Oracle Lists Benefit of Big Data for Businesses

Oracle has listed the benefit of using big data as a business solution in the telecommunication sector.

Speaking in Lagos, at a forum on ‘Big Data’, Adebayo Sanni, Nigeria’s country director of Oracle, said that with a growing increase in consumption of data rich content by consumers across all devices, ‘big data’ serves as a viable solution to bridge the demand-supply gap.

He added that increased customer expectations further aided complexities for communications service providers in terms of customer service, billing, complaints handling and marketing as well as in the technical challenge of being able to switch on services or roll out new offers and tariffs quickly and effectively.

According to him, the sophistication of mobile and broadband Internet networks meant they were perfect for embracing big data for their own advancement.

They were able to carry intelligence data on performance and demand through networks, which were designed and exist only to convey data.

He noted that as telecommunications companies faced up to a future of voracious bandwidth demand and highly discerning – and vocal – customers, big data therefore offered one of the very best tools to plan and maintain networks.

Sanni pointed out that big data would ensure that operators were optimising their network resources and responding to customer requirements in a way that would both improve bottom line and enhance the customer experience.

He noted that the insights into our behaviour that big data analysis brought about provided a clear benchmark against which fraudulent activity can be rapidly identified and shut down. 

“One example of how location-based data is making a major difference is where mobile operators are looking to invest in their networks. Operators typically want to make that investment either where it is needed, such as increasing or introducing mobile network coverage in an area which is poorly served, or where that investment will be most appreciated and most popular with profitable customers.

“Typically this will be in a city location with a rapidly expanding population of increasingly mobile data-hungry workers. It will not necessarily be where those individuals live, so simply checking a relational database of the most profitable customers against the addresses their bills are sent to, won’t be enough.

“Mobile data usage needs to be measured in the locations where the data is consumed, in real time at velocity, not retrospectively at the end of the billing period.

“For operators, this may mean determining where their most profitable customers are when they are most active and where clusters of good customers may be putting a strain on the current network infrastructure due to increased data consumption.

“Big data can also activate other technologies such as automated menu screens for call centres, so once a problem is recognised in certain areas, calls from those areas are met with a message informing them the fault is being dealt with.

“This can save customers time spent sitting on the phone and can save companies money in terms of reducing call handling in the call centre,”a he said.