ovum decision matrix: selecting a customer analytics

Ovum Decision Matrix: Selecting a Customer Analytics Solution for Telcos, 2017–18

Publication Date: 15 Dec 2017 | Product code: SPT001-000003

Adaora Okeleke


Summary

CatalystDelivering personalized customer experience remains the top business challenge for communications

service providers (CSPs). Ovum's recently published 2018 ICT Enterprise survey saw almost all CSP

IT executives interviewed identify delivering personalized customer experience as one of their three

most important business challenges for the next 18 months. This trend emphasizes the high priority

CSPs place on how customer relationships are managed. However, several factors have an impact on

CSPs' ability to identify and then deliver customers' core needs. These include understanding the data

sets they should focus on; collecting, cleansing, and consolidating these data sets; and having the

right expertise to mine the data sets.

It is in view of these challenges that Ovum has updated its Ovum Decision Matrix focused on

customer analytics solutions sold to the CSP market (first published in September 2015). We sought

to identify how vendors are aligning themselves to meet CSPs' needs and identify how they stack up

against each other in terms of their technology, execution of strategy, and market impact.

Ovum viewTo satisfy CSPs' demand to deliver personalized customer experience, vendors must become

customer centric with respect to their customer engagements, as well as operations (front office and

back office). CSPs need to invest in analytics tools, as well as the data storage and management

tools that enable them to store, combine, and analyze data from both customer and network domains.

These investments are critical to ensuring that CSPs get the right context every time for every form of

interaction – marketing, care, sales, or support – they have with every customer. Consequently,

vendors must identify how to gain access to relevant data sources; how to consolidate, store, and

prepare the data for analysis; develop the right analytical capabilities; and identify how to embed

analytical insights into business operations, channels, and systems.

Therefore, in our assessment of customer analytics solutions targeted at CSPs, we look at the sum-

total of product sets used to deliver customer analytics use cases for the CSP. These product sets

range from the data collection, storage, and management infrastructure, through to the data analytics

and the applications that consume the data insights to support business operations such as

marketing, sales, care, and network operations. We also consider how the vendor executes on its

strategy – solutions need to support varied deployment models, they need to scale to support growing

subscriber numbers, and they need to operate effectively with existing IT infrastructure. Services

capabilities are also considered as CSPs require strong data services expertise to mine their data

assets in a way that helps achieve their business objectives.

Our analysis of vendor solutions reveal that each vendor is evolving their solution to better meet CSP

needs. However, how this is achieved differs based on the focus of each vendor. All vendors are

evolving their solutions to support Hadoop environments. They are also investing in technologies such

as real-time analytics to provide timely insights that support customer engagements. Vendors'

portfolio of analytics applications is growing while preexisting applications are being enhanced. The

telecoms-focused players are evolving the products, features, and services they bring to the market.

Vendors such as Ericsson, Huawei, and Nokia are leveraging their deep network capabilities to

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strengthen their customer analytics offerings. Meanwhile, the pure-play analytics vendors such as

IBM, SAS, and HPE are continuously evolving their offers and enhancing existing capabilities, as well

as adopting capabilities like machine learning to enhance the quality and speed of the insights they

provide.

Demand for customer analytics solutions will be high over the next 12 to 18 months. Telecom

customers' appetite for data services will continue to evolve in-line with the rollout of new digital

services. CSP systems and operations need to be kept updated on customer behavior and

requirements, using insights from analytics tools. Vendors must be ready to provide the right skills,

experience, and evidence of their ability to support CSPs to fulfill their business and operational

objectives.

Key findings The demand for analytics is evolving, driven by the need to deliver personalized customer

experience.

All vendors are evolving their customer analytics solutions to ensure support for Hadoop

environments. CSPs are quickly deploying Hadoop platforms to hold all enterprise, customer,

and network data, with a view to mining these data sets to understand what their customers

are doing, and to react proactively to deliver optimal experiences to them. They are also

investing in developing new analytics applications and advanced technologies such as

machine learning, in order to simplify and automate the processes required to analyze vast

data sets, and utilize insights to deliver personalized services.

