6 Applications of A Data Refinery: How Telcos Can Support Generation Cloud

By Katja Kurisjärvi, Marketing Manager, Comptel

In yesterday’s blog post, I highlighted Comptel EventLink 7.0’s key features and mentioned how they comprise the foundation of our Data Refinery solution. Communications service providers (CSPs) and global enterprises alike require a strong technology base to keep up with the standards of nexterday and the high expectations of “Generation Cloud.”

Building on the Comptel EventLink core, with rating and charging components and embedded intelligence, including reporting and monitoring, our Data Refinery solution can enable real-time decision-making and action- triggering. Here are six ways that it can be put to work to drive CSPs’ businesses forward.

1. Beyond traditional billing mediation

“Comptel EventLink can, as always, manage traditional billing mediation tasks, and many of our customers use it for full-blown mediation consolidations,” says Senior Product Manager Tero Lindholm. “The platform is typically used in the OSS/BSS layer, where a Tier 0 or 1 operator with IP, fixed and mobile networks has consolidated all of its services on it.”

However, recently, new and existing Comptel EventLink customers have started to use the software for purposes other than pure billing mediation, taking advantage of its ability to process intelligent data in real time and in any format.

Typically, such cases involve complex event processing (CEP) and refining value out of “Big Data in motion” – data that originates from multiple sources in a real-time environment. The Data Refinery adds intelligence to the data handling, and enables real-time analysis, decisions and actions based on the data going through the system streams. When more hierarchical customer profiling and propensity calculations are needed, the Comptel Social Links analytics add-on is included.

2. Automated campaigns

One of the new purposes for the Data Refinery is real-time analysis with decisions and actions to enable automated campaigning processes. This is something that Comptel has implemented for operators all over the world.

“We are helping operators better understand how their customers are using their services and which offers are most relevant to which individuals,” said Tero.

The Data Refinery combines real-time usage events with a real-time understanding of the subscription and the subscriber profile and location, for example, like whether the subscriber is roaming. The Data Refinery can accumulate different usages, and combine them with real-time analysis, make more relevant offers to the end customers with optimal timing.

Understanding real-time usage is made possible by combining usage events from network elements such as PCRF or OCS (mobile) or CMTS (for IP network), and the subscription information from the CRM. The summary of each customer’s usage, according to his/her subscription and services, is shown immediately in the CSP portal, where end customers can directly monitor their service usage.

Having real-time information about data usage increases customer satisfaction and helps CSPs’ provide more suitable offers based on the real-time understanding of service usage.

3. Economical ways to managing roaming agreements

Comptel is in a good position to help operators solve roaming challenges. The company was a pioneer in rolling out roaming cost control use cases when the EU roaming regulations came into force in 2007. These regulations were intended to regulate the roaming data and voice charges imposed by operators to their subscribers, thus preventing bill shock.

To regulate roaming charges, operators are looking for more economical ways to manage roaming data and agreement processing between different roaming partners. The Comptel EventLink extension, Roaming Management, is used by 20+ operators for managing roaming billing and fraud detection, and for automated processing of partner agreements. The extension supports the TAP/RAP/NRTRDE/RAEX processing in alignment with the GSMA standards and provides full visibility into the configuration of the agreements from test phase through production.

4. Monetising OTT offerings

The Data Refinery can help monetise over-the-top (OTT) offerings. For example, in Asia-Pacific, a Tier 1 customer is using the Data Refinery to collect information related to Google Play purchases. The customer has a revenue-sharing model with the Google Play market place, and the Comptel system provides usage information to revenue-sharing platforms and to the interconnect billing system.

5. Ready for IoT

The Data Refinery is highly suitable for connecting devices and applications, and expanding usability from pure billing mediation tasks to supporting the Internet of Things (IoT) business model.

For instance, since 2013, the Telefonica Group in Europe has used the Data Refinery for processing smart metre usage traffic from Telefonica’s machine-to-machine (M2M) network elements. Smart metres equipped with SIM cards communicate readings over GPRS links, which generate events that the Data Refinery can collect and separate from mobile device usage events, providing the aggregated data to the M2M platform and assurance.

6. LTE leading the data explosion

Increased data usage is clearly visible to the users and developers of Comptel EventLink—a Tier 1 operator’s system, for instance, can now process as much as 500 TB of data daily (comparable to the daily usage of Facebook data).

