Mobile World Congress 2013: Qtel Rebranding

Posted: February 28th, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Events, Industry Insights | Tags: , , , | 2 Comments »

Here in Barcelona, I had the fantastic opportunity to attend an exclusive Qtel event in which the company unveiled its new brand: Ooredoo. This translates to ‘I want’ in Arabic, which reflects the telco’s new focus on customer centricity and catering to end users’ desires. Examples of this vision include statements like: “I want a service that reflects who I am”, “I want the world to smile with me”, and “I want to fly higher”.

There were an amazing number of people who spoke at the launch, including Cherie Blair on her charity for women, the general of the International Telecommunication Union, the director general of the GSMA, Qatar’s Olympic medallist from the summer 2013 games, and the CEOs of Qtel Qatar and its subsidiary, Indosat. It was also announced that football star Lionel Messi is the operator’s new global brand ambassador, although he was unable to attend due to an important match.

Ooredoo strides to enrich people’s lives by understanding every single person’s wishes and dreams, and looking at how they can be fulfilled regardless of income or demographic. With this thinking, mobile services and Internet will be more broadly distributed in order to evolve the mobile economy, for prosperity, equality and beyond.

It was clear that the operator is really committed to people’s needs, as both connecting and challenging customers was stressed. It’s leading a Millennium initiative with the GSMA to help alleviate the burdens of poverty, simplifying broadband access so more people have the opportunity to educate themselves.  The CEO of Indosat, Alex Rusli, explained that island people previously had to travel up to four hours for the closest services. After access was made available where they lived, they started to grow and develop. The moral of this story is that rural communities should have the same opportunities as those in the city – everyone deserves an opportunity to grow.

Adding to this is a particular emphasis on women. For instance, the company is rolling out a special program in Iraq specifically for women where the tariff decreases after three minutes of a voice call. Since women tend to talk for longer periods over the phone, they can now enjoy less expensive calls. There are also going to be more female staff serving women at various points of sale and an initiative to help women establish businesses – checking the price of fabric, for example, to ensure they are not overpaying.

Every person wants to grow, and Ooredoo is providing the opportunity to do so by contributing to social business, enriching people’s lives and connecting the world. What do you think of Qtel’s new brand? Leave your comments here or email us at comptel.marketing@comptel and share your thoughts about the 2013 Mobile World Congress!


Mobile World Congress 2013: Live from Barcelona!

Posted: February 26th, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Events, Industry Insights | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

The excitement was (and still is) palpable here in Barcelona, as Mobile World Congress kicked into full gear yesterday. The keynote sessions on day one did not disappoint, with four of the largest mobile operators across the globe outlining their business strategies over the past year and looking ahead to 2017 and beyond. First up was chairman of the GSMA and CEO of Telecom Italia Group, Franco Bernabè, who stated that spectrum, privacy and investments must be the key focus for mobile operators moving forward.

Sixty-two million wireless connections are already using LTE, and this number is expected to grow to 920 million by 2017. Spectrum, then, is clearly a priority. However, as Bernabè explained, it’s critical to do more than simply having the right amount of spectrum—mobile operators must ensure that it is also harmonised across the world, in turn, making mobile services more affordable for consumers.

Privacy is another element for operators to consider, as mobile phones are carrying an increasing amount of personal information. With $350 billion compromised this year due to security risks, there is a clear place for mobile operators to become central in secure identity and access management.

Finally, Bernabè urged, operators must find a balance between competition, innovation and investment. Investments will depend on three factors: economics of scale, foreseeable business environments and up-to-date regulatory frameworks. He continued saying that operators must remain committed to Near Field Communications (NFC), LTE and voice over LTE (VoLTE) to create economically viable competition, especially in regions where excess competition is depressing the markets.

Following the opening remarks, GSMA’s director general, Anne Bouverot, moderated a discussion on the challenges and opportunities for mobile operators. AT&T’s president and CEO, Randall Stephenson, believes that we’re moving from a period of wireless experience on mobile devices to one where connectivity is always assumed and new services, like home security and mobile wallets, can be layered on top.