Ovum has identified four companies as market leaders: Huawei, IBM, Netcracker, and SAS,

with IBM retaining its position as overall market leader. This group has a rounded set of

offerings which they continue to evolve in-line with market demands. They are leveraging

multiple data sources – structured and unstructured – from both network and customer

domains. They deliver strong analytics functions, perform well with respect to execution of

their strategy, and have demonstrated strong market performance.

Amdocs, Ericsson, HPE, Nokia, and Pegasystems are the market challengers. They come

from a range of backgrounds, with each vendor coming to the market with unique capabilities,

combined with varied levels of telecoms expertise. However, while the depth of their analytics

capabilities continues to evolve to support new use cases, the depth of their analytics

capabilities and the penetration of their analytics solutions within the telecoms market does

not match that of the market leaders.

Vendor solution selection

What is a customer analytics solution?Ovum defines a customer analytics solution as a combination of product suite and associated

services that utilize consolidated data sets relating to a customer's entire lifecycle. For a CSP, these

data sets ideally span the entire customer journey from product research to purchase, and eventual

use of service, up to the point of service renewal or the unpleasant experience of churn. These data

sets will, therefore, cover processes such as customer acquisition to management, through to

retention. For the telecoms sector, given the critical role that the network plays in the services CSPs



deliver, customer analytics solutions will be expected to rely on not just customer-related data sets

from CRM, billing, charging, and ordering systems, but also network data. Network-related data such

as network quality, bit error rate, network speed, and drop call rate will play a critical role in identifying

if a customer chooses to purchase, extend, or end their engagement with a CSP.

Apart from providing the basic business intelligence and analysis functions such as reporting and

monitoring, these tools are expected to provide advanced analytics capabilities such as predictive

analytics and prescriptive analytics. Finally, these solutions need to deliver their analytical insights

either directly to existing business systems such as care and marketing platforms, or to prepackaged

applications designed specifically for the telecoms vertical.

Inclusion criteriaThe following inclusion criteria had to be satisfied by participating vendors:

The vendor's solution must be in commercial use, and have at least one operational CSP

customer.

The vendor's customer analytics solution needs to include prepackaged applications

developed specifically to the telecoms industry.

The vendor's solution needs to leverage data from multiple data sources, using either a

portfolio of telco data adapters or leveraging data held in CSPs' operational data storage

infrastructures (e.g., big data platforms).

The solution must also have a significant level of brand awareness within the telecoms

industry. This assessment is based on market impact and recognition within the telecoms

industry and among peers.

Exclusion criteriaThe criteria for the exclusion of vendor solution in this decision matrix are as follows:

Vendors that deliver analytics platforms without prepackaged applications specific to the

telecoms industry were excluded from this research.

Vendors that provide analytics capabilities utilizing single data sources to provide customer

insights.

Our list of vendor solutions is not exhaustive but is representative of the key players in the

customer analytics space within the telecoms industry. Some vendors we approached were

unable to provide us with the required information during the project timeline, while others

turned down our request to participate in the research.

MethodologyTechnology assessment

For the technology assessment, Ovum has focused on a set of seven criteria we consider most critical

to CSPs for their investments in customer analytics. They also form the core source of differentiation

of vendor offerings. Technology is assessed across these seven categories, each of which has a

maximum score of 10 and is weighted in favor of the market leader in each category.

Prepackaged analytics applications: We have looked at the suite of applications each

vendor provides and the use cases delivered to the telecoms sector. Other factors considered



were the ability of the application to support multiple business users. We have also

considered the availability of tools to develop custom applications as when required by CSPs.

Data sourcing: We assessed the extent to which a vendor's analytics solution is able to

access and analyze varied data sources (e.g., structured and unstructured data, and

streaming data to provide customer insights). We also considered how the vendor gets

access to these sources, either by connecting to a centralized big data store where data from

across the organization is centrally stored and/or using data connectors.

Data management: What data management capabilities does the solution provide (e.g.,

master data management, data modeling, data enrichment, data quality, and metadata

management tools)? These capabilities are critical to ensuring that insights obtained from the

analytics functionalities are accurate.

Advanced analytics: To what extent does the solution support advanced analytics

capabilities such as predictive analytics, customer analytics, text analytics, speech analytics,

cross-channel analytics, and complex event processing? We also considered if the vendor's

solution includes artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as machine learning in facilitating

the generation of customer insights from telco data.