To cite an example from Tero, the amount of usage events has tripled for an Indonesian customer over the past two years, and is currently hitting 12-13 billion records with each passing day.

“Indonesia is just about to adopt 4G services, and we can expect the number of usage events to multiply as 4G is introduced to tablets, smartphones and other handhelds being used in that region,” noted Tero.

In Italy, a similar explosion was seen earlier this year, where the mobile data packet usage increased by 84 percent in just five months. Not only has LTE created an enormous impact on the volume of network events, it has also increased network complexity. This is because VoLTE based on IMS technology introduces new types of network elements that require high capabilities to collect and correlate different events from different sources, in order to have properly chargeable items for billing and other applications.

It’s no wonder that operators are finding it difficult to handle customers’ appetites for ‘all-you-can-eat’ packages and are consequently moving to capped data plans. Such data plans take advantage of policy control solutions, which restrict available capacity for each customer. Customers who demand the highest bandwidth without limitations must be prepared to pay for it, bringing welcome income for operators still suffering from voice revenue losses.

Want to discuss how else Comptel EventLink 7.0 and our Data Refinery solution can support your business?

Download the presentation below, or email [email protected] for a demo.

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This is based on an interview with Senior Product Manager Tero Lindholm.

A Data Refinery Requires a Strong Technology Foundation

By Katja Kurisjärvi, Marketing Manager, Comptel

In today’s rapidly changing technology landscape, it’s survival of the fittest. Only the most adaptive, intuitive and efficient software, bringing the greatest benefits to users, will survive. If the software fails to meet the expectations of nexterday, it will be replaced by more modern technologies better suited to satisfy the always-on, real-time needs of today’s “Generation Cloud.”

During it’s nearly three decades of existence, Comptel EventLink, formerly known as Comptel Convergent Mediation and MDS/AMD, has seen the winds of change with regard to customer behaviour, and has stood the test of time in the hands of many Tier 1 mobile and fixed operators.

Now, Comptel EventLink’s data management capabilities are needed more than ever to harness data coming from all directions in all industries – and increasingly, in real time.

Last autumn, version 7.0 was released to meet these new spheres of data handling with embedded intelligence, an intuitive user experience, and real-time reporting and action-triggering automation. More details can be found in our press release.

To ensure it would meet today’s high usability standards, Comptel conducted research amongst 15 operators. Evaluations of its usability, in addition to customer interviews, centred on how operators were using Comptel EventLink in daily operations, to uncover key areas for improvement and, ultimately, create a new era of mediation in version 7.0.

The latest iteration enables effortless data stream management and provides intuitive stream monitoring capabilities with clear visibility into system load and errors. Streams can be created effortlessly via drag-and-drop, using ready-installed node libraries. Everything is organised, so the most important information is quickly at hand and right in front of the user’s eyes.

To top it all off, performance has improved 200% over earlier version 6.2, and with much less hardware, making the system more than ready for network function virtualisation (NFV), which requires highly distributable systems and high availability.

“The feedback on Comptel EventLink 7.0 so far has been nothing but positive,” confirms Senior Product Manager Tero Lindholm. “The success of its extensive usability and performance investments is evident, as the first live customer upgraded to version 7.0 as soon as one month after the release.” A very fast deployment indeed!

It is this strong technology foundation that has been crucial to powering Comptel’s Data Refinery solution and, in turn, helping to deliver on telecoms operators’ and other global enterprises’ business-critical demands in real time.

Learn more about Comptel EventLink 7.0 and our Data Refinery solution below. Tomorrow, I’ll dive deeper into various applications of a Data Refinery and why it is ideal to keep up with the needs of “Generation Cloud.”

Download our Comptel EventLink 7.0 presentation:

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This blog post is based on an interview with Senior Product Manager Tero Lindholm.

Welcome to the New Era of Mediation: Refining Every Last Bit of Data to Fuel Your Business

Few businesses have as much constantly streaming data as communications service providers (CSPs). Day and night, seven days a week, customers are sending and receiving huge amounts of data. The amount of data in flux is not just growing, but it also comes in different formats, varying from structured to unstructured, real-time and historical.

That’s a lot of information to process and manage. Over time, the constant flow of data across technologies like fixed, mobile, IMS, LTE, cable and IPTV has resulted in siloed, fragmented data sets. These scattered data processing layers require not just consolidation but also intelligent data analysis capabilities to turn every grain of insight into value and revenue for the operator.

