deliver a network connection. Rather, they want accessible connectivity at a reasonable price, with many willing to put up with some level of inconvenience like seeking out a Wi-Fi connection instead of subscribing to a 3G or 4G data plan to better balance their spend on mobile network connectivity with other budgeted items. There are a number of new network-based service options that many CSPs in Asia Pacic, North America and Europe believe they can provide as their investments in policy management and real-time convergent charging fully come online, said Whitelock.

Top customer-oriented functions

Customer experience management (CEM) regained the top position as the customer-oriented function that gets the most attention within organizations, switching position with customer care and self-care for second rank (see chart 2 at the left). These two functions are the top two concerns for the fth year. Stratecast believes that while CEM is again the No. 1 one business focus, addressing the various servicelevel aspects of CEM customer service assurance (CSA) will take

Source: Telecom Asia and Stratecast

Billing Survey l 13
BigData&Billing

time due to the amount of data to be analyzed and needs of the organization tied to other equally pressing requirements. Of those surveyed, 53% said their customer service assurance (CSA) is operational or will be in six months, the same as in the previous year. However, the number of those who are investigating options increased further to 26% from 20% in 2012 while the number of those who still have no plans to implement a CEM/ CSA strategy rose to 22% from 18%. Of those who run CSA, the most prevalent arrangement (28%) is for the program to be run by the customer care department. The executive team continues to hold sway on CSA, although only at a close-second with 27%. Whitelock said there is signicant buzz about CEM and it will be a continued business issue as data management and analytical tools are put in place to make CEM-based measures in a more real-time setting business practical. When asked whether data management and architecture initiatives within the organization are addressing customer data, almost half (49%) said work is being planned or under way. Also, 29% said work is complete while 21% said this is not a priority at this time. As for customer care, self-care is especially important amid an increasing number of new service offerings, technical complexities with evolving user devices, advances in network technologies, and an increasing amount of service controls relative to spending limits and network usage caps. More than half (57%) of respondents said they have a customer self-care portal running. However, 51% said customer self-care needs improvement or replacement to better address the needs of their organizations cloud service offerings. The survey also shows that

business analytics, the No. 3 business focus among organizations, has attracted more attention as a means to enhance the understanding of customer behavior due to the proliferation of customer usage data. The most important new business need for business analytics lies with real-time decision making gaining insight about current customer behavior and the offer of something new (yield management) at the point of peak customer attention, Whitelock said. Among those surveyed, 36% run data analytics solutions but these are not real-time. The same proportion said they are investigating their options, but half of that (18%) said they will have real-time analytics within six months. One-tenth of those polled said this is not currently a priority. For those who do have near real-time analytics, the most frequent user is the sales and marketing department (25%) followed by product management (17%) and customer care (16%). Still looking at business functions, product lifecycle management moved from the bottom third of priorities in 2012 to fourth place in the latest survey. Stratecast thinks that one reason for this repositioning is that CSPs, especially in Southeast Asia, now offer customers advanced services that involve capabilities from strategic

partners. Another factor is that operators are much more willing to try out new combinations of service options. When asked what functions need attention for improved CEM, 32% of those polled cited service quality management followed by customer care/self-care with 20%. Also, 18% said the function that most needed help was billing. Whitelock said this implies that many CSPs recognize the importance of an up-to-date convergent billing system to support the new service offerings they can now deliver. A great customer experience is inherently linked to an organizations ability to deliver quality services, with exibility for customers to try things on their own, and be able to bill for such services in varied and sometimes unique ways, he said. Further, respondents were asked which OSS/BSS improvements may help to better address their cloud services needs (see chart 3 previous page). Half of them pointed to customer care/self-care while 42% said it was product lifecycle management and 39% picked billing. Whitelock said this shows the necessity of customer self-care and billing in non-traditional ways. Giving customers consumers or enterprise customers the exibility to pick the options that best support their needs is essential of cloud-based services to be successful. l

Respondent prole
The annual joint Telecom Asia-Stratecast survey, running since 2008, was conducted online in February and March and had responses from telco executive in 16 countries and territories across APAC. Thirty-four percent were mobile operators, 28% converged players, 10% xed-line telcos, and 28% cable, ISPs and other. Forty percent represented operators with fewer than one million subs, 22% had 1-10 million subs, 18% reported 10-50 million subs, 8% had 50-100 million subs and 11% claimed to have more than 100 million users. Management level executives accounted for 41% of the respondents, engineers/technicians 19%, and sales & marketing as well as consultants both 14%.

14 l Business Analytics
BigData&Billing

In-house vs Outsource
The pros and cons handling data management and analytics internally or using a third party Joseph Waring

here are a few areas to consider when evaluating the advantages of in-house capability vs an outsourced approach to monitoring networks and analyzing customer behavior. Eric Bourland, director of BI strategic services at Teradata International, asks: do telcos need to invest in the technical capacity required to store and process information or can this be done through a third-party? In addition, do telcos need to have their own teams to handle analytics? Bourland notes that data protection guidelines are a compelling reason to store data in-house as is the likely high cost involved in transferring data to a third-party. Christopher King, senior director of product marketing at Oracle Communications, also suggests that telcos develop the in-house skills and retain this data internally. Customer data is typically extremely sensitive and often protected by law. If a CSP moves customer data into other companys computers or across international borders they must take care not to violate data privacy laws. Matti Aksela, VP of analytics at Comptel, agrees the benets of in-house analytics are that the knowledge stays in-house and the telco develops the ability to utilize deep insight. However, he says there is a known lack of talent in the data science space and an in-house team is not really able to learn from the errors of others, possibly leading to sub-optimal approaches being taken. Third-party vendors dont, by default, have that very detailed knowledge of local conditions, but benet from working with multiple CSPs, and can hope to evolve their approaches from learning globally, he says. Also vendors operating in this space can have a very skilled team behind their analytics solutions, and knowledge on integration and decision-making based on the analytics, and can quickly achieve benets for CSPs. It may be even easier to tear down the silos coming from the outside

than just working internally. Teradatas Bourland says rather than relying entirely on a third-party provider, it is important for telcos to develop their own internal data management and analytics competence as this will provide them a unique competitive advantage. After all, he insists, data is a strategic business asset, so it will benet from being managed by and readily accessible to internal business stakeholders. If the rm doesnt have this expertise, or is operating in a small country with access to limited resources, it could make good business sense to work with a thirdparty to build the required internal resource. Similarly, an expert third-party can also be a key enabler in helping to get big data projects off the ground, as well as help MNOs stay up-to-date with what other rms and indeed other sectors are managing to achieve, Bourland says. Erwann Thomassain from Amdocs customer management division also advocates this hybrid solution. Telcos can more quickly resolve their severe shortage in big data resources and expertise by leveraging SI partners while building in-house teams, he says. Ideally, a telco should select an SI partner with in-depth communications-specic expertise, as well as strong expertise in big data infrastructure and analytics tools specic for the communications industry, which can design and deploy big data architectures and analytical models, as well as offer a strategic roadmap to address future requirements. The need for real-time information management is also an important consideration. Bourland notes that moving big data volumes around is essentially a physics problem: to get results as close to real-time as possible, the nearer you need to be to the data, again making sense for it to be kept internally. Outsourcing the data management can result in latency issues, again making it more logical to keep data in-house so that results can be generated and acted upon quickly. l