Mobility features: We considered if the vendor's solution provides access to analytics

applications using mobile devices.

User interface: We have assessed the user interface of the analytics applications with

respect to factors such as ease of use of the applications, and provision of search capabilities.

Administration and system management: We have assessed the features provided by the

vendor for the management of the customer analytics solution. These include user

management, query management, upgrade management, and system monitoring.

Execution

In this dimension, Ovum has reviewed the capability of the solution in the following key areas of

strategy execution. Execution is measured across nine categories, each of which has a maximum

score of 10 and is weighted in favor of the market leader in each category covered.

Maturity: We assessed each vendor's solution with respect to it maturity and how it has

evolved, based on the technologies being adopted. The more established pure-play analytics

vendors gained the highest scores, even though they could be considered as not having core

telecoms expertise possessed by vendors with a broader portfolio of telco-specific platforms.

Sales model: We considered several factors that support each vendor's go-to-market

strategy. We examined if go-to-market strategies include direct sales and/or sales through

channel partners, telco types targeted, and the vendor's route-to-market – whether regional or

global.

Interoperability: For this criterion, we assessed how easily the customer analytics solution

can integrate with other telco operational systems such as CRM, BSS, and OSS.

Deployment: This criterion assesses the variety of modes of deployment used in delivering

the solution, either on-premises or via the cloud. How easy it is to deploy software updates to

the solution was also considered, in addition to the availability of toolset to enable the

migration of product/solution from one version to another. We also looked at the types of

features such as server platforms, web browsers, and web servers supported by each

vendor's solution.



Scalability: Criteria such as the maximum number of subscribers supported by the largest

deployment and the processing capacity per day delivered by each vendor's solution were

assessed.

Partner ecosystem: The vendor's partner ecosystem was assessed, taking into account the

number and strength of technology partners, as well as reseller partners.

Direct client/partner support: The extent to which the vendor supports both client and

partners in the delivery of the solution are assessed here. We looked at the types of support

offerings made available such as training programs, support centers, and seminar workshops.

Professional services: The vendor's portfolio of professional services such as solution

implementation, consulting, systems integration, training, and managed services provided to

CSP customers was examined.

Roadmap: Each vendor's roadmap was assessed based on future development and

business roadmaps. These include plans for future enhancements to existing products or

proposed development of new products that strengthen preexisting solution sets.

Market impact

The global market impact of a solution is assessed. Market impact is measured across six categories,

each of which has a maximum score of 10 and is weighted in favor of the market leader:

Revenues from customer analytics: The scores for each solution's global customer

analytics revenues were calculated as a percentage of the market leader's revenue. This

percentage is then multiplied by 10 and rounded to the nearest integer value.

Total telecoms revenues: Each vendor received scores relating to earnings obtained from

the telecoms industry in 2016. The score was calculated as a percentage of the market

leader's revenue. This percentage is then multiplied by 10 and rounded to the nearest integer

value. The inclusion of this category is to help factor in the addressable market and the

benefits of established relationships in the telecom market.

Revenues from customer telecom analytics: Ovum obtains scores for revenues each

vendor generates from selling its customer analytics solution into the telecoms industry. These

revenues are calculated as a percentage of the highest telecoms revenues reported,

multiplied by 10, and then rounded to the nearest integer value.

Telecoms customer base: The total number of telecoms customers for each vendor's

solution was obtained and a weighted score awarded, and then rounded to the nearest

integer value.

Direct local presence: Ovum determines the number of countries in which the vendor has a

presence. This number is calculated as a percentage of the market leaders' geographic reach,

multiplied by 10, and then rounded to the nearest integer value.

Investment: Each vendor is awarded a score based on an estimate of the value of total

investment committed to the development of the customer analytics solutions. A weighted

score is awarded and rounded to the nearest integer value.



Ovum ratings Market leader: This category represents the leading solutions that we believe are worthy of a

place on most technology selection shortlists. The vendor has established a commanding

market position with a solution that is widely accepted.

Market challenger: The solutions in this category have a good market positioning and are

selling and marketing the product well. The products offer competitive functionality, and

should be considered as part of the technology selection process.

