Software major IBM will acquire The Now Factory, an analytics software firm that assists telecom service providers to deliver better customer experiences and drive new revenue.
The software giant did not disclose financial terms. The Now Factory is a privately held company.
The Now Factory, which counts T–Mobile of the U.S., Spain’s Telefonica and Hong Kong’s CLS as telecom customers, will become part of IBM’s Software Group – after the customary approvals.
Today’s acquisition complements the IBM MobileFirst Analytics portfolio, which is designed to enhance the way organizations analyze mobile device usage to provide exceptional customer experiences.
The Now Factory’s software enables telecom service providers like Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, etc. to gain real-time insights into their customers by analyzing massive quantities of network and business data.
IBM in a statement said real time insights allows telecoms to provide an enhanced quality of service to their customers by better managing negative experiences and network outages.
Informa Telecoms and Media says that by 2016, the average mobile phone subscriber will use 6.5 times as much video, 10 times as much gaming data, and 8 times as much content for social media and music than they currently consume.
The Now Factory’s software assists telecoms to better understand how a subscriber interacts with cloud-based services, such as mobile applications. Customer Experience Management (CEM) is an important focus area for telecoms to improve revenue.
Telecoms can benefit by utilizing The Now Factory’s software to analyze customer usage of 3G and 4G LTE data services and identify high volume pre-paid subscribers. This can result in a targeted campaign to convert high volume pre-paid subscribers into post-paid accounts, IBM said on Tuesday.
In addition, The Now Factory enhances IBM’s Big Data Platform to bring a new class of analytics solutions to the market. IBM InfoSphere Streams augments The Now Factory data mediation and analytics, and extends the range of use cases to include more real-time analytics on data in motion.
The Now Factory’s clients can also now access IBM PureData System for Analytics and Hadoop-based IBM InfoSphere BigInsights for exploration and deep analysis of subscriber and network data.
“Today’s announcement is part of IBM’s strategy to continually establish leadership in the era of big data and capitalize on the opportunity to analyze data in real time,” said Bob Picciano, general manager, Information Management, IBM Software Group.
IBM’s long term strategy is to support strong expected growth in big data and analytics, an area of IBM’s business that is expected to reach $20 billion in revenue by 2015.
IBM has almost 9,000 dedicated business analytics and optimization consultants, over 500 patents and 400 researchers.
IBM continues to expand its ecosystem, which consists of more than 27,000 IBM business partners – and has established nine global analytics solution centers in Berlin, Beijing, London, New York, Ohio, Tokyo, Washington and Zurich.
