Putting the subscriber at the heart of a company’s strategy is a concept with the air of a public relations pitch. But when your job is managing subscriber data, like Apertio’s, the concept earns you 140 million Euros and the chance to expand your business beyond the Home Location Registry.
Nokia Siemens Networks’ acquisition of Apertio closed last month and with it closed the book on certain aspects of the merged giant’s IMS portfolio; the company is standardizing on Apertio subscriber databases instead.
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What are the most relevant convergence issues for your organization over the next 12 to 24 months? |
With it, too, may close the book on the idea of standalone subscriber databases such as the Home Location Registry (HLR) and Home Subscriber Server (HSS). Nokia Siemens sees more potential in making Apertio into an open database that supports several systems and applications, including the HSS.
"Technology-wise, Apertio is more open and had advantages in time-to-market. But more important is that it is not just an HLR, but also a good platform for what the next-generation network needs," says Michael Clever, head of next-generation voice and multimedia at Nokia Siemens.
What the NGN needs is databases with open architectures and interfaces that lead the industry not only into HLRs and HSSs, but into new areas of taking advantage of subscriber data, Clever says.
As a separate business unit within Nokia Siemens, Apertio will provide a strategic platform in the next-generation architecture for Nokia Siemens Networks’ portfolio. It will be a business unit focused on subscriber data. The two-year relationship between Apertio and Nokia Siemens could have resulted in an OEM relationship, but Clever says it would be very difficult to handle the complex interactions through an OEM.
"Apertio has a time-to-market advantage and we don’t want to lose momentum because of integration work," Clever says. "Besides, customers were pushing us in this direction."
So, too, is the competition. Although it doesn’t have a market share to speak of yet, a startup called Xeround out of Israel announced the general availability of its new distributed data management system in January. The Xeround Sound platform also began as a core IMS function such as an HLR or HSS. However, Charlotte Yarkoni, CEO of Xeround, says subscriber centricity goes beyond that.
"It is less about supporting specific elements in the network and more about being able to work in an overall heterogeneous ecosystem and support a variety of elements," Yarkoni says.
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Do you have plans to centralize subscriber information from across the business into a single repository? |
Xeround Sound is a distributed data management system specifically tuned for the subscriber-centric and real-time transactions of next-generation networks and business support systems. It also features native support for both SQL and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) interfaces.
"A lot of database solutions work natively with one of those protocols in their stack, but we are one of the few, if not the only one, who can support both natively," Yarkoni says.
Xeround also subjected its product to the Nokia Network Database Benchmark (NDB) to validate the product’s performance and ability to scale successfully to 100 million subscribers across forty servers.
On its own, Apertio already was developing relationships to simplify the integration of applications for fixed and mobile service providers using its subscriber network database. The company collaborated with Veraz Networks on a joint solution, which they have deployed in Amdocs’ interoperability lab as part of an IMS reference model.
"We are creating an end-to-end IMS solution that specifically addresses the problems of migration of existing networks towards IMS and the new applications," says Francesca Puggioni, head of corporate business development at Veraz.
All of this activity is around IMS, but driving it is the desire to make all subscriber data work to the service providers’ advantage.
In a series of studies over the last year on subscriber intelligence and data consolidation — the former not being a comment on customer IQs but on gathering and using intelligence about the customer — Apertio found that 62 percent of the 74 global operators it surveyed planned to consolidate their stores of customer data in order to exploit real-time services. Sixty-seven percent identified personalized services as key opportunities presented from the access to customer data.
All respondents described convergence and subscriber intelligence as being critical for customer-centric service delivery. The survey shows that operators clearly plan to monetize data once it is consolidated. The director-level marketing and technology representatives in the survey indicated they plan to consolidate subscriber data to derive customer profiles that will drive personalized, dynamic services. In fact, 62 percent of those surveyed say that in the next 12 to 24 months, they will begin consolidating their data.
"Respondents realize that profiling of travel patterns, channel preferences, keywords used, spending habits and even presence data will have to be used to create ‘customer profiles’ for highly personalized services," says Rick Halton, director of directory product line management at Apertio.
Halton says 76 percent of respondents saw customer profiling as the most relevant area for subscriber intelligence strategies going forward.
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Has your organization moved to a more subscriber-based delivery model over the past 12 months? |
More than 50 percent of those surveyed indicated all aspects of subscriber management, apart from roaming services, would be relevant to subscriber intelligence. The most relevant areas are profiling customer behavior; management of identities — particularly where numerous services bind third-party offerings; and service personalization.
At the top of the list for priorities in the world of convergence was the ability to deliver value-added services, followed closely by subscriber data management, which may indicate that service providers are only anxious to get their hands on and minds around customer usage and behavior because it will lead to more useful and profitable services.
Although operators understand they must leverage real-time information, most concede that real-time services will stretch the capabilities of their existing networks, as well as CRM, billing and operations support systems. For that reason, these support systems will have to go beyond their historic, time-delayed data management styles to handle real-time, dynamic information. So, too, will the databases.
"We have this vision of 5 billion subscribers connected to the telecom world in 2015, and most of those, we believe, will be mobile subscribers. But all of them will have some subscriber-related data in the network," Clever says. "Today it is sitting in some switch or HLR somewhere, but over the next five or 10 years, it all will have moved to NGN systems. With Apertio, we now have the basic technology and means to support it."
When it comes to supporting the customers, it becomes a whole new challenge. Service providers said in the survey that the costs associated with servicing and maintaining customers need to be streamlined. According to Halton, operators pay as much as $9 per customer for every call to a call center.
"In managing churn reactively, operators incur enormous costs," Halton says.
Considering technology’s impact on the end user sometimes goes overlooked, it is good to know that when it comes to IMS, the people in the network and the OSS/BSS segments are working together. In addition to Veraz and Apertio working with Amdocs in its lab, Amdocs along with HP and other OSS/BSS vendors joined the IMS Forum’s Plugfest to begin testing interoperability at the software layer. The plugfest took place in February at the University of New Hampshire’s Interoperability Lab.
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Links |
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Apertio www.apertio.com |