Market follower: Solutions in this category are typically aimed at meeting the requirements of

a CSP department. As a tier-one offering, they should be explored as part of the technology

selection.

Market and solution analysis

Ovum Decision Matrix: Selecting a Customer Analytics Solutionfor Telcos, 2017–18Investment in customer analytics is critical to CSPs looking to grow their revenues and improve the

service experience delivered to their customers. Meeting these objectives will require vendors to not

only provide a strong analytics portfolio but satisfy a broad array of factors, including the degree to

which the solution can use a CSP's customer data, and so meet the CSP's business and operational

needs. Following our evaluation of vendor solutions for customer analytics offered to the CSP market,

Ovum has come up with final scores which are summarized in Figures 1 and 2. These figures provide

Ovum's view of the overall technology strength, market impact, and execution ability of the key

customer analytics vendors involved in this research. In both charts, the horizontal axis highlights

each vendor's positioning with respect to technology, the vertical axis for positioning with respect to

execution, while the size of the bubbles is for market impact. Figure 2 provides an expanded view of

the vendors' relative positioning.



Figure 1: Ovum Decision Matrix: Selecting a Customer Analytics Solution for Telcos, 2017–18

Source: Ovum



Figure 2: Expanded view of Ovum Decision Matrix: Selecting a Customer Analytics Solution forTelcos, 2017–18

Source: Ovum

Table 1: Ovum Decision Matrix: Selecting a Customer Analytics Solution for Telcos, 2017–18Market leaders Market challengers

Huawei Amdocs

IBM Ericsson

Netcracker HPE

SAS Nokia

Pegasystems

Source: Ovum

None of the vendors covered during the research fell into the "market follower" category. This result

emphasizes the maturity of the solutions being delivered to CSPs. We also see that the telecoms

analytics market is increasingly competitive with vendors increasing investments to develop solutions

that meet the evolving needs of the telecoms industry.



Market leaders: Huawei, IBM, Netcracker, and SASIn our assessment, the leaders showed very strong product set delivering capabilities that align with

the increasing focus of CSPs on delivering personalized customer experience. These four vendors

demonstrated through existing engagements their ability to deliver support to CSPs in solving their

business challenges. IBM attained the highest score.

The market leaders' category includes vendors with two very different backgrounds. Huawei and

Netcracker are vendors with a core telecoms focus serving CSPs across several business domains.

By contrast, IBM and SAS are pure-play analytics solutions providers with a long history in supporting

CSPs meet their analytics needs across departments such as marketing, sales, and customer care.

Huawei delivered strong performance across technology, execution, and market impact with highest

scores obtained for its technology assessment and market impact. Huawei's FusionInsight big data

solution is comprehensive, delivering strong data management and analytics capabilities. As a

provider of CSP network equipment and OSS/BSS software with a strong global footprint (excluding

North America where expansion has been limited), the vendor has access to a vast array of data

sources. The vendor is active in the Hadoop open source community, enriching Hadoop-based

projects with its telecoms expertise, with a view to make these projects relevant to the CSP market. Its

strong services capabilities consisting of a vast array of expertise make for a complete analytics

solution offer.

IBM is a strong player in the telecoms customer analytics market. The vendor returned highest scores

for execution and market impact. IBM has continued to evolve its customer analytics solution

introducing capabilities such as real-time analytics and machine learning to its analytical processes.

Investments in cognitive analytics and in network analytics (through the acquisition of Now Factory)

continue to play a critical role in the vendor's engagements with CSPs. IBM also partners with other

vendors in the telecoms space to ensure that its offer remains relevant to the CSP market.

Netcracker is a telecoms software specialist and provides analytics solely for the telecoms vertical

across multiple regions and tiers. The vendor returned high scores across all three domains, returning

very strong performance for technology assessment. Netcracker has combined its understanding of

CSP data and business processes with sophisticated analytics capabilities inherited from its parent

company, NEC. The vendor has also developed intuitive applications that serve multiple business

users within a CSP organization. Furthermore, the vendor's telco back-office (OSS/BSS) and services

offerings allow it to gain in-depth understanding of CSPs' core challenges. Netcracker's future

roadmap is relevant and targeted at exploring AI capabilities to help solve CSPs' challenge to deliver

personalized experiences.

