Sandvine adds data analytics capabilities

Sandvine, best known for its deep packet inspection technology and solutions for managing network traffic congestion, today released a new data analytics platform that will help service providers answer core questions about their businesses to better address new service opportunities.

The new Sandvine Data Analytics product is based on technology and work done on an ad hoc basis with existing Sandvine customers, which frequently turned to the vendor for help in figuring out specific questions about network usage and customer trends, said Don Bowman, chief technology office for Sandvine.

“This is the result of several years of working with lead customers to answer these types of business intelligence questions,” Bowman said, including questions like how is over-the-top Hulu traffic affecting their video-on-demand business or how are open Wi-Fi networks impacting an operator’s Wi-Fi service revenues, for example.

Sandvine’s platform not only gives the raw data answers to those questions but helps to “put that information into commercial context,” Bowman said, making the tool usable not only by network admins, but marketing and product managers as well.

To make these capabilities available as a turnkey product, Sandvine made user interface improvements to the reporting tool and packaged up in templates many of the typical questions a service provider might ask. It also simplified how to make new requests for data collection or create new report queries – steps that take hours with the new platform versus days or weeks starting from scratch. It is also offering a managed service version of the platform if operators need extra help, he said.

The solution sports an open architecture that can both pull in complementary data from other systems and databases as well as integrate with policy servers, billing systems and other elements to deliver specific actions based on the analysis, Bowman said.
Sandvine is rolling out the product at this week’s The Cable Show, targeting its strong MSO customer base. It is already deployed in beta with lead customers and will be generally available starting in July, Bowman said.

Beyond cable and telco video applications, Sandvine expects the solution to be particularly suited to mobile operators, whose data businesses are typically exploding, albeit in many ways not necessarily anticipated. Analysis of unexpected usage and trends in mobile, such as the impact of new tablet computers like the iPad, is a perfect use case to help service providers separate what they think is happening on their network from what really is happening, Bowman said.

“We’ve been less and less focused on core congestion management for several years now and focused more and more on network policy for service creation, measurement and understanding service trends,” Bowman said.