Next, China Mobile’s chairman, Xi Guohua, added that operators should be more concerned about OTT competition, which can erode the value of services. He suggests consolidating industry resources, like networks and devices, to gain a competitive advantage in the value chain. Additionally, Xi believes there is an opportunity with LTE to strengthen collaboration among the Internet of things, such as M2M, which will increase dialogue and align interests for the world’s operators.

Adding to this, Telefonica’s executive chairman and CEO, César Aliert, stated that operators need to lead the ecosystems into a healthy future by implementing new commercial models to better serve customers and change market dynamics. This includes breaking the taboos associated with network rollout and providing the best experience possible to customers.

Then, Vodafone’s CEO Vittorio Colao dove into how his group of operators is transforming in this digital revolution. Interestingly, he noted that more than a quarter of mobile users check their phones at the dinner table, and 66 percent sleep with their phones. Life is clearly mobile, and this is only going to increase. Because of this, Colao stated that operators need to enrich the customer experience with other services. Winners will be those who have the best products and lowest prices and are most willing to compromise and put in the work.

So far, the keynotes have been exciting to listen to, and the show floor has been packed! We’re looking forward to attending more sessions and meeting our customers, partners and other across the industry to share ideas about our changing telco landscape. In the meantime, stop by our booth in Hall 6, stand 6C30!


What Technologies Are Impacting Policy Management?

Posted: February 22nd, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Industry Insights | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on What Technologies Are Impacting Policy Management?

I was recently talking about policy management with my colleague, Ulla Koivukoski, and started thinking about how far we’ve come and how it will continue to evolve. All of the new and advanced technologies that have been introduced in the past couple of years are having a big influence on this, and will continue to shape how communications service providers (CSPs) utilise policy management capabilities.

One of the most prominent of these technologies is 4G/LTE. Because LTE enables faster data speeds, customers will inevitably want to consume more and more data. CSPs who can gain deeper insight into such data usage will have a clear advantage. For policy management specifically, this means the ability to provide different packages with different rating models that are unique to customers’ behaviours. It also means implementing bandwidth or data caps in certain instances– otherwise, we’d use all of our network capacity!

Adding to this, it’s crucial for CSPs to identify the impact of down throttling on individual customers who are likely to churn and/or cause a revenue loss. For example, if customers experience poor quality of service (QoS), CSPs need to be able to proactively offer them a higher bandwidth or data package. In this way, the risk for revenue loss and customer churn can be mitigated while simultaneously improving QoS for the right customers. Further, a predictive analytics engine can suggest which customers will be most valuable for CSPs based on pre-defined Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and which customers desire a corrective action to keep them on-board (e.g. a dedicated bandwidth prioritisation).

CSPs also can benefit by tightly coupling policy control with real-time charging. Like our recent consumer research demonstrated, financial considerations like personalised product/service promotions can influence customer behaviour. So, if CSPs can not only dynamically control the packages that are being delivered to customers and how, but also competitively price their offerings, they can increase the amount customers are willing to spend and maximise their revenue.

Linked closely with this is big data, which is giving CSPs a huge opportunity to add value. To tap into the power of big data, CSPs must first sift through and analyse the immense data volumes, both structured and unstructured, to get complete views of their customers. With this, CSPs can offer new services and bundles to customers with both efficiency and rapid time-to-market. Adding to this, a combination of advanced analytics and mediation enables CSPs to begin use cases like proactive broadband upsell for customers based on the prediction of their changed usage pattern, premium user identification, and automatically approaching customers with the right offer, in the right context.

Another technology making an impact on policy management—and one that goes hand in hand with big data—is the cloud. More and more, the cloud is one of the best options for storing and processing data. It allows for offline processing and the ability to trigger information online, to achieve real-time, personalised campaigns. Latency and security threats remain a concern, but if these can be managed properly, then I see policy making a big shift to the cloud.

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg – there are many more advancements being made every day. As our world and the technologies in it continue to evolve, I look forward to seeing how policy management will grow and change to drive a better, more efficient customer experience.