SAS is a pure-play analytics vendor with a large install base within the telecoms industry. CSPs of all

types – fixed-line, mobile, and multiplay service providers – have adopted the vendor's analytics

solutions to solve business challenges around churn and contextualizing engagements with

customers. SAS's customer analytics portfolio has been enhanced following the release of its cloud-

based offerings – SAS Customer Intelligence 360. Targeted at the marketing organization, SAS

Customer Intelligence 360 complements the vendor's on-premises customer intelligence solution to

allow for a 360 degree of the customers. While its business is focused on sales of software, the

vendor has partnered with several companies to support its go-to-market strategy and reach into the

CSP market.



Market challengers: Amdocs, Ericsson, HPE, Nokia, and PegasystemsThis category demonstrates the wide array of vendors looking to capitalize on the analytics

opportunity in the telecoms vertical. The main differentiation between these vendors' offerings is seen

in the array of prepackaged analytics applications provided, the data sources analyzed, and the

services capabilities that they offer to help CSPs jumpstart their analytics projects. Within this

category, Amdocs, Ericsson, and Nokia focus on the telecoms industry with more than 80% of

revenues concentrated within the sector. On the other hand, HPE and Pegasystems have an industry-

wide focus and are using their cross-industry expertise to support the development of solutions sold to

the CSP market.

Amdocs is a leading software and services provider to the telecoms sector. Core to Amdocs' vision for

the telecoms market is the need to deliver improved customer experience and support intelligent

operations using insights drawn from analysis of customer behavior and network performance. Recent

acquisitions and development activities have facilitated the revamp of Amdocs analytics proposition to

the telecoms sector. Its recently launched SmartBot, developed in partnership with IBM and Microsoft,

will be valuable to customers. We expect to see the vendor win more deals and thus increase its

current install base.

Ericsson, a network equipment provider (NEP) continues to enhance its analytics capabilities. The

Ericsson Expert Analytics (EEA) platform provides the core of the vendor's customer analytics

solution. EEA has been enhanced with new applications with a view to utilizing its deep network

expertise to support CSPs in tracking how customer behavior and network performance impact on

customers' overall experience. Ovum expects to see the vendor improve on its current offering as the

vendor looks to invest in automation and AI to improve its analytics capabilities and its ability to

embed intelligence in customer-related operations. The inclusion of these new capabilities and the

vendor's ability to win more deals with a scale that is comparable with that of the leaders will make the

vendor's offer compete favorably within the market.

HPE stands as a market challenger presenting a broad profile of use cases for telco marketing and

customer care. The vendor had evolved its analytics solution to operate effectively within Hadoop-

based data infrastructure. Following the spinoff of its Autonomy and Vertica assets, the vendor has

been focused on ensuring that solutions deployed following this divestment are comparable with the

capabilities previously delivered by these assets. The vendor has also invested in tools that allow for

easy interpretation of analytical results. To move up the ladder, the vendor needs to improve on its

deployment capabilities by providing more deployment options, as well as winning deals that

demonstrate the scalability of its solution.

Nokia is another NEP that is transforming itself from being a network specialist toward being a

customer-centric solution provider. Recent acquisitions such as Alcatel-Lucent and Comptel are

expected to accelerate the vendors' position in the telco analytics domain. Its ownership and

management of Bell Labs will see the vendor innovate in areas such as AI to improve service

experience. The vendor's services capabilities are continuously evolving to ensure that customers

receive high-quality services. To move up to the leaders' tier, the vendor will need to grow its customer

base and consider extending its reach through reselling partners.

Pegasystems is a software vendor with a multi-industry coverage. The vendor is active in the

telecoms market, delivering its solutions to CSPs across all tiers. Pegasystems' Customer Decision



Hub (CDH) is a solution that enables CSPs to deliver the next best action dependent on the context of

the engagement that the CSP has with the vendor. Pegasystems' focus on business process

automation bodes well with CSPs, as automation remains a crucial discussion among CSPs and

plays an important role in delivering timely and contextual service experience to customers.

