Leftover Data: Trash Or Treasure?
In today’s digital world, there always are bits of data that get left on communications providers’ networks. Tuning to a video event creates data. Placing a phone call creates data. Making an online purchase creates data. Rather than sending this data to the digital trash bin, some companies are finding more lucrative uses for it.
Openet, a company that earned its bread and butter handling transactions for mobile operators, is finding a side business in subscriber data management (SDM). At the recent Cable Show in Los Angeles, Openet participated in the new CIO.IT track called "Know Thy Customer: Analyzing & Managing Subscriber Data." Michael Manzo, chief marketing officer at Openet, delivered a case study from a large North American cable operator that uses Openet’s subscriber data management (SDM) software. (For the presentation, click here).
Openet’s SDM solution is an umbrella architecture that enables a wide array of subordinate business intelligence and analytics solutions. The SDM is architected to work with legacy infrastructures to aggregate, normalize, cleanse and warehouses subscriber data from back-office systems and service-consumption data from network infrastructure.
Besides having a singular view across internal departments, SDM offers a singular view across siloed services: voice, data, and video. And third-party data from companies like Experian and Claritas also can be overlaid.
Other potential uses include targeted advertising, dynamic pricing, service entitlements, authentications and parental controls. Additionally, operators can aggregate subscriber data into a dynamic subscriber profile to manage identity, subscriber-entitlement and service-usage rules across all services and networks while “anonymizing” this data to protect consumer privacy.
Although Openet can’t name the cable operator that’s using its SDM, Manzo said, "This is real. It’s not academic. This has been built and deployed."
Manzo also noted the operator is using the data in a variety of ways. For marketing purposes, "they can stop giving promotions for things customers have already got," he said. "For audience measurement, they are getting a clearer picture than what Nielsen’s telling them."
The data also can be mined for network planning to determine where the plant either is over or under capacity. And the billing department can use the data to detect non-paid services, also known as revenue leakage. "Until now, most cable operators would have solved each of these problems with an independent solution and not have a singular view," said Manzo.
-CT Staff