The Big Data Phenomenon

Posted: February 14th, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Industry Insights | Tags: , , , , , | 2 Comments »

When the Big Data buzz started to surface a few years ago, my first thoughts were “what’s the big fuss about this?” Many of the use cases were very simple compared to what Comptel has being doing for its customers already for decades. Data aggregation and advanced analytics is already a combination Comptel is used to.

Maybe the reason was that they were new to businesses outside the Telco world, where massive amounts of events go through very complex real-time processing for enterprise scale systems that are not able to cope with such tremendous amounts of data. Traditional data warehouse systems are ill-equipped and very cost- inefficient to handle such systems.

Comptel’s bread and butter in Mediation business has always been in doing complex things with high-volume, real-time requirements for enterprise systems that are not able to do that cost efficiently. And lately, as you’ve probably noticed, joining forces with finest quality analytics expertise we are already tackling the problem of big data quite adequately!

Even today, in terms of web scale data processing needs, Comptel is in the same league with the big players. Twitter’s data volumes and processing complexity look like  a small-scale operation compared to what Comptel does with its real-time event processing engine. On top of that, every single event is potentially related to billable items, which brings the accuracy and auditing requirements to a completely different level.

Why, then, the sudden, booming buzz around Big Data? The answer: the growing behavioral data volumes, and analyzing them.

Promise of Big Data

There are numerous drivers that have created both the need and the opportunity for big data.

•    Improved customer experience and contextual intelligence by connecting emotionally with the customers at the right time
•    Cloud computing and improvement of cost-performance ratio of computation and storage
•    Smartphone and mobile apps phenomenon creating more data that can be turned to information
•    Ubiquitousness of social media where the users are creating content that can be turned to information
•    Advanced analytics reaching the level of Artificial Intelligence

Lots of seemingly unrelated, already over-repeated buzzwords. “Is this guy trying to bore me to death”, you might ask. Well, yes I am, but that’s not the point here.

What is really going on here is, of course, is the ability to offer previously unseen levels of personalized services at very low costs. This is achieved with the next level of automation – the automation of decision making. The promise is the same as with the previous automation cycles:
Increased throughput or productivity.
Improved quality or increased predictability of quality.
Improved robustness (consistency), of processes or product.

Looking back a couple of centuries, the first automation wave concentrated on manufacturing and hard labour, moving then to automation of simple services, like telephone switches and bank clerks. Similar examples within Comptel include, telecom network engineers who manually activated new subscribers, or invoicing accountants reading the impulse meter counters, calculating the difference and creating invoices out of that. And now, decision- making is the next in line.

Advances in the cost of computing, smartphones, apps and cloud together have created an enabler of completely new types of services, and lowered the barrier to business entrance. With smartphones and app stores, anyone can theoretically create a service that can reach a billion paying customers. Cloud IaaS providers like Amazon EC2 make sure that your entry barrier is low, but your service can rapidly scale with the growth of your business.

With the massive scale of software deployment in mobile world (‘billion downloads of Angry Birds already in 2012!‘, ‘’Temple Run 2′ was downloaded 50 million times in less than two weeks’), it is actually a very valid revenue generation model to give the software for free, and then exploiting  upsell (freemium model) or advertising as the source of income. Average revenue per Facebook user is $4.34 (2011) – without the user paying anything directly to Facebook. To further optimize the revenue, customer behavior analysis is required to figure out the optimal prices, and optimal contextual timing of offers – the right offer at the right time.

The real game changer is, that for the first time ever, usage and behavioral data is available on a scientifically quantifiable, individual, very granular level – and customers give the information willingly. This makes it possible to analyze individual behavior and give personalized services based on what the individual really wants. Having Intelligence at every touchpoint creates an emotional connection for the customer, and a feeling of being cared for has a strong influence on customer loyalty. Many are willing to switch to a service provider who offers this kind of  personalized service, even at a higher cost.

Mr. Orwell might have a say on this kind of intelligence, though. With such a dramatic shift in data exploitation and deducing capabilities, it is a very welcome fact that privacy laws and regulations exist.