To solve this situation, Comptel is bringing a new version of its convergent mediation platform, Comptel EventLink 7, to market. The market is ready for a new era of mediation that streams and refines data into automated, intelligent actions such as upsell campaigns, roaming data, targeted customer lists, cloud orchestration and charging, as well as offers real-time early warnings for xDR anomalies, multi-country data consolidation, LTE/VoLTE services management capabilities and more. Comptel EventLink can provide that technology.

With a new kind of mediation software, CSPs will be able to increase time-to-market, operational efficiency, advanced monitoring, service forecasting and real-time customer engagement. Here’s how.

A Data Refinery that Integrates, Learns and Turns Data into Action

Comptel EventLink 7.0 connects all the dots across devices, applications, network elements, customers and locations, collecting and intelligently analysing streaming data. Comptel EventLink ensures that data is in the right place at the right time, capturing contextual information and formatting it for delivery to the destination engine.

This “data refinery” smoothly integrates and embeds analytics to the mediation layer, and consolidates all the data coming into and being sent out of it. That ensures that no information is lost. CSPs can maximise and control every last bit of data in its native format, including the access to the unfiltered raw data, across every operation.

Comptel’s new Big Data mediation software, Comptel EventLink natively integrates and embeds analysis, reporting and machine-learning capabilities, allowing operators to use the contextual intelligence from that Big Data to speed up business decisions and actions.

For example, operational intelligence empowered by a data refinery can stop revenue loss and identify unexpected traffic peaks while improving Quality of Service. Simply by collecting historical and real-time data, a data refinery can provide operators with a snapshot of what to expect in the future and send alarms about any potential service peaks or disruptions.

Without a data refinery to process all that streaming data, CSPs could be missing out on a lot of “sleeping” revenue or insights. If xDRs aren’t analysed, predicted and monitored in real-time, revenue loss, service disruptions and anomalous patterns can get completely overlooked. A data refinery integrates, refines and learns from the information traveling back and forth on the network, alerting CSPs about upcoming issues and opportunities.

A Superior User Experience

So how can CSPs make the most of the Comptel EventLink data refinery? By building workflows around how the data gets used. In order to help businesses efficiently leverage data streams, Comptel has researched CSP users’ end-to-end business design journeys and translated the invaluable learnings into our new user experience (UX) interface.

The result is the Comptel EventLink Stream Designer. With an intuitive, drag-and-drop dashboard, the Stream Designer allows CSPs to build new products and services cost-effectively, quickly and easily. Stream Designer is a revolutionary new way for CSPs to configure how data is managed and used.

In addition to offline streams, active, online streams are fully supported, so it’s possible to build a workflow that intelligently streams online data or monitors customer’s data usage across a network and automatically sends that information to the relevant destination, business or operations team.

With a sleek, user experience and interface to build custom workflows, Comptel EventLink is ushering in a new era of mediation. The timing couldn’t be better. With the Internet of Things promising a world of connected watches, cars, refrigerators and more – along with the exponential growth in data use – contextual, real-time analysis and reporting is increasingly becoming a business-critical initiative. A data refinery that can perform real-time, automated analysis and speed up intelligent decisions and actions will enable CSPs to continue innovating, building customer loyalty and optimising their business.

Want to try out the next generation of mediation? Learn more about Comptel’s new convergent mediation platform or download our EventLink 7.0 presentation below.

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Comptel’s FinPro Trip Looks to the Future of Telco in Indonesia

Last week, Comptel’s CEO Juhani Hintikka and vice president of Asia-Pacific Kari Jokela visited Indonesia as part of the FinPro business delegation to discuss future economic cooperation between Finland and Indonesia. A leader in FinPro, Comptel has previously visited India, Kazakhstan and Chile, among other countries, to meet and work with those regions’ local communications service providers (CSPs) and government officials.

Juhani Hintikka, Jan Vapaavuori - Minister of Economic Affairs and Kari Jokela

Comptel has been doing business in Indonesia for more than 10 years now, and we’re excited to continue to build relationships with those in the region. The Asia-Pacific telecommunications market has tripled in size since 2003 and added one billion new connections. By the end of 2013, experts expect there to be three billion connections total. Next year, Analysys Mason predicts that Indonesia will steadily move toward deploying 4G services.

