Partnership integrates network, customer data for telecommunications industry

Agilent Technologies and Teradata have announced 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 from local and regional levels to national and multinational levels. This claims to be the first partnership of this kind in the telecommunications industry.

The jointly developed solution will deliver a 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 market-leading 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.

"Signalling 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 companies will sell and distribute the new solution beginning in the third quarter of 2007 and will support the platform with professional and customer services.