But, it doesn’t end there. Combining the behavioral predictions with IT and network topology and capabilities, it is possible to automate the configuration and management of the whole service platform. Imagine automated capacity balancing across data centers within a country, continent, or even the globe, according to usage, weather etc predictions. Predictions of the capacity growth could trigger automatic network and hardware expansions using an intelligent Fulfillment solution, including Resource Inventory, and Order Management. Software Defined Networking is a very interesting ingredient in all this, allowing new dynamics into network configuration, together with software.

Soon, the entire component building – device assembly – delivery – installation – configuration supply chain could be completely automated without any human intervention.

Welcome, Skynet!

Comptel For Big Data

In all this, Comptel is in a very unique position.
1.    With Comptel’s massive experience in data stream shaping – processing, enriching, aggregating and correlating massive amounts of structured and unstructured data in an efficient way – together into meaningful business value creating scalable, real-time, actionable insights out of Big Data is business as usual for us, with the standard analytics toolset carried out by typical Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence tools.
2.    With the world class predictive analytics algorithms of Comptel Social Links, Comptel can create very accurate, actionable predictions on individual subscribers with the data already flowing through the Comptel EventLink platform. This saves an enormous amount of time and effort by reducing the integration cost. As anyone involved with mediation or data warehousing projects can tell, the cost of integrating data to a single place is very high. To support fast, easy and cost-efficient integration, Comptel Social Links includes a suite of ready-made and productized use cases, which utilize Social Network Analytics and machine learning for predicting customer attributes and behavior, and for automatically optimizing decisions in  both customer and network facing business systems.
3.    The Comptel Fulfillment product suite is already geared towards automated, data-driven process execution. The  fundamental thought behind Catalog and Inventory driven Order Management is, that instead of using static process definitions, let the software figure out what is the optimal way of fulfilling the order. Therefore, it is possible to introduce predictive analytics based on service and product usage trends, such as order periodization and execution optimization and hardware capacity management.
4.    Using the insights from the usage and network quality data, combined with the understanding of the network capacities, Comptel can control the perceived network quality through Predictive Policy Control and analyzing other quality of service data. The predictive control can be used to, for example, to temporarily provide exceptional QoE for customers with high expected future value, when the customer needs it most to optimize the revenue within a system of  limited network resources.

Juhana Enqvist is Chief Architect at Comptel


Q4 2012: An Update on Comptel’s Business and Strategy

Posted: February 13th, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: News | Tags: , , , , | Comments Off on Q4 2012: An Update on Comptel’s Business and Strategy

Today, we announced Comptel’s financials for the fourth quarter of 2012, which closes my second year as the CEO of Comptel. The fourth quarter was the best quarter in 2012 in terms of net sales and operating profit.  The year ended with us winning two important customer contracts that demonstrate how our focused investments in Comptel Fulfillment and Comptel Social Links have started to bear fruit.

We signed the largest Analytics deal in Comptel’s history with Robi Axiata in Bangladesh, a joint venture of NTT DoCoMo and Axiata Group.  We have a good base of 15 customers now for our advanced analytics and one major win and three whole suite of products of the new Comptel Fulfillment 8 release, which we launched in the first half of 2012.

We continued our strategy execution and investments according to our 2012 plan. Our net sales grew by 7.4 per cent which is more than the approximate 4 per cent market growth. As stated in my Q3 blog, we are consciously building partnerships to strengthen our sales channel and to complement our portfolio. The new CMO organization we established in Q3 has progressed with the sales efficiency activities, including partnership enablement, which will be a key for our growth strategy. The most recently signed up partner is the mobile broadband company Nokia Siemens Networks.

The R&D investments continued to support the strategic Event – Analysis – Action vision in key portfolio areas.  The first half of the year was about developing Comptel Fulfillment 8 and integrating Comptel Social Links to our portfolio. The second half was about the key customer wins, new business use cases and researching the appliance model for analytics. Our ambition is to get analytics as an integral part of the other elements in our portfolio.  For or example service order orchestration “powered by advanced analytics” or personalized policy control and charging “powered by advanced analytics”.  You can visit us at Mobile World Congress (MWC13) at 6C30 booth in the Hall 6 to hear more.

