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A Ventraq/Teradata solution delivers the right information to communication service providers, faster.
by Lori Janies
All businesses need access to timely, accurate and relevant information. For the telco industry, gleaning that information from the massive volumes of data generated by a wide array of sources can be daunting. Ventraq’s Business Integration Appliance Services (BIAS) framework, running on a data warehouse from Teradata, is a solution tailored to communication service providers (CSPs). BIAS provides quick and easy access to detailed, actionable data gathered from disparate enterprise data sources.
Achieve lasting results
To highlight how the solution works, consider a Tier 1 CSP that sells some of its services to another carrier. As a Tier 1 CSP, its business is one of the largest in terms of subscribers, coverage area and services provided. Hence, the volume of data collected, stored and analyzed is significant.
The service level agreement (SLA) stipulates that the carrier’s bill must be verifiably accurate within 1% of the total invoice amount. Proving this level of accuracy involves extracting data from a large volume of network switch records, analyzing it and creating a detailed custom report.
Before the Ventraq/Teradata solution was implemented, this CSP would hire an external telco cost-auditing firm to gather the required data and verify the data integrity. The data would then be turned over to an analyst at the CSP to be further verified, synthesized, formatted and ultimately incorporated into the final report.
The process was labor- and cost-intensive, and compiling the report took an entire quarter. Additionally, it was not easy to see how results were derived or trace where data had come from.
With the Ventraq/Teradata solution, the process is much simpler, faster and less expensive. In about three months—the same amount of time required to complete one report-generation cycle—the CSP configured the Ventraq BIAS platform with the appropriate business rules to automatically gather and synthesize the network switch records daily and store the relevant data in the data warehouse until needed.
The solution has enabled the CSP to realize enormous time and cost savings; the organization no longer needs the external auditing firm because an in-house analyst can generate the report in just a few minutes, and at a consistent 99.5% accuracy—a level the old report could never have met. Additionally, the solution enables complete data transparency for both consumers and regulatory agencies.
Speed and scalability
Using the high-speed power of a data warehouse from Teradata, BIAS enables CSPs to collect and analyze event and event-related data from multiple network, business and operational sources. The huge amounts of information come from call detail records, provisioning, billing and invoice, as well as facilities and inventory data. Switch, trunk and network information, rates, number portability, customer information, and manufacturer’s handset are contributors of industry reference data.
The highly scalable BIAS solution takes advantage of Teradata’s massively parallel processing approach for broader and exponentially faster query, data loading and processing capabilities. Users can access a large number of ad hoc, on-demand reports. With these in hand, company leaders can gain actionable insight that sets them on the path toward corrective or proactive customer and product management.
CSPs can realize multiple benefits from implementing the combined Ventraq/Teradata solution:
- Maximize profits and reduce churn by pinpointing why a product is underperforming or exceeding expectations.
- Maximize revenue by improving intercarrier data management and identifying revenue leakage with continual assessment and validation.
- Minimize costs by analyzing inventory, provisioning, switch and billing activities against usage and facilities invoices and contracts in order to uncover circuit and switched access cost issues.
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Solution components
Ventraq BIAS is the framework on which the Ventraq Business Analytics suite of solutions is based. From this single platform, and leveraging a single source of integrated data, a wealth of individual applications can be generated for users throughout the enterprise.
The BIAS platform is optimized to perform its high-volume analytical tasks within the Teradata Database to improve speed, ensure data accuracy, eliminate data redundancy and enable on-demand reporting. BIAS components include:
- Application/client server. A suite of analytical applications spanning network, finance, marketing, billing and operational requirements. Desktop and Web-based user interfaces are supported.
- Platform server. The complete data processing and management solution supports a centralized and distributed architecture as well as both Ventraq and third-party applications.
Running on the BIAS framework are numerous solutions provided by the Ventraq Business Analytics suite. They are available within these analytics categories:
- Financial
- Operational
- Subscriber
- Data management
An assortment of solutions is provided for CSPs, such as customer behavior analytics, mobile Web, interconnect bill management, data integration and management, revenue intelligence, network cost, and customer experience management.
Scale forward
The Ventraq/Teradata solution is highly scalable and so may be easily applied to business problems across departments and throughout the enterprise. This scalability can improve an organization’s competitiveness, efficiency and productivity into the future.
Lori Janies writes about business and technology for various publications.