Market leaders

Market leaders: TechnologyFigure 3: Ovum Decision Matrix: Selecting a Customer Analytics Solution for Telcos, 2017–18: Market leaders – technology

Source: Ovum

Overall, IBM's portfolio of customer analytics solution was an outstanding solution in our technology

assessment, featuring as one of the leaders in all seven categories assessed. Huawei, Netcracker,

and SAS gained similar overall scores, leading in different categories. For example, Huawei

outperformed other vendors in data management, having invested in developing its big data variant of

the open source Hadoop platform, FusionInsight, and other open source projects with a view to

aligning these projects, with the demands of the telecoms industry. The vendor is also investing in

helping CSPs improve on the quality of the data assets used for analytics. SAS outperformed in the

analytics category delivering a solution with advanced analytical capabilities such as real-time

analytics using event streaming. SAS continues to evolve its analytics solutions to drive personalized

engagements through marketing and care. Netcracker leads in the user interface and administration

categories – offering an intuitive user front end which enables easy interaction with and administration

of the platform.



Telco-focused vendors such as Amdocs and Ericsson, with broad BSS and OSS capabilities, score

well but do not have the full analytics offerings delivered by the market leaders. Most of the

participating vendors returned a good performance with respect to satisfying the fundamental user

requirements, which include the ability to support user-defined workflows and the integration of

analytics solutions with preexisting telco systems.

Ovum expects to see advancement in the technology features delivered by these vendor solutions.

Currently, there is a lot of investment going into machine learning to enable quicker and more efficient

delivery of analytical insights from CSPs broad portfolio of data assets. Major releases of solutions in

the next 12–24 months will explore how machine learning and associated technologies such as deep

learning and natural language processing (NLP) can be used to improve customer engagement and

business processes.

Market leaders: ExecutionFigure 4: Ovum Decision Matrix: Selecting a Customer Analytics Solution for Telcos, 2017–18: Market leaders – execution

Source: Ovum

The execution category assesses the maturity and the ability of the vendor to successfully deploy,

integrate, support, maintain, and further develop the product. The vendors with more mature

solutions, backed by a solid services portfolio provided either directly or indirectly through partners,

led in the execution dimension. Leaders include Huawei, IBM, Nokia, and SAS.

As CSPs forge ahead with planning and actual deployment of customer analytics solutions,

considerations such as interoperability, deployment, and scalability, as well as professional services



capabilities, will be critical. For example, identifying ways to achieve interoperability with open source

and third-party solutions will be critical to the success of any analytics solution deployment. More than

half of the vendors assessed in this ODM scored highly in the interoperability category, providing out-

of-the-box integration capabilities that allow for ease of integration with existing CSP business

systems.

The telco-specific vendors – Ericsson, Huawei, Netcracker, and Nokia – delivered strong performance

in this category. As OSS/BSS software providers with a broad install base, these vendors have

developed preintegrations with CSP systems, thereby simplifying the integration process for their

analytics solutions. The same argument goes for SAS, as it has historic partnerships with these

players, supporting the go-to-market strategies for their analytics solutions. All participating vendors

continue to drive an integration strategy to ensure that analytics results are served to as many

systems and processes as possible, with a view to delivering actionable insights.

Market leaders: Market impactFigure 5: Ovum Decision Matrix: Selecting a Customer Analytics Solution for Telcos, 2017–18: Market leaders – market impact

Source: Ovum

The market leaders – IBM, Huawei, Netcracker, and SAS – recorded the highest scores for the market

impact dimension. IBM recorded the highest scores for overall customer analytics revenues, customer

analytics revenues taken from telecoms industry, and total telco install base. Huawei recorded the



second-highest score for market impact, returning high revenues for customer analytics within the

telecoms domain, as well as overall telecoms revenues given its depth of coverage and large footprint

within the industry. Netcracker and SAS returned strong performances in areas such as total customer

installed base and direct local presence. Given its limited footprint in the services domain, SAS's

revenues from customer analytics is lower compared to other vendors with well-recognized services

portfolios.

Vendor analysis

Amdocs (Ovum recommendation: Market challenger)Figure 6: Amdocs radar diagrams

Source: Ovum

Ovum overall assessment

Our assessment of Amdocs' customer analytics solution indicates that the vendor is doing relatively

well in challenging the leading players. The vendor returned average scores across all three

dimensions assessed: Technology, execution, and market impact.