Finally, I would like to mention our services business, where we succeeded to significantly improve the operational performance by implementing the productivity measures in Q2 and Q3. This will give us a good basis for 2013. We were also able to exceed our targets in new services such as Managed Services and Consulting in 2012.

In Q4 we fine-tuned our strategy execution plans to ensure we continue with focused activities in all areas.

Overall in the year 2012, we won 13 new customers and signed 15 significant orders, valued over MEUR 0.5. We will be busy also in 2013 to deliver our top-line and especially to ensure and improve our profitability. We have an exciting and interesting journey ahead in 2013.


Survey: Customers Yearn for the Personal Touch from Mobile Operators

Posted: February 12th, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: News | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

It’s no secret that customer experience is a crucial element to communications service providers’ (CSPs) business growth strategies. Last year, I talked about the necessity to anticipate customer needs to help accomplish this, as highlighted by a survey conducted with research firm Vanson Bourne. This year, we worked with the company again to gain a global understanding of subscribers’ feelings toward their CSPs and found that they indeed welcome, and in fact desire, this personalised communication at every touch point. This includes from the first interaction when joining the service (35%), to when they are experiencing issues with the service (61%), to when their needs are changing (40%).

When would you like to have more personalised help/contact from your operator?

The good news for CSPs is that these interactions can help recoup the 20% of revenue that is currently being spent on churn compensation and retention, according to telecommunications industry consultant tefficient. While this number is staggering, it also means there is a huge cost-savings opportunity – if CSPs can earn customer loyalty. For one, churn prevention can be significantly reduced as, currently, more than one-third of consumers indicated that they might consider changing their mobile operators now if they could.

Would you like to change your operator now if you could?

Adding to this, there is a significant revenue opportunity to be had if CSPs personally interacted more often with customers.  For instance, almost two-thirds of consumers said that they would like to download large files to their devices more often if they had a better rate plan for their mobile data, better bandwidth or a better device, and nearly half (49%) would pay for a temporary upgrade to download those files more quickly and improve their viewing experience, if offered.  On average, consumers are willing to spend $3.80 for a temporary service upgrade—accounting for an increase in ARPU of 12 percent.

If your mobile operator offered you a temporary bandwidth boost / data consumption upgrade for a small charge, how much would you pay?

As I mentioned in today’s press release, the key to making this a reality and, ultimately, to earn customer loyalty, is through contextual intelligence at every touch point. As the survey results show, consistent, personalised interaction puts CSPs one step closer to winning consumers’ hearts, more efficiently utilising assets and profitably monetising their offerings.

Data for this survey was gathered from consumers in Brasil, Chile, France, Germany, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom and Vietnam. A full copy of the research report will be available at Mobile World Congress (25-28 February 2013 in Barcelona) in Hall 6 at Stand 6C30, or by contacting [email protected]. You can visit our show microsite as well, for further examples of intelligence at every touch point.


Smart Order Validation – Powered by Predictive Analytics

Posted: February 11th, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Behind the Scenes, Events | Tags: , , , , , | Comments Off on Smart Order Validation – Powered by Predictive Analytics

Most order management implementations rely on an ‘order entry – order orchestration – order execution’ philosophy. It’s a commonly used model, although providers are regularly heard to comment about a lack of visibility into orders, once a service delivery process has begun. This lack of visibility leads to a poor experience for customers who in many cases suffer a poorly configured service and are generally first to flag that there is an issue. The problem is likely to grow and become more relevant to mobile operators, as end-to-end LTE service rollouts and complex Enterprise mobility solutions (including BYOD), add an increasing amount of touch points in the network.

A big challenge faced by CSPs with traditional order management is costly order fallouts. With a lack of visibility and control throughout the order orchestration process, both network resources and the workforce can be deployed or dispatched at incorrect times – typically when earlier pre-qualification stages of service order orchestration have failed to complete. This can be costly in operational and investment terms.

