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Stalking the landscape

12th November 2007 > ITWeb

 

Huge volumes of transactional information and a formidable competitor in Microsoft are both a threat and an opportunity for BI vendors.

 

How will business intelligence tools help companies, especially telcos, with terabytes of transactional information? Will Microsoft's recent moves on the BI front hurt or help the existing vendors? Present at an ITWeb roundtable discussion to give their answers to these and other questions were: Caron Mooney, director of IS Partners; Marc Scheepbouwer, MD of Intellient; Adrian van der Merwe, MD of 8th Man Consulting; Richard Greyling, managing consultant at Knowledge Integration Dynamics; Carlo Gunter, COO of e.com Institute; Nitesh Vallabh, director of PBT; Dillon Gray, channel manager of Business Objects; John Olsson, sales and marketing director at Ability Solutions; Filip van den Houte, business partner at MCI Consultants; Greg Bogiages, director of Cortell; Estelle de Beer, BI practice manager at Sybase's BI Practice; Erwin Bisschops, senior solutions architect at Harvey Jones; and Christo Bredenkamp, MD of Synergy Computing.


ITWeb: How will BI tools help telco providers move towards transactional-based revenue rather than the current access models?

 

Richard Greyling: We have major telco customers and most of them have felt that to analyse their transactional information at this stage of their projects is too much. They'd rather summarise it and not overanalyse it at that level. One of them has the largest data warehouse in the southern hemisphere - 320 terabytes and growing daily. Analysing that is very optimistic. They will have to get to that level eventually to be competitive, but at this stage in the South African market, it isn't such a risk. Luckily the guys in Europe are doing the groundwork so we'll be able to learn from them.

 

Nitesh Vallabh: In certain aspects, telcos are using transactional information, particularly in product development, where they need to test how a product will perform in the market. They take a sample data set and put it through a set of parameters to see what usage would be like for a certain product.

Estelle de Beer: BI tools are capable of analysing large volumes of data - it's the back-end systems that need to be capable of producing result sets on those large volumes where there's often a bottleneck. The BI tools can give you the transactional information, but if you can't store 14 terabytes and allow them to interrogate that, then it becomes a back-end infrastructural problem rather than a business problem.

Dillon Gray: There are two distinct markets in the telco environment in this country: landline and cellphone. If we look at the mobile environment, we have so many applications: SMS, WAP, marketing and so on. So there's a need for the carriers to start reinventing themselves to bring in that information and try to use it as a tool. But, as has been said, competition on that side doesn't exist in this country. Is there really a need for them to do it? Right now, I don't think so. Our landline operator is under a lot of pressure, both internally and externally. Internally it has legacy people who have a set way of thinking about what BI should be; externally, they have new competitors coming in. From our perspective, the landline operator needs BI to reinvent itself and BI will also help the competitors. But the telcos now want BI more to do their billing rather than look for transactional revenue.

Marc Scheepbouwer: We have a cellular provider as a customer and they use a BI architecture to analyse quality around calls. It's tied to a culture in that business to deliver quality service. They take all the call stats, drive it through a data warehouse and an analytical layer, and present the results to their mast engineers so they can pre-emptively manage their masts. So, BI is being used in some areas. Although the technologies are capable, there are scalability issues. It is challenging, not only at the transactional level, but also for the interpretation of the data.

Christo Bredenkamp: One of the areas in which we see BI making a difference to mobile companies is in their call centres. There we're dealing with operational data and it is possible to do live analysis of it, such as [the number and frequency] of dropped calls.

Erwin Bisschops: I was involved with a large project with a telco overseas where they used BI tools to predict churn, which is quite an important KPI. It was a BI environment setup in a closed loop, with their transactional environment linked to a marketing module. The data in the warehouse would be analysed by marketing people and the business logic could be applied in that environment. It produced a list of people who would be walking away within the next three months. That list could be fed directly into the marketing campaign module and the responses would flow back to the warehouse to check its effectiveness.

Greyling: The business model for telcos in the UK and Europe is substantially different to that in South Africa. Here you pay per minute; there it's a fixed cost. Here, there's little value in moving from one [operator] to another, whereas over there they're competing on service.