To help CSPs in the region prepare for this wave of change, Comptel aims to offer new products and services through an extended range of local partners. For example, the company recently announced that it is working with local partner Lintas Teknologi to deliver Comptel Convergent Mediation to the second largest CSP in Indonesia, Indosat. By consolidating the mediation of its entire mobile product portfolio, the operator will be able to handle billions of transactions daily, while seamlessly scaling as its business grows.

As 2013 draws to a close and Comptel looks at a new year, we couldn’t be more excited to cultivate our relationships with CSPs throughout Indonesia and Asia-Pacific, and offer them new ways of doing business that help grow their revenues, streamline their operational processes and build customer loyalty.

Want to learn more about what the telco industry is thinking about in the APAC region? Download our APAC survey below!

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To Reverse Declining Revenues, the Telco Industry Has to Think Outside the Box

A new report from independent global analyst firm Ovum showed that the telco industry may be experiencing declining revenues for the near future. Most of the decline will occur among telcos with significant exposure to Europe and other mature economies. The only significant growth is taking place within emerging markets, particularly China.

The findings come from a review of full-year KPIs of 23 of the world’s largest telcos, and the analyst firm expects revenues to slow down until at least 2018.

Ovum’s review may or may not come as a surprise to communications service providers (CSPs), which have already been in a constant dance to adapt to the latest technology and the latest competition. While Ovum’s findings seem grim, they should be embraced as an incentive to modernise and innovate their service offerings and customer focus.

The telco industry can look at two things in particular: finding the equilibrium that balances OTT contribution with their business models, and leveraging core competencies and rich data to operationally transform into a “customer company.”

1. Treat OTT players like inspiration, not competition.

The loss of revenues telcos are experiencing is, more often than not, blamed on OTT players. There’s no doubt that services like Apple, Google, Skype and WhatsApp are draining business from the industry, but that doesn’t mean that the answer is to aggressively defend market positions, or turn the other way and pretend they don’t exist.

Ovum’s telco operations analyst and report author Adaora Okeleke suggests using them as inspiration. “Telcos could feasibly play a role as service enablers, but they first need to adopt the leaner structures of OTT players such as Google,” she said in a statement. “By partnering with application developers and allowing them to use their secure platforms for service delivery, telcos will be able to drive innovation and reduce time-to-market.”

As my colleague, Steve Hateley, recently wrote, another option is to try new pricing structures that OTT players can’t give to customers. Some CSPs are experimenting with unlimited bundles, as opposed to reversed, limited bundles. There are also potential strategic alliances that could be built between CSPs and OTT providers that benefit everybody. After all, OTT players still depend on the network infrastructure that CSPs provide.

2. Create more efficient operations.

By invoking the “leaner structures” of Google, Okeleke acknowledges that there are inefficiencies in the current telco business model. But it doesn’t take too much digging to discover that this is a common sentiment.

As an example, many CSPs have more than one mediation and / or provisioning platform, which can end up producing redundancies and slow, error-filled service roll-outs. OSS consolidation may seem intimidating, but the rewards are worth it – by consolidating five systems into a single Comptel Convergent Mediation platform, for example, one CSP recently reduced operational costs by up to 30 percent.

Additionally, having a central solution for their increasing amount of network, service and other data allows CSPs to more effectively apply contextual intelligence to overcome their business challenges associated with better customer understanding.

The Future of Telco

There’s no doubt that things in the telecommunications industry are getting shaken up, but new technologies can offer a host of opportunities for CSPs just as old revenue and business models continue to decline. Comptel is working hard to provide those solutions to the telco industry, and we’re excited for the future, because those solutions mean a better experience for customers and better operations for CSPs.

Comptel Recognised by Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific as Most Innovative Telecom OSS / BSS Vendor of the Year

Comptel is pleased to announce that Frost & Sullivan has named it the Most Innovative Telecom OSS / BSS Vendor of the Year. The analyst firm’s annual Asia Pacific ICT awards program is given to companies that displayed growth in performance and groundbreaking achievements. In addition to those metrics, Frost & Sullivan examined nominees’ major customer acquisitions, portfolio diversity and product innovation.

Kari Jokela, vice president, Asia Pacific, was on tap to receive the award in a ceremony at the St. Regis in Singapore.

