For a moment, imagine that interacting with a company’s web site is the same as having a conversation with an employee in customer service. It is a good test of how effective the online communications channel is. A few days ago I had this conversation with an airline that we will call JetAway to protect the – well – guilty. “I see you are offering return flights to Nice for £24.99.” “We certainly are. My name is James.” “Hello James. Excellent, in that case I’ll book it now.” “Good, so let’s go through this short
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I’ve made the argument twice now that Oracle’s acquisitions of Acme Packet and Tekelec are Big Data plays. I stand by that argument, but I also think these buys are a sign of how intelligence is moving out of the network and into a sort of new layer that pulls together things like diameter signalling and session border control, policy control, software-defined networking, and real-time billing and charging. BillingViews reader Geoff Coleman made the point, in his recent comment, that a variety of large players from the IT side of the business are ”moving the policy (management) away from
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LTE is about data and people are still – generally – about talking to one another. So the question is ‘what do we do about voice and LTE?’ LTE is here. There were 100 million LTE subscribers in 2012 and 381 operators are currently investing in it, according to the GSA. As a result, IN platforms are potentially redundant, they don’t do data. Upgrading them increasingly becomes a waste of time. Operators are publicly acknowledging that they need to think like the internet. This means it is time for Real Time. There is a lot
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Oracle announced today that it will acquire network signalling control and policy management vendor Tekelec for an undisclosed amount. This follows on the heels of Oracle’s acquisition of Acme Packet, which fills a related and overlapping space in what one might loosely call the network intelligence domain. Keep in mind that Oracle has also been very active in SDN – software defined networking – as well. As NetCracker’s Sanjay Mewada recently discussed, intelligence is moving out of the network and into BSS/OSS functions, like SDN and policy management. Signalling management has always been something of the glue
Read More »A survey by Capacity Media and Subex asked 190 0perators of all sizes, from across the world for their views on wholesale fraud. Whilst the industry tends to focus on retail and consumer issues, there are clearly threats at the wholesale level too. The fraud problem is $6.12 billion, in a market worth $170 billion. Amongst the reasons for the rise in wholesale fraud are difficulties in prosecution and the rise of IP services – ‘increasingly penetrable’ services according to Subex, who identified Point of Sale fraud as a rising threat late last year. Surprisingly, in the
Read More »A few years ago, Jo Waring, TelecomAsia’s wise editor, asked at a conference what operators will do when boundaries and borders become things of the past. The immediate answer from CSP panelists was to remain silent. Oddly, that is exactly what their strategy has been. While that was several years ago, the question now is whether we have reached the point where there’s more value in offering international data roaming packages with Bill Shock protection than there is in surprising customers with hefty roaming fees As my learned colleague Ed Finegold points out here, inertia
Read More »There was one set of conclusions that came out of last week’s Big Data Summit, such as big data is big (but often thin), that eBay doesn’t need any data from telcos, it has enough to be going on with and that trust and privacy issues are probably the Achilles heel of using big data to everyone’s advantage. There were another set of conclusions around the two things that always ruin the best-laid plans – people and politics. One speaker said that there is no way that you can possibly build a business case for big
Read More »No-one would get a prize for predicting that this year will be ‘the year of Big Data’, in fact, if you did you might find yourself with a wooden spoon instead. Big Data is going to big in Big Government, Big Data is going to be big in M2M, Big Data is going to be big across all communications, in fact there are at least two ‘Big Data’ conferences, sorry, ‘summits’ happening in the next four weeks, in Europe. In related news, we also hear startling predictions that this year is going to be the
Read More »With some analysts causing confusion in the community with their smoke and mirrors, others certainly agree on where the market is heading and who will lead the charge. The latest research from Infonetics points to growth in the convergent charging market of 24 percent compound between now and 2016. This follows on from a report earlier this year that predicted that service providers will spend $14 billion on convergent charging systems by 2017, $1.9 billion of which will be earmarked for Policy Management. Analysys Mason was also upbeat earlier this year, having measured more
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