Agilent Technologies and Teradata, a division of NCR, have signed a partnership to provide business intelligence (BI) for the telecommunications industry by integrating network operational and financial data with customer information.
The solution, called assureME Intelligence, scales seamlessly from local and regional levels to national and multinational levels. This is a partnership of this kind in the telecommunications industry.
The jointly developed solution will deliver a truly scalable BI platform while providing near real-time intelligence, an integrated view of voice, data and content, and information about a network's quality of service by subscriber.
All of this data can be rolled up into a single view of global telecommunications operations.
"With this solution, telecommunications providers can become more customer-centric and make more insightful decisions," said Neil Haydon, worldwide marketing manager of Agilent's Assurance Solutions Division.
"Given this ability to enable the integration of network data with customer data, carriers can layer additional data from other functions and departments, providing deeper insight into customer and network behaviour."
The joint solution will enable correlation of signalling data from Agilent's probe-based operational support systems (OSS) with information from front and back-office business support systems, such as provisioning, billing and customer relationship management.
This integrated data will offer a breakthrough in customer analytics, driving new insights into customer behaviour, profitability, network operations and their interrelationships.
"Signaling underpins the operations of telecoms networks and services," said Haydon.
"It controls all calls, sessions and services, providing the most complete source of data available to operators. Agilent's industry-leading system delivers a gold mine of mission-critical data that details all aspects of a subscriber's interaction with the network and services, both successful and unsuccessful. This data is instantly at the fingertips of the operator delivering detailed insights into specific customers' service-affecting issues."
The integrated solution is based on Teradata's award-winning enterprise data warehouse (EDW) and Agilent's data acquisition system and analytics.
Both companies will support the solution. The Teradata Warehouse is now the exclusive EDW platform for Agilent Technologies and will replace Agilent's existing OSS data warehouse, thereby delivering a more powerful, scalable and flexible data warehousing solution to telecommunications companies.
"Agilent and Teradata are teaming to provide unchallenged capabilities in customer analytics that will be of great value to our customers," said Darryl McDonald, chief marketing officer, Teradata.
"The power of Teradata's enterprise data warehouse enables network operators to quickly and easily integrate extremely large volumes of data from multiple sources in near real-time. Teradata enables the operators to move from being reactive to proactive in both customer and operational management."
"Our goal is to help telecommunications companies better understand their customers' experience so they can improve it, thus enhancing customer loyalty and addressing one of the industry's biggest challenges -- reducing churn," said Haydon.
Agilent and Teradata plan to develop more applications and analytics aimed at helping carriers lower costs, expand market share, drive up average revenue per user and increase profitability.
Agilent and Teradata will sell and distribute the new solution beginning in the third quarter of 2007 and will support the platform with professional and customer services.