Specifically, Comptel Social Links, which was introduced to the APAC market and globally in 2012 following the acquisition of Xtract, has been key to our continuing innovation in the market and raising the bar when it comes to customer experience management. The integration of the advanced predictive analytics technology into our proven mediation and fulfillment software platform has challenged the traditional OSS / BSS approach, and allowed communications service providers to integrate their sales, technology and marketing organisations, and transform their Big Data into big opportunities. This has placed us in a unique position in the market.

We are honored to receive this award, because it shows that Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific believes in our Event – Analysis – Action strategic framework. We know that our customers and partners not just on the continent but also worldwide share our belief in that strategy, too, and are realising the powerful impact that automated decision-making and customer interaction can have on their businesses.

We would also like to take the opportunity to congratulate our customer Robi Axiata Limited, who were named Emerging Market Service Provider of the Year during the awards ceremony.

Thank you, and there are plenty of more exciting things to come in 2013 and beyond!

What Technologies Are Impacting Policy Management?

I was recently talking about policy management with my colleague, Ulla Koivukoski, and started thinking about how far we’ve come and how it will continue to evolve. All of the new and advanced technologies that have been introduced in the past couple of years are having a big influence on this, and will continue to shape how communications service providers (CSPs) utilise policy management capabilities.

One of the most prominent of these technologies is 4G/LTE. Because LTE enables faster data speeds, customers will inevitably want to consume more and more data. CSPs who can gain deeper insight into such data usage will have a clear advantage. For policy management specifically, this means the ability to provide different packages with different rating models that are unique to customers’ behaviours. It also means implementing bandwidth or data caps in certain instances– otherwise, we’d use all of our network capacity!

Adding to this, it’s crucial for CSPs to identify the impact of down throttling on individual customers who are likely to churn and/or cause a revenue loss. For example, if customers experience poor quality of service (QoS), CSPs need to be able to proactively offer them a higher bandwidth or data package. In this way, the risk for revenue loss and customer churn can be mitigated while simultaneously improving QoS for the right customers. Further, a predictive analytics engine can suggest which customers will be most valuable for CSPs based on pre-defined Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and which customers desire a corrective action to keep them on-board (e.g. a dedicated bandwidth prioritisation).

CSPs also can benefit by tightly coupling policy control with real-time charging. Like our recent consumer research demonstrated, financial considerations like personalised product/service promotions can influence customer behaviour. So, if CSPs can not only dynamically control the packages that are being delivered to customers and how, but also competitively price their offerings, they can increase the amount customers are willing to spend and maximise their revenue.

Linked closely with this is big data, which is giving CSPs a huge opportunity to add value. To tap into the power of big data, CSPs must first sift through and analyse the immense data volumes, both structured and unstructured, to get complete views of their customers. With this, CSPs can offer new services and bundles to customers with both efficiency and rapid time-to-market. Adding to this, a combination of advanced analytics and mediation enables CSPs to begin use cases like proactive broadband upsell for customers based on the prediction of their changed usage pattern, premium user identification, and automatically approaching customers with the right offer, in the right context.

Another technology making an impact on policy management—and one that goes hand in hand with big data—is the cloud. More and more, the cloud is one of the best options for storing and processing data. It allows for offline processing and the ability to trigger information online, to achieve real-time, personalised campaigns. Latency and security threats remain a concern, but if these can be managed properly, then I see policy making a big shift to the cloud.

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg – there are many more advancements being made every day. As our world and the technologies in it continue to evolve, I look forward to seeing how policy management will grow and change to drive a better, more efficient customer experience.

The Big Data Phenomenon

When the Big Data buzz started to surface a few years ago, my first thoughts were “what’s the big fuss about this?” Many of the use cases were very simple compared to what Comptel has being doing for its customers already for decades. Data aggregation and advanced analytics is already a combination Comptel is used to.

Maybe the reason was that they were new to businesses outside the Telco world, where massive amounts of events go through very complex real-time processing for enterprise scale systems that are not able to cope with such tremendous amounts of data. Traditional data warehouse systems are ill-equipped and very cost- inefficient to handle such systems.

Comptel’s bread and butter in Mediation business has always been in doing complex things with high-volume, real-time requirements for enterprise systems that are not able to do that cost efficiently. And lately, as you’ve probably noticed, joining forces with finest quality analytics expertise we are already tackling the problem of big data quite adequately!