What if you could intelligently and proactively analyse requests for service, before they are placed as orders in the system? What if you could use predictive analytics to perform “smart validation” of orders as they come in, to judge which orders are expected to cause problems?  What if you could proactively treat these orders differently? – assign them to a special queue to specifically address and ensure customer satisfaction. Is it possible to leverage fulfillment and analytics to be preventative instead of purely reactive?

Deep analysis into the data used at each critical stage of order orchestration can help to predictively validate feasibility, reveal patterns and identify input behaviour that contributes to higher order fallout rates. Armed with advanced and analytically-enriched information, CSPs can effect real improvements to service delivery accuracy, aid in the improvement of business processes and help to drive down operational costs.

Comptel are available at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona 25-28 February to discuss this and other topics including:-

  • Personalising policy and charging powered by predictive analytics
  • Monetising mobile broadband with contextual marketing
  • Improving QoE based on expected customer value
  • “Making inventory work” with a federated approach

Your Data is More Than Just Bits and Pieces

Posted: February 8th, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Behind the Scenes | Tags: , , | 1 Comment »

010000100110010101100001011101010111010001111001….This is what data often might look like to many of us, including CSPs, and at a first glance might not look like much. Many CSPs are also worried about the inevitable and immense data growth in their network which means that there’ll be no shortage of available zeroes and ones. However, this is more than just random bits and pieces. Inside the binary universe lies the key to understanding your customer which means that you can stop worrying about the Big Data and embrace it as an unprecedented opportunity instead. Let us tell you how.

If you take a seemingly meaningless binary string and apply advanced analytics to it, you get ”010000100110010101100001011101010111010001111001”: this translates to ‘Beauty’. The same goes for “01001101 01100101 01100001 01101110 01110011” which actually converts to “Means”. This is what we do: we tap into your data, no matter how unstructured or disorganized it may seem on the surface, make the data more beautiful and eventually turn it into valuable information. The more data you have at your disposal, the more information we can generate for you – and the more opportunities for customer delight and generated revenue you have.

So, what to do with all that beautiful information you’re now comfortably sitting on? How about turning the information into action by applying contextual intelligence to it? This allows you to identify what types of customers you have, what kind of services or offers do they find attractive, and react to your customers’ needs instantly. There’s a group of young, vibrant, business-like, party-hardy, happy-go-lucky and funky customers just waiting for you to make an offer that is tailor-made for their individual needs. Many require services that fulfill their needs at a specific moment (for example, want a temporary turbo-boost for video downloading or to join a video conference). You have all the required information at your disposal not only to serve your customers better but also to grab hold of that precious piece of revenue that you’d otherwise have missed, because you didn’t have the tools to react at the right time. Seize the day and dive deep into the data pool: we’ll teach you how to swim in it effortlessly to find the treasure trove that is hidden at the bottom of the pool. 01000001 01110011 01110011 01100101 01110100 spells for “Asset”.

Comptel – 01000011 01101111 01101101 01110000 01110100 01100101 01101100

Makes It – 01001101 01100001 01101011 01100101 01110011 00100000 01001001 01110100

Happen – 01001000 01100001 01110000 01110000 01100101 01101110

For You –   01000110 01101111 01110010 00100000 01011001 01101111 01110101


A Deeper Look at Analytics-Driven Policy Control and Charging

Posted: February 6th, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Industry Insights, News | Tags: , , , | 1 Comment »

Today, we announced a joint real-time policy control and charging solution with Procera Networks, Inc. I thought this was an opportune time to sit down with Comptel’s resident policy experts, Malla Poikella and Tinakaran Ramdas, to discuss the state of policy – how it’s changed, the important elements involved, and what our partnership with Procera means for policy control and charging.

Q: How have we seen policy management mature, and how will this area continue to evolve in 2013?

Malla: Policy management will be present everywhere. Traditionally, it was just used to control network activities like bandwidth and usage. Now, it’s no longer constrained to the network and is effecting a much larger scope with charging, for instance, playing a greater role. Adding another layer to this is analytics, which enable more actionable intelligence that can be used to determine which individuals to engage, when to engage and the proper message to send to them. This type of targeting will, in turn, work to prevent churn and generate revenue.

