A Data Refinery Requires a Strong Technology Foundation

By Katja Kurisjärvi, Marketing Manager, Comptel

In today’s rapidly changing technology landscape, it’s survival of the fittest. Only the most adaptive, intuitive and efficient software, bringing the greatest benefits to users, will survive. If the software fails to meet the expectations of nexterday, it will be replaced by more modern technologies better suited to satisfy the always-on, real-time needs of today’s “Generation Cloud.”

During it’s nearly three decades of existence, Comptel EventLink, formerly known as Comptel Convergent Mediation and MDS/AMD, has seen the winds of change with regard to customer behaviour, and has stood the test of time in the hands of many Tier 1 mobile and fixed operators.

Now, Comptel EventLink’s data management capabilities are needed more than ever to harness data coming from all directions in all industries – and increasingly, in real time.

Last autumn, version 7.0 was released to meet these new spheres of data handling with embedded intelligence, an intuitive user experience, and real-time reporting and action-triggering automation. More details can be found in our press release.

To ensure it would meet today’s high usability standards, Comptel conducted research amongst 15 operators. Evaluations of its usability, in addition to customer interviews, centred on how operators were using Comptel EventLink in daily operations, to uncover key areas for improvement and, ultimately, create a new era of mediation in version 7.0.

The latest iteration enables effortless data stream management and provides intuitive stream monitoring capabilities with clear visibility into system load and errors. Streams can be created effortlessly via drag-and-drop, using ready-installed node libraries. Everything is organised, so the most important information is quickly at hand and right in front of the user’s eyes.

To top it all off, performance has improved 200% over earlier version 6.2, and with much less hardware, making the system more than ready for network function virtualisation (NFV), which requires highly distributable systems and high availability.

“The feedback on Comptel EventLink 7.0 so far has been nothing but positive,” confirms Senior Product Manager Tero Lindholm. “The success of its extensive usability and performance investments is evident, as the first live customer upgraded to version 7.0 as soon as one month after the release.” A very fast deployment indeed!

It is this strong technology foundation that has been crucial to powering Comptel’s Data Refinery solution and, in turn, helping to deliver on telecoms operators’ and other global enterprises’ business-critical demands in real time.

Learn more about Comptel EventLink 7.0 and our Data Refinery solution below. Tomorrow, I’ll dive deeper into various applications of a Data Refinery and why it is ideal to keep up with the needs of “Generation Cloud.”

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This blog post is based on an interview with Senior Product Manager Tero Lindholm.

Comptel Deepens the Telenor Customer Relationship with a New Fulfillment Solution and Services Deal

Comptel today announced a major order from Telenor in Norway. The four-year contract is a continuation of the long relationship between the companies. The deal amounting to eight million euros comprises Comptel Fulfillment software licenses and services.

The Comptel Fulfillment suite of products is specifically targeted to reduce the time it takes from the first customer contact until the billable service is delivered. If the network is pre-built, which often is the case for modern DSL and FTTx networks, service delivery can be done in a matter of seconds instead of hours and days.

Automation Is the Key

Comptel Fulfillment offers a combination of automated features, which can reduce most, if not all, of the back-office work, leaving only the field work as manual:

Order Management automates the process of capturing order information and distributing the tasks to systems and involved personnel.

Catalog automates the decomposition of products and services into reusable tasks for fast creation and delivery.

Resource Inventory and Number Management automate the allocation of the required resources, such as network device ports and IP addresses.

Activation automates the interaction with the network, pushing commands to network elements and service delivery platforms.

“We are really pleased to continue our customer relationship with Telenor in Norway. It is a privilege to be part of the Telenor Norway fulfillment transformation project for their fixed network,” said Juhani Hintikka, president and CEO, Comptel.

“Comptel Fulfillment has an important role in our long-term efforts to modernise and simplify products, processes and IT systems,” says Terje Foyn Johannessen, director of telephony & Internet, Telenor Norway. “We aim to significantly reduce operational expenditure and offer our customers improved experience with better quality and faster time-to-market for new services.”

Mobile World Congress Day 2: Getting Big Value Out of Big Data

The first day of Mobile World Congress was a busy one, full of panels, speeches and workshops. When Day Two began, I knew it was going to be another exciting one, full of insights from thought leaders across the telco industry. Today, one of those thought leaders was Comptel’s VP of Analytics and Technology, Matti Aksela. Matti was a participant during the morning panel session, “Big Data Goes on Stage.” He joined executives from Blancco, Creanord, Omnitele, Tieto, and Tecnotree to discuss the current state of Big Data and the changes we can expect to see over the next several years.

