Unlocking the True Potential of Usage DataAmdocs White PaperNovember 2014

With the continued pressure to differentiate and lead in a market suffering from service commoditization and fierce competition, service providers are eager to explore the potential value of big data analytics. Service providers are arguably some of the most data-intensive companies in the world today, with tier 1 service providers already rating, accumulating and storing tens of billions of network events a day. While big data technologies and analytics have found their way into a number of industries and applications, charging and billing systems are a relatively new playing ground, presenting unique challenges.

To truly unlock the potential of usage data leveraging big data technologies and applications, service providers need to tackle several key areas. Firstly, they must determine how to shift from a ‘best effort’ mindset to a ‘save everything’ mindset, where all usage data is stored in its entirety for extended periods of time. Secondly, they must establish how to best manage and expose usage data so that analytical models can be created to reveal value beyond monetizing network services and traffic. Finally, they need to achieve all of this in real time without impacting the performance, security and scalability of some of the most mission-critical systems a service provider manages.

Adopting a big data mindset for usage data

Service providers need to start their journey to big data by implementing big data storage and management solutions into their charging and billing infrastructure. To this end, Amdocs developed and released Amdocs TeraScale, a carrier-grade big data solution, designed to cost efficiently

store, manage and extract real-time charging usage data for analytical use cases. As a leading provider of charging and billing systems, Amdocs is not only well acquainted with the huge amount of usage records and transactions that need to be processed, but also the stringent security, performance and availability requirements demanded by service provider operational environments. With this in mind, the goal with Amdocs TeraScale was to deliver a solution that would not just be enterprise-grade but carrier-grade, delivering the robustness, performance and stability essential to charging and billing systems.

Making big data move quicker

Just as important as the ability to efficiently store big data is the ability to manage it in a way that allows rapidly aggregating and extracting it for business insight and analytics. In the charging domain, we often encounter the term ‘real time’. Customers today expect services to be delivered and systems to react in real time. Take for example, roaming legislation that requires service providers to notify consumers in real time when data charges reach a certain threshold. While business insight tools and data warehouses are certainly capable of providing reports and insight to users, these are usually offline and may sometimes take days before the information is available. In addition, the time and complexity associated with creating new reports, views or data structures can be challenging. Just as service providers will need to adopt a ‘big data mindset’ for storing data, big data solutions may need to adopt a ‘real-time mindset’ when dealing with usage data.

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In terms of usage, this means that big data solutions should be able to receive a real-time stream of usage data directly into storage as it is received from the network – ensuring fresh, up-to-date usage is always available for analysis. Amdocs TeraScale is designed to integrate directly with Amdocs Convergent Charging to ensure this real-time capability. The mechanism that is used to process and rate network events is also used to enrich and upload usage events into Hadoop. This not only ensures data integrity, but also allows simultaneous processing of usage data for both traditional storage and big data. The result is that Amdocs TeraScale can be implemented without any disruption or impact on existing charging processes.

To speed time to value, usage data will also need to be made available quickly to data scientists. Such information will enable the use of analytical applications to discover valuable trends, patterns and predictors amongst the plethora of usage details. Amdocs TeraScale achieves this by providing optimized extracts and queries for analytics applications. These include efficient batch extracts for the exploration of very large data sets, continuous data retrieval optimized for low latency, near real-time response and the ability to run ad-hoc drilldown queries at any level of detail.

Pursuing maximum value

Network events in their most basic form are already used to carry out a number of useful analytical tasks, such as network monitoring, congestion tracking and call dropouts. By combining raw network data with the actual subscriber profile, pricing and offer information, we create an even more valuable data set, which is essentially what usage data is once it has been processed by the charging system. Amdocs’ TeraScale big data solution enables service providers to store and manage vast quantities of usage data over time. Amdocs Charging Business Analytics uncovers the value of usage data with visualization and purpose-designed algorithms to provide insights such as customer churn, thereby identifying user segments based on service consumption, as well as other factors.

Usage data is one of the largest data sets that service providers own. Every time a service is consumed on the network, text is sent, a call is made or applications are used, a usage event record is sent to Amdocs Convergent Charging where it is rated.

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Charging Business Analytics Dashboards

Usage data is valuable for analytics because it is:

• Big – petabytes of information enter the network, where they are ready for analysis

• Fresh – real-time data streaming is crucial when moving to a real-time model due to the necessity to immediately analyze and react

• Granular – provides duration of usage, amount charged and impact on the subscriber’s balance

• Unique – records customer name, device being used and phone number each time a service is used

One of the most valuable applications of usage data is to improve decision making for marketing and business stakeholders within the service provider. Usage data can be utilized to provide value in multiple areas: marketing, based on subscriber consumption behavior; dynamic usage-driven segmentation of customers; and offer optimization, based on consumption behavior. To drive quicker time to value from usage data, Amdocs is investing in developing productize analytic application that leverages the rich, real-time usage data stored and managed by TeraScale.

These applications include:

• Charging Business Analytics Dashboards – real-time interactive dashboards that enable usage-driven business insights with investigation and customer segmentation capabilities

• Prepaid to Postpaid Migration – identifies high-end prepaid subscribers with high probability to migrate to postpaid

• Offer pricing simulation – determines optimal pricing for launched new offers in a rapidly changing market, and anticipates the offer adoption rate and expected revenue

• Rotational churn detection – identifies rotational churn, reduces lost revenue due to rotational churn and increases churn prediction accuracy

• Prepaid churn prediction – identifies prepaid customer probability to churn in highly competitive prepaid markets with price-sensitive customers

About Amdocs

For 30 years, Amdocs has ensured service providers’ success and embraced their biggest challenges. To win in the connected world, service providers rely on Amdocs to simplify the customer experience, harness the data explosion, stay ahead with new services and improve operational efficiency. The global company uniquely combines a market-leading BSS, OSS and network control and optimization product portfolio with value-driven professional services and managed services operations. With revenue of $3.3 billion in fiscal 2013, Amdocs and its more than 20,000 employees serve customers in over 70 countries.

Amdocs: Embrace Challenge, Experience Success. For more information, visit Amdocs at www.amdocs.com

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