This week sees the biggest telco event of the year taking place in Barcelona, the traditional venue for Mobile World Congress. Since MWC is such a big show there has unsurprisingly been a deluge of announcements from companies seeking to gain some telco-related revenue. And, let's be frank, telcos could sure use some help - with their traditional revenue streams drying up (how many people still have a regular land-line or, even better, make regular toll calls?) telcos need to move fast to plug the gaps.
Hitachi Data Systems, at first glance an unusual company to be talking telco, wants to be a part in that reinvention and is today announcing a new analytics solution aimed specifically at telcos. Live Insight for Telecom, as it is so succinctly known, is a predictive analytics solution that telcos use to gain insights into their networks and service levels. The idea being that by using the solution, telcos can be more reliable, reduce costs and better tailor their infrastructure to demand.
On top of driving analytics for their own operations, telcos can use the
So. Will this thing fly or is it destined for failure? On the one hand, providing network monitoring and analysis for telcos makes total sense - telcos already apply a lot of intelligence to their own operations and Hitachi will likely see some traction for this part of the offering. As telco analyst Jim Hodges wrote:
Advanced telecom analytics has become a vital part of the service provider landscape since it enables real-time IP network management, customer experience management, policy management, security enforcement and virtualization/orchestration
Telcos using the service for their own product offering is a very different matter however. Telcos are funny beasts, while full of some of the smartest people around, their rate of innovation is staggeringly slow. It's a real generalization and there are certainly outliers (CenturyLink is doing a great job of reinventing itself as a post-phone telco) but it's a statement that is generally valid. Having spent time with telcos, I've been amazed at how slow they are to innovate - you'd think that owning a customer relationship and tacking addition services on top of that relationship would be obvious. For telcos however it seems a massive step for them to take.
Anyway, in terms of what the solution does, it has several capabilities but the main value proposition is its scalability - it can simultaneously ingest and analyze up to one million events per second per processing engine. Those are big numbers and well-suited to the telco needs.
This looks like an interesting solution and, while telcos could likely build their own analytics offering to give themselves network insights, an off the shelf solution is attractive. I don't see a huge amount of potential however for this product to be onsold to telco's customers.