Big Data is still a fairly difficult term to define. At Comptel, we believe that the term is a new label that’s being applied to something fundamental – the ability to build a business strategy around customer data. The panel acknowledged this, noting that telcos are handling petabytes upon petabytes of information that could potentially be useful to the business.

But what do telcos really need to make the most out of Big Data?

The Foundation of Data is Infrastructure

Tomi Paatsila, CEO at Omnitele, explained that scalable infrastructure is integral to Big Data analytics, because organisations have to be able to adapt to different traffic environments. Matti added that scalable infrastructure also needs to support different types of data to effectively consolidate all that information.

Part of that requirement is due to the emergence of new virtual machines (vms). Ideal infrastructures will have to be vendor-agnostic, providing a seamless integration for the technologies of yesterday, today and tomorrow. As Lucas Weber, product manager at Blancco pointed out, both virtualization and the rise of cloud computing have added new layers of complexity to the data that infrastructures must be able to handle.

However, collecting and processing all those petabytes of data can still be a cumbersome (and expensive) task for telcos, especially if they attempt to do so manually.

Automation for the Next Generation

The panelists agreed that automation is a key element to any Big Data solution. They also agreed that it’s important to analyse end-user behaviour at every possible touch point, a particular science of the customer experience that Comptel has championed for a long time. When telcos can collect contextual intelligence at every touch point, execs can make informed business decisions based on real-time, segmented customer interactions.

Matti often observes organisations that are frustrated with the results of their Big Data solution, because business leaders didn’t identity a specific motivation behind implementation. As Matti said on today’s panel, “The key is to start looking for value out of the data right away.” To do that, telcos need to decide which business problem can be solved with the help of Big Data. In Matti’s experience, the top use case is churn reduction.

Weber summed up the panel conversation perfectly: “At the end of the day, consumers and enterprises should benefit from Big Data.” As telcos strive to become customer-centric companies, the ability to efficiently utilise Big Data to create a better customer experience will be an important factor in their success, or their failure.

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Customer Experience Automation: Beyond the Order, Beyond the Trouble Ticket

By: Andy Hicks, Research Manager, EMEA, Telecoms, IDC

If your job involves talking to a lot of different people, you probably find that you end up saying a few things over and over just to lay the groundwork for whatever conversation you’re having. Since I’m a telecoms analyst, for example, I often find myself saying something like this:

“As an industry, we’re entering a whole new level of complexity on the IT side. We’re seeing an explosion of services, user types, devices, quality of service (QoS) levels and service level agreement (SLA) obligations. The permutations of all those factors make for more than any service provider can manage manually, so we’ll have to make sure that all that service and network management is automated to the maximum extent possible.”

So far, this is pretty unobjectionable stuff, and that’s the point. It’s something that most people in the industry can agree on before getting into specific cases. But as with its implementation, plans for automation vary both between carriers and within each one’s IT infrastructure. There is some common ground though. In the fulfillment part of the chain, one-touch provisioning and the like are generally accepted goals.

Where the promise of automation is still not as well understood, I believe, is in the service inventory, especially as it affects customer experience. Discussions of customer experience are often limited to either the fulfillment process (Is the order filled quickly and correctly?) and customer service (Is the problem resolved satisfactorily and cheaply?). Both the order and the trouble ticket are events, which are easier to measure and address. Extending the purview of customer experience to ongoing operations requires diagnosing and averting service problems before they affect customers. This requires systems to predict network and service outages in real time, and provision new resources to proactively fix the problem. The same components can also help engineers model the consequences of any changes to the system before they affect users.

The difference between “good enough” capabilities in this area and true differentiation in customer experience will increasingly inhere in the ability to model the effects of outages and planned changes alike on individual services and the individual customers that use them. Since each of those services is aggregate of smaller elements, and since the most valuable customers are likely to use the most services, a successful extension of the service inventory must be able to analyze the effects of system changes and failures not only on the network, but also on the services provided across it, especially as they affect the “gold” customer base. The criteria for that analysis will come from SLAs as well as service providers’ service assurance goals for each category of its users.

To date, Internet service providers and enterprise network providers seem to have more advanced offerings in these areas than mobile providers and fixed-line incumbents. As markets mature and competition in services increases from over-the-top (OTT) players, every service provider will have to improve its predictive and proactive capabilities to remain competitive in customer experience.

Andy Hicks covers telecom software, services, and business strategies in EMEA, with special focus on emerging markets, at IDC. Currently, he is focussing on the IT-ification of telecoms, the increasingly complex services market they compete in, and the work of multinational groups to rationalize their operations across borders.