Talking about How Operators Transform IT System into New Engine for Growth of Company Performance

Influenced by the development of technology of cloud computing, big data and mobility, the IT system of telecom operator's business has begun to play an increasingly important role, from the background support system to the core business system. According to a survey conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit, more than half of the respondents rely heavily on IT departments for operational efficiency. Of the total respondents, the most highly performing companies, those that reported better earnings than their peers, set different roles for IT in key areas of their business. In 2013, operators will invest more financial resources and manpower to transform IT systems.

In this year's "IT Month" report, we will focus on four areas of big data, cloud computing, IT centralization and security. How operators will use these technologies to turn IT systems into new engines for the company's performance growth.

Now it seems, "Suddenly a night of spring breeze, thousands of trees and pear trees bloom" to describe the big data of the publicity effect is not excessive, but on behalf of its release value a bit exaggerated.

Verizon started researching big data in October last year, and for Verizon, big data is still a nascent thing to explore, in fact, before a technology has yet to produce economies of scale, operators will not easily change their IT infrastructure . "Verizon consultant Yang Junjie said in an interview with the" Communications Industry News "(net).

However, as a CRM consultant at Verizon Marketing, Yang Junjie thinks big data represents the future of carrier IT systems. It is in October last year, the United States Verizon Precision Marketing Division Precision Marketing Division.

At present, a number of consulting firms are giving analysis reports that telecom and the Internet are the two most popular segments of big data. "As a network operator, operators hold the most comprehensive user information, and if these data are used in depth, it will bring significant value to operators." Several respondents said to reporters.

Edward Deming, a statistician and statistician in the United States, said: "Anyone except God needs to talk in terms of data." Telecommunication operators around the world are using their actions to achieve the "talking" goal of the Internet.

Pipeline is the data gold mine

Analysts report that the growth of smart terminals has led to exponential growth in operator data traffic, which has seen mobile internet traffic nearly 10-fold increase in the past 18 months. Another data report from Cisco shows that in 2001, the global IP flow needs to reach 1EB for one year. In 2013, it takes only one day for a drastic reduction in time and shortened to half a day in 2016.

The carrier's network is generating a huge amount of information every day. Take Shanghai Telecom for example. Xujiahui district produces 80,000 location updates every minute. There are 3 million mobile phone calls per hour in Shanghai. There are 70TB-100TB of data traffic per day and 3 billion Internet traffic per day . Obviously, behind these huge amounts of information is a data gold mine.

"This information is all generated by the operator's pipeline, which is the gold mine for the operator's Nuggets big data, in which operators receive three types of most valuable information, namely mobile subscriber location information, signaling Information and network management and log. "ZTE chief engineer Ye Yun big data in an interview with" Communications Industry News "(network) said in an interview.

Location information has already begun to benefit Telefónica. After the Big Data division was established, Telefonica introduced its first product, the Smart Steps, which analyzes user traffic and its key determinants at a given time and place and provides insight into the results of government and business Customer provided.

These insights provide decision-making support for retailers in designing and siting new stores, merchandising methods, etc. to help retailers better understand customer needs and improve their marketing performance.

And by modeling location and signaling data, carriers can leverage big data to support public affairs. He Hongling, project manager of China Mobile introduced that operators can set up user's "time-space" feature analysis model and serve traffic planning, major events and emergencies based on historical information and current information.

Prior to the advent of big data, operators originated more data analysis based on BSS systems and CRM systems. "Pipeline data is more valuable than BSS systems," said Ye Yun.

Wu Chuan Yu, general manager of China Teradata communications industry, gave an example to reporters further elaborating on the importance of network-side data. He mentioned that Teradata worked with a carrier to assess user satisfaction with operator services. The earliest based on BSS data to evaluate the analysis showed that the user satisfaction is high, pay in time, almost no complaints rate.

However, the reality is that the operators of this operator continued to improve off-grid rates. As a result, Teradata recommends introducing the signaling data on the OSS side for a comprehensive evaluation. Signaling data shows that many users often can not get through the phone, or frequent disconnection, downloading content is very slow, user perception is very poor, which is the key reason for users to leave the network.

"BSS systems focus more on marketing data, so for big data, operators must converge data on the BSS and OSS sides to form the entire network," said Wu Chuan-yu.

By introducing network big data and integrating data with BSS side, Shanxi Mobile accurately observed how much the OTT service such as WeChat, mobile phone QQ, MCH chat and other traditional services to operators has been and made correct market decisions.

However, to meet the data fusion between the BSS domain and the OSS domain, operators have encountered challenges. The telecom carrier's IT architecture is often compared to a "chimney-like" architecture with a huge number of data silos. To scale the integration of these data is not an easy task.

The chief scientist of China Mobile Research Institute once said on Weibo that "although telecom operators have natural conditions for analyzing user behavior, operators' business development model based on infrastructure (capability and technology) upside (market demand) And operators are traditionally constrained by an event-driven business architecture that has so far made it hard to generate direct market value. "

In this regard, Wu Chuan Yu said that manufacturers introduced big data solutions are to make up for this shortcoming.