Getting to know you: Business intelligence goes mainstream for telcos

Access is the key to accelerating the use of business intelligence in the telecom space and in any competitive business environment. Gathering, sorting, manipulating, correlating and reporting technologies could be the best available, but if the necessary people can't access the data whenever and from wherever they want, the technology is irrelevant.

Business Objects has been providing business intelligence solutions since 1991, touting access to that intelligence as a key feature. The company's main end-user products, BusinessObjects and WebIntelligence, give end users access to reports and query capabilities through a client/server environment or the Internet.

The company also offers BusinessMiner, which provides end users with data mining capabilities. "Businesses that track demographic data such as age, sex, marital status, income and purchase decisions can identify influences on product purchasing," said Sandra DeRodeff, director of telecom marketing for Business Objects.

The SetAnalyzer tool lets service providers and enterprise customers segment their customers based on various criteria. "This is particularly useful for companies that have large customer databases," DeRodeff said.

And that means service providers.

"Telecom is one of the most customer-centric industries we face today. It has some of the most extensive databases in terms of customer information and activity," said Bob Moran, managing vice president of decision support research for The Aberdeen Group. "It is fairly well understood that analysis can help such institutions grasp where their vulnerabilities are and predict what could lessen those vulnerabilities."

The company has licensed its software to AT&T, Global One, U S West Wireless and some RBOCs.

"Global One allows users such as corporate executives to get major corporate account billing data, traffic usage and configuration data over either an extranet or through the Internet," DeRodeff said.

The BusinessObjects product serves the intranet and extranet environments with a suite of tools for integrated query, reporting and online analytical processing that run on top of databases and applications. The Internet option is enabled through WebIntelligence.

"The Internet is being used more and more with WebIntelligence. It really makes using the tool very easy because everyone knows how to use a browser," said Nicolas Bontron, product marketing manager for Business Objects.

To extend access for its 1.6 million users, Business Objects has developed a wireless version of WebIntelligence to support emerging wireless technologies and devices that use the Wireless Application Protocol.

"Wireless is important because it becomes a mechanism that a company can [use to] communicate with business people and consumers about activities taking place that are relevant to them," Moran said. "It is so important that all of the tools on the reporting side will have to have it."

Opening reports via the wireless Web may extend the product to new sets of users. "Initially, a lot of analysis was in the marketing department from the [customer relationship management] perspective. We are seeing it move out to where the network [technicians] are tracking repair and outage information to improve meantime to repair," DeRodeff said.

"It's not just power users anymore; it is going mainstream," Bontron said. "As we saw with WebIntelligence, companies were at first using it [exclusively] in an intranet environment. In the last two years they have opened it up to extranets. We see that evolving in the wireless world as well." An increasingly important market focus for both versions of WebIntelligence is in network applications used by operations centers and field technicians.

"We have an implementation with one of the major RBOCs. Their network organization is opening their databases to construction, assignment and other workforces," DeRodeff said. "There are over 3000 metrics that need to be pulled into the network organizations - all from different databases."

Service providers are deploying business intelligence solutions to retain customer loyalty through improved customer support.

"The ideal circumstance is to be able to analyze the database and either act automatically or deliver reports about activity within the telecom world," Moran said.