Even today, in terms of web scale data processing needs, Comptel is in the same league with the big players. Twitter’s data volumes and processing complexity look like  a small-scale operation compared to what Comptel does with its real-time event processing engine. On top of that, every single event is potentially related to billable items, which brings the accuracy and auditing requirements to a completely different level.

Why, then, the sudden, booming buzz around Big Data? The answer: the growing behavioral data volumes, and analyzing them.

Promise of Big Data

There are numerous drivers that have created both the need and the opportunity for big data.

•    Improved customer experience and contextual intelligence by connecting emotionally with the customers at the right time
•    Cloud computing and improvement of cost-performance ratio of computation and storage
•    Smartphone and mobile apps phenomenon creating more data that can be turned to information
•    Ubiquitousness of social media where the users are creating content that can be turned to information
•    Advanced analytics reaching the level of Artificial Intelligence

Lots of seemingly unrelated, already over-repeated buzzwords. “Is this guy trying to bore me to death”, you might ask. Well, yes I am, but that’s not the point here.

What is really going on here is, of course, is the ability to offer previously unseen levels of personalized services at very low costs. This is achieved with the next level of automation – the automation of decision making. The promise is the same as with the previous automation cycles:
Increased throughput or productivity.
Improved quality or increased predictability of quality.
Improved robustness (consistency), of processes or product.

Looking back a couple of centuries, the first automation wave concentrated on manufacturing and hard labour, moving then to automation of simple services, like telephone switches and bank clerks. Similar examples within Comptel include, telecom network engineers who manually activated new subscribers, or invoicing accountants reading the impulse meter counters, calculating the difference and creating invoices out of that. And now, decision- making is the next in line.

Advances in the cost of computing, smartphones, apps and cloud together have created an enabler of completely new types of services, and lowered the barrier to business entrance. With smartphones and app stores, anyone can theoretically create a service that can reach a billion paying customers. Cloud IaaS providers like Amazon EC2 make sure that your entry barrier is low, but your service can rapidly scale with the growth of your business.

With the massive scale of software deployment in mobile world (‘billion downloads of Angry Birds already in 2012!‘, ‘’Temple Run 2′ was downloaded 50 million times in less than two weeks’), it is actually a very valid revenue generation model to give the software for free, and then exploiting  upsell (freemium model) or advertising as the source of income. Average revenue per Facebook user is $4.34 (2011) – without the user paying anything directly to Facebook. To further optimize the revenue, customer behavior analysis is required to figure out the optimal prices, and optimal contextual timing of offers – the right offer at the right time.

The real game changer is, that for the first time ever, usage and behavioral data is available on a scientifically quantifiable, individual, very granular level – and customers give the information willingly. This makes it possible to analyze individual behavior and give personalized services based on what the individual really wants. Having Intelligence at every touchpoint creates an emotional connection for the customer, and a feeling of being cared for has a strong influence on customer loyalty. Many are willing to switch to a service provider who offers this kind of  personalized service, even at a higher cost.

Mr. Orwell might have a say on this kind of intelligence, though. With such a dramatic shift in data exploitation and deducing capabilities, it is a very welcome fact that privacy laws and regulations exist.

But, it doesn’t end there. Combining the behavioral predictions with IT and network topology and capabilities, it is possible to automate the configuration and management of the whole service platform. Imagine automated capacity balancing across data centers within a country, continent, or even the globe, according to usage, weather etc predictions. Predictions of the capacity growth could trigger automatic network and hardware expansions using an intelligent Fulfillment solution, including Resource Inventory, and Order Management. Software Defined Networking is a very interesting ingredient in all this, allowing new dynamics into network configuration, together with software.

Soon, the entire component building – device assembly – delivery – installation – configuration supply chain could be completely automated without any human intervention.

Welcome, Skynet!

