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Data management is emerging as one of the most critical areas for an operator, and how he manages it is going to be the make or break factor. According to a recent report by Infonectics, subscriber data management software and services, service providers across the globe are likely to invest $789 mn in data management by 2013. (source: Infonectics).

Subscriber data management (SDM) is increasingly being viewed as a strategic tool that can help operators better monetize their existing assets by allowing them to extract, normalize, analyze, and pass on valuable subscriber information to their marketing teams. "Spending on SDM is likely to be in high double-digit percents annually for at least the next four years," says the report.

Manning Data Hassle
Subscriber data mangement is also increasing in importance, since how an operator manages the data becomes the key to what kind of services he would offer to the end user, which in turn is going to be critical to retain the high ARPU generating customers. Offering the right services to customers is going to become the key in the mobile number portability regime. The importance of data management is further going to increase when 3G services become the norm. This would be of special interest to the Indian operators, because of the much anticipated launch of 3G. Interest in 3G data offload is driving SDM investments in some markets like India.

3G and MNP is going to make data management fundamental to an operator. Besides, in the ongoing tariff war it is imperative for the service operators to retain the high ARPU generating customers; and to do that it is critical that they make the maximum usage of the subscriber data available with them.

"Data warehousing has been and will continue to be critical to the future of telcos. Customer experience analysts will define an operator's success. Being proactive in resolving the quality of service problems will be one of those success criteria. Trend analysis of events and usage will enable carriers to provide the network capacity and quality in those most critical areas for their best customers," says David Grant, VP, industry solutions, Teradata.

"The service providers have varied data, and they also have to converge value added services, so it is imperative that they have a consolidated view of the subscribers' data at one place," says Pascal Laik, vice president, master data management products, Oracle.

Data management would be different from business intelligence tools. "A lot of work has to be done to increase the quality of data, and also to get the exact data. Moreover, a service provider will get data from his website, IVR, etc, so business intelligence is not equipped to handle that kind of data," explains Laik.

Oracle is currently evaluating the market in the country. "Indian telecom market is our focus area. Our master data management suite comprises of applications whose purpose is to supply clean master data to the enterprise by consolidating multiple siloed sources of data, cleansing, and de-duplicating this information, and sharing it throughout the enterprise," explains Laik.

The service providers are turning to their enterprise data warehouses for help regarding two critical areas as they weather the current economic environment. The first important problem is that of retaining the profitable customers today is more important than ever. The operators continue to invest in warehousing to retain and grow their client base. The second important area is the ability to leverage the data warehouse to control costs. For instance, Verizon made a decision to bring cost management data into its warehouse, which was a key factor driving its decision to expand its warehouse.

Going forward, in a bid to put up a strong fight, the operators would need to focus on the quality of service analytics. This will basically be driven by an increase in the number of customers moving from wireline to wireless services that not only brings more competition, but also greater revenue opportunities.

"Besides, the wireless companies in the region are now buying ISPs and cable TV operators. Bundled multi-play offerings are emerging as the next area of growth in the region. Advertising has and will play a key role in driving revenues for telcos. Knowing who to target, and understanding the success of a particular campaign will be essential to leverage this new revenue opportunity," says Grant.

Going forward, the Indian operators don't have much option, but to invest in state-of-the-art system. Customer service delivery platforms would need to improve, and be smarter. Besides, new monitoring capabilities will be needed for the network as telcos move from just voice traffic engineering to broadband data and beyond. This is especially so with 3G/WiMax coming up in the Indian market.

Besides, the service operators would need to install more advanced customer care systems, especially as 4G grows. Going forward, telcos would need to come up with niche products like self diagnostics for residential and business customers. To come up with such services, they would need a more detailed information on the customers' experiences.

According to the vendors, the Indian service providers have business intelligence and customer relationship management tools in place, which are vastly different from subscriber data-management solutions. "They have implemented something, but they would have to go for more sophisticated tools. We see the demand in the market, and many service providers are currently evaluating the tools available in the market," says Laik.

With the coming up of 3G and MNP, the billing would also need to change. "Bundling of billing will make data warehousing an effective solution in providing overall monitoring and management of those invoices, payments, and customer profiles by integrating information to provide a single view of the customer versus looking at customers by one billing system at a time. Many of our customers have already implemented MNP, and have gained benefits in terms of understanding the drivers for customers' churning, and also regulatory compliance. We would continue to remain focused on data warehousing and enterprise analytics. We provide telcos the ability to get a single view of customers across all billing systems for reporting purposes," says Grant.

Speaking about the challenges in the Indian market, Laik says, "The main challenge is that the Indian market is very complex, and that there are extremely diverse customer profiles. The scale of the data available with service providers is huge. As the number of subscribers increases, there is going to be an increase in the enquiries they handle. It will increase the efficiency of service providers to have the entire subscriber data at one place."

In fact, the scale of the data makes it imperative that the service providers get a single view of the master data. Fragmented information as well as out-of-date information can delay business decisions of service providers. Proper management of the subscriber database on the other hand will give a competitive edge and global benchmark in managing the customer, supplier, product, and financial data with data governance services as well as help in supporting world-class integration.

Gagandeep Kaur
vadmail@cybermedia.co.in

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