Q: How important is real time to this?

Tinakaran: Throughout the whole cycle of policy control and charging, real time has played a huge role. But, you must understand that there’s a difference between real time and what we call ‘online’. Whereas real time can experience somewhat of a lag, online communications happen immediately. To illustrate this point, imagine streaming a video that keeps stalling. Operators can send a message in that exact moment saying that they are going to give you a boost because you’re a valued customer. This is an online communication – something that is relevant to customers while they are experiencing issues like this. It not only helps alleviate that certain problem, but drives loyalty gains in the long run. Real-time communications, on the other hand, takes a little longer, so you might receive an offer ten minutes after you’ve already finished the video – making it much less relevant.

Q: Policy control was a hot-button topic two to three years ago. Why is it still relevant and critical for communications service providers (CSPs) today?

Malla: Policy control is a key enabler of revenue generation, but data is also an important part of this – which has presented a problem for operators in the past when it comes to how to best harness and manage it. With today’s tools, though, operators can more easily do this, as analytical capabilities provide both user and network insights. This holistic view means operators have the clearest path to rate and charge intelligently.

Q: Why did Comptel and Procera decide to engage in this partnership?

Tinakaran: This partnership allows Procera further granularity into different services offered and, as a result, more opportunities to generate revenue. For instance, a user may want a special package for social services – now, with Comptel, Procera can understand user needs like this and target them accordingly with a specialised package. This granularity is enabled with both DPI and policy capabilities, allowing Procera to offer various packages, monitor that usage and then charge for them accordingly.


Is There an Monetization Upside Using Analytics when Launching LTE?

Posted: February 1st, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Events, Industry Insights, Telecom Trends | Tags: , , , , | 1 Comment »

Contextual Intelligence at Every Customer Touch Point

The telecommunications market has become increasingly data driven; it plays a central role and extends into all areas of people’s daily lives. Consumers and business customers alike are looking for services and applications that reflect their diverse and individual needs. Over-The-Top players (OTT) such as Facebook, Google, YouTube and so forth, are increasingly successful in winning the hearts, minds and wallets of customers, by offering the applications and services that meet customer needs ‘beyond connectivity’.

“Monetising the data” –topic has been hot for a while now in telecommunications and other enterprises. Monetisation in terms of growing the data traffic and revenue but also using the data for customer and network intelligence is a huge business opportunity and yet challenging to capture. We see data as a lever for the CSPs to connect emotionally with their customers at every touch point where they interact with their customers.

Such interaction include a specific, personalised campaign at the moment when the customer is most open for a new offering or a temporary capacity allocation for a heavy video upload need. Our consumer research, which we conducted in 12 countries across the globe by VansonBourne, December 2012 (will be launched prior to Mobile World Congress) , shows that nearly half of the consumers would be willing to pay for a temporary bandwidth boost or data consumption upgrade. Thus the potential is there and can be monetized by leveraging advanced and predictive analysis and automated decisions and actions to make and save money. In other words; by leveraging contextual intelligence at every touch point.

At Mobile World Congress we will discuss the topic in more details with concrete showcases. The business use case list is long, but we have chosen the ones, which on one hand can demonstrates quick business results and on the other, can help CPSs integrated their organizational teams.

  • Analytically-enriched order orchestration
  • Analytics-driven, predictive policy control
  • Contextual Mobile Data Campaigning
  • Using a Federated Model to “Make Inventory Work”
  • Customer value driven network prioritization

On Tuesday, 26th we will have a special guest, Fredrik Jungermann, the founder of tefficient, who will discuss on:

“Pinpoint the right customers – or dilute margin”

Fredrik shares his analysis of advanced LTE markets – including the US – with focus on the impact LTE has on the profitability of leading service providers. Is there an monetization upside using analytics?

To book your seat send the meeting request with a specific reference to: “Right customers for LTE”.  See you there!