HP scours treasure trove of customer data

Like the volumes of books in the aisles of the Library of Congress that go unread, service providers have volumes upon volumes of data about their customers that go unmined. HP says this is bad for business in two ways: missed opportunities for new revenue and undetected fraud. To that end, this week the company launched its HP CentralView business software solutions.

HP's suite of products — some new and some not so new — are aimed at communications, media and entertainment companies, the new sweet spot for operations and business support system vendors. Some products give a single, intelligent view of all customer-related data, while others provide the monitoring and analysis tools for transforming that data into actionable business information. They help make decisions about new service opportunities, customer retention, customer credit risks, fraud detection and management, and revenue assurance.

“The communications market is very data-rich. It has millions of subscribers generating lots of transactions every day that result in call detail records. There's no shortage of information about the customer,” said Bill Zimmer, solution manager of the BSS portfolio for HP Communications, Media & Entertainment. “It is just spread everywhere in multiple systems, usually in silos. Our customers can benefit from getting this information centralized.”

Karl Whitelock, senior consulting analyst for Stratecast, said a consolidated view that distills massive amounts of customer-centric data can enhance the speed and quality of a company's decision-making and its ability to win in the market.

One of the new products is HP Neoview, an enterprise data warehouse platform that works with existing solutions such as Credit Risk Control, Customer Retention Maximization, Dealer Performance Audit, Fraud Risk Management, Revenue Leakage Control, Subscription Fraud Prevention and Video Usage Insight. Vodafone Portugal said last month it will deploy HP's Fraud Management System.

The portfolio also incorporates technology from partners such as Oracle, SPSS and Business Objects.