Telecom Lead India: The global telecom subscriber data management market revenue, including software and services for mobile and fixed-line networks, rose 45 percent in 2012 to $792 million.
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.
For instance, for South Africa’s Cell C, the increase in subscriber numbers, call volume, and new services caused its HLR to fail in terms of capacity and reliability.
By deploying the Huawei SingleSDB solution to build a new and highly reliable subscriber data management system, the operator overcame the legacy problems and was able to integrate its databases to realize all subscriber data with unified storage, unified management, and unified service provisioning.
Cell C’s Opex and Capex have since reduced and its service deployment ability has improved, giving the operator a well-honed competitive edge in the market, Huawei said.
Though slow to achieve widespread traction, the 3GPP’s UDC (user data convergence) standard is gaining momentum in developed markets.
Oracle’s 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.
As the big data trend continues to influence 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.
Shira Levine, directing analyst for service enablement and subscriber intelligence at Infonetics Research, 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.”
Frost & Sullivan says the global market for subscriber data management will reach $2.78 billion in 2012 and that quality of customer experience (QoE), not services, will become the decisive factor that gives operators a competitive edge. This emphasis on QoE positions subscriber data rather than network infrastructure as the core asset, the effective management of which requires an effective solution.
In a May 2012 note, Infonetics said the SDM software and services market will grow to $1.86 billion by 2016, driven increasingly by network modernization initiatives, particularly LTE deployments, which are prompting mobile operator interest in the separation of back-end SDM databases from front-end applications to consolidate subscriber data.
Operators in the EMEA region continue to lead the SDM opportunity, with mobile operators in Western Europe, particularly Vodafone, Orange, and Telecom Italia, among the first to deploy SDM.
Baburajan K
