Oracle shares Big Data strategy for Indian telecoms

Software major Oracle has shared Big Data strategy for Indian telecom operators. Namit Sinha, senior sales director, Technology, Oracle India, says the Big Data strategy followed by Oracle is centered on the idea that customers can evolve their current enterprise data architecture to incorporate Big Data and deliver business value, leveraging the proven reliability, flexibility and performance of their Oracle systems.

Big Data opportunities in telecom market

Indian telecom sector has seen growth as high as 20 percent CAGR over the last few years. A Deloitte study on the telecom sector states the knowledge that operators have about their customers coupled with their skills and assets in identity and authentication, billing, device management and customer care, allow the operators to position their networks as enablers of digital operations. Telecom networks are becoming the backbone of several critical industries including IT, as the operations of these industries increasingly depend on the reliability of robust telecom networks.

With the increasing demand for telecommunications, telecom operators in the country realize that they need to put in place sophisticated technology like Big Data & analytics to decode and analyze this deluge of data to maintain a competitive edge.

Challenges

A recent report by EY titled The top 10 business risks in telecommunications states the key challenges facing the telecom sector is the need to understand and respond to fast-changing customer expectations and behaviors. To match customer expectations, telecom operators today heavily bank on third-party information. A big challenge for operators is to acquire this data and combining it with the structured data set already available in the telecom dataware house. The next challenge lies in explosion of volume of data closer to the origin. The problem here is storing and processing these levels of volumes in traditional databases and technologies.

Namit Sinha, senior sales director, Technology, Oracle India

When compared to traditional infrastructure for analytics, the biggest change in a Big Data ecosystem is in the data acquisition phase from multiple sources. The infrastructure required to support the acquisition of big data must deliver low, predictable latency in both capturing data and in executing short, simple queries. It should be able to handle very high transaction volumes, often in a distributed environment; and support flexible, dynamic data structures. Telecom operators also face challenge around some of the softer issues such as the quality, privacy and security of the data. Additionally, Telecom operators need to recognize that they can’t drive big data with the same cost economics as they do for the regular business data. They need the right tools to handle various technical hurdles around scalability, around the complexity of the data, around the rate at which the data is coming from the sensors and managing data latency.

Opportunities

While there are a few challenges, the better news is that telecom operators have far more exciting opportunities to leverage through Big Data. Operators today have at hand trillions of bytes of unstructured information about their customers, suppliers, and operations. This large pool of information can be captured, aggregated, stored, and analyzed as part of every sector and function of the global economy.

Careful examination of this varied, scattered and unformatted digital data streams can reveal new sources of economic value and provide fresh insights into customer behavior. Companies can look at a possibility of business hypothesis testing by digging deeper into this unstructured pool of information and analyzing them against existing business warehouse data with accuracy.

Demand of Indian telecom operators

Today, the main concern of the operators is not the cost but to deliver value added services, improved customer experience, retaining a customer and grow a profitable customer base. To cater to this, telecom operators require infrastructure that is able to deliver low, predictable latency in both capturing data and in executing short, simple queries. It should be able to handle very high transaction volumes, often in a distributed environment; and support flexible, dynamic data structures. They also need to address softer issues such as the quality, privacy and security of the data.

While Telecom operators realize that there is competitive advantage in the information, they also recognize that they can’t drive big data with the same cost economics as they do for the regular business data. For this reason, operators are looking at the right tools to handle various technical hurdles around scalability, around the complexity of the data, around the rate at which the data is coming from the sensors and manage data latency.

Oracle’s strategy

For Oracle, the telecom industry is a major focus and growth driver in India. The Big Data strategy followed by Oracle is centered on the idea that customers can evolve their current enterprise data architecture to incorporate Big Data and deliver business value, leveraging the proven reliability, flexibility and performance of their Oracle systems. Oracle solutions for communications address complex business processes relevant to the industry to help organizations speed time to market, reduce costs, and gain a competitive edge.

By leveraging Oracle Big Data Appliance in conjunction with Oracle Exadata, telecom operators can acquire, organize and analyze all their enterprise data – including structured and unstructured data – to make the most informed decisions in real-time.

“In addition, we offer Oracle’s communication data model, which is a prebuilt communications industry-specific data warehouse-database schema with associated analytic models and dashboards,” Oracle’s Sinha said.

Oracle’s Enterprise performance management applications support telecom operators with strategic planning and goal setting, financial and operational planning, the end-to-end financial close and reporting process, and profitability management in a comprehensive and fully integrated suite.