Comptel For Big Data

In all this, Comptel is in a very unique position.
1.    With Comptel’s massive experience in data stream shaping – processing, enriching, aggregating and correlating massive amounts of structured and unstructured data in an efficient way – together into meaningful business value creating scalable, real-time, actionable insights out of Big Data is business as usual for us, with the standard analytics toolset carried out by typical Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence tools.
2.    With the world class predictive analytics algorithms of Comptel Social Links, Comptel can create very accurate, actionable predictions on individual subscribers with the data already flowing through the Comptel EventLink platform. This saves an enormous amount of time and effort by reducing the integration cost. As anyone involved with mediation or data warehousing projects can tell, the cost of integrating data to a single place is very high. To support fast, easy and cost-efficient integration, Comptel Social Links includes a suite of ready-made and productized use cases, which utilize Social Network Analytics and machine learning for predicting customer attributes and behavior, and for automatically optimizing decisions in  both customer and network facing business systems.
3.    The Comptel Fulfillment product suite is already geared towards automated, data-driven process execution. The  fundamental thought behind Catalog and Inventory driven Order Management is, that instead of using static process definitions, let the software figure out what is the optimal way of fulfilling the order. Therefore, it is possible to introduce predictive analytics based on service and product usage trends, such as order periodization and execution optimization and hardware capacity management.
4.    Using the insights from the usage and network quality data, combined with the understanding of the network capacities, Comptel can control the perceived network quality through Predictive Policy Control and analyzing other quality of service data. The predictive control can be used to, for example, to temporarily provide exceptional QoE for customers with high expected future value, when the customer needs it most to optimize the revenue within a system of  limited network resources.

Juhana Enqvist is Chief Architect at Comptel

Counting Down to AfricaCom 2012

Working in marketing, I am constantly trying to identify which conferences are the right fit for showcasing various products and solutions. While conducting these searches, Comptel, like other practical companies, often finds itself targeting the fastest growing market: Africa. It may come as no surprise, then, that Comptel will have a stand at the 15th annual AfricaCom conference taking place 13-15 November in Cape Town. This year’s thought-provoking programme promises to reflect Africa’s potential to influence a market already filled with vibrant new dynamics.

At the show, we will have a dedicated team of experts on-site that are happy to speak with communications service providers (CSPs) about the true value we can bring to their business by driving innovation and growing lifetime value through real-time, personalised customer engagement.  The Comptel team is looking forward to demonstrating how to reduce churn by transforming data into actionable intelligence. Acting on this intelligence, in addition to maximising customer lifetime value, helps CSPs distinguish themselves amidst a competitive market. The company will also discuss how to achieve accelerated and accurate advanced service deployments to enhance customer satisfaction, loyalty and their propensity to spend.

Will you also be attending the conference? If so, be sure to stop by Comptel’s stand, #C05, to find out how the right integrated mediation, policy control, charging, service fulfilment and predictive social analytics capabilities can deliver a fresh approach to telecommunications business for greater profitability.

To set up a meeting in advance, please contact [email protected]. Looking forward to seeing you in Cape Town!

Q3 2012: An Update on Comptel’s Business and Strategy

Last week, we announced Comptel’s financials for the third quarter of 2012, which proved that our earlier focus on cost containment is quickly showing results. This quarter was ripe with strong sales, bringing the company back to profitability, and I am very pleased to show revenue growth in all of Comptel’s areas of business.

We won two significant projects from South America – one is outside of our traditional domain, from a Brasilian utility company that purchased Comptel Fulfillment, and the other is with Telefonica Argentina that continued to consolidate its mediation systems with Comptel. Reinforcing our position as a powerful analytics vendor, we also closed a Comptel Social Links deal with a prominent operator group in the Middle East. In addition, there was a considerably large sized managed service deal, and a few larger upgrades of Comptel Mediation and Comptel Fulfillment contracts from existing customers.

As anticipated, the operating result for the third quarter was positive. We met the cost-savings targets set in June, and the cost level for this quarter was significantly lower compared to the first half of the year. Now, it is time to move forward following the regrettable personnel-related efficiency measure we completed during the quarter and continue the execution of our strategy. We’re confident that we’re moving in the right direction and are further improving the integration of our analytics capabilities and striving to deliver on our corporate values.

One of our goals is to become the leader in customer interaction automation for telecommunications, and we’re also looking to expand this outside of our traditional domain. This will ultimately have an impact on our sales and marketing strategy, which will both be aligned with the approach, as the role of our partners will become even more important. In order to implement the new sales and marketing approach, we decided to build a strong team of sales executives, headed by the newly established role of Chief Market Operations Officer (CMO), who will take the lead in this transformation. At the same time, we also simplified our Executive Board to ensure the organisation is as efficient as possible and can successfully execute the strategy.

Overall, the third quarter of 2012 has been quite busy. Maybe the best way to sum up this quarter is to simply reiterate how I concluded the last quarter: I’m honoured to convey, on behalf of Comptel, that we are looking forward to continuing to deliver on our promises to the market in the fourth quarter of 2012.