Product and strategy

Amdocs has revamped its CSP analytics proposition with the Amdocs Insight platform (which was

originally the foundation of the vendor's analytics offering), going through a series of changes over the

last year. The key focus of these improvements is to help CSPs solve the challenge of delivering

personalized customer experience. Major changes to the Insight platform include the move from batch



mode processing to real-time or near real-time processing using Apache Spark's open source, big

data processing framework capabilities.

Recent acquisitions and partnerships have contributed to development of Amdocs' enhanced

customer analytics functionalities. In September 2016, Amdocs acquired contextual customer

engagement specialist Pontis, to enhance its delivery of contextual and personalized communications

to CSP customers. Amdocs has also partnered with IBM and Microsoft to leverage their AI capabilities

in areas such as NLP and to provide functions such as sentiment analysis to drive more personalized

experiences to its customers.

Following these changes, the Amdocs Insights platform has now been rebranded as the "aia"

intelligence platform. aia includes four core capabilities:

A data management layer which includes:

Amdocs Data Hub (ADH), a Hadoop-based data management platform that stores

and processes data, both in batch and real-time modes. ADH includes prebuilt

collectors that collect data from systems within the Amdocs CES platform and moves

them into ADH. ADH can also collect data from other types of collectors with the

added ability to create custom collectors for new data sources.

Amdocs Logical Data Model (aLDM) is a telco-specific data model that maps data

held in thousands of data tables from a CSP's operational systems (e.g., OSS, BSS,

and CRM) to create a single data gateway for the CSP's data warehouse. These

features accelerate the time to extract insight from the data as the data model

provides a centralized view of enterprise-wide data to support all analytics use cases.

Intelligent Customer 360 correlates all the data held in the data model to provide a

view of the customer's behavior and preferences. It comes with real-time data

integration capabilities that supports external machine-learning scoring capabilities for

the calculation of both real-time and offline KPIs. These include a customer

experience index, propensity to purchase, and churn risk. These metrics, once

obtained, can be made available across all channels such as agents at retail stores,

chatbots, IVR systems, and contact centers.

AI engines developed in-house and through partnerships with IBM and Microsoft. These AI

engines deliver capabilities such as NLP for chatbots to provide contextual engagements with

customers.

Engage, which is analytics driven customer engagement platform, is a product from the

Pontis acquisition. It is a contextual digital engagement platform which uses analytical insights

to deliver personalized engagements to customers. It replaces the Amdocs Proactive Care

application, as it includes more prepackaged applications across both marketing and

customer care.

Legacy customer analytics applications for marketing and care are also included in aia

with improved interfaces.

Ovum's SWOT assessment

Strengths

Strong focus on data management: Amdocs provides broad data management capabilities

which have been critical to the vendor's success in the telecoms analytics space. Recent wins



with Telefónica's Latin operations in Argentina, Chile, and Peru, as well as with other

operators, are testament to the vendor's data management capabilities. These data

management capabilities are crucial to analytics functions delivering the accurate insights on

CSP customers and their experiences of the services they consume.

Strong go-to-market capabilities which leverage extensive partnerships: The vendor is

combining its strong telecoms expertise and relationships with fresh expertise from partners

with strong presence in the evolving big data and analytics domain. These include Cloudera,

Hortonworks, IBM, Microsoft, MicroStrategy, and SAS. The result of these partnerships has

contributed to the enhancement of the vendor's analytics offer. In addition, the vendor's

engagement with Hadoop players will foster the vendor's engagements with CSPs, as there is

a demand for analytics deployments that can support Hadoop.

Acquisitions are strengthening the vendor's ability to deliver a contextual experience to

CSP customers. Pontis's Engage platform, for example, now plays a critical role in the

vendor's analytics proposition. cVidya is another asset acquired by the vendor in 2016 which

delivers customer analytics capabilities such as marketing analytics to the CSP space.

Strong services capabilities provide for a more complete analytics solution offering.

Weaknesses

Late entry into the analytics market: Amdocs launched its analytics offer in 2014 and so

had a late entry into the analytics market.The vendor has to compete with established players

such as IBM with more mature solutions and customer references.

Amdocs has limited coverage in other verticals which CSPs are beginning to consider

when engaging with analytics vendors as they look to engage with vendors with cross-vertical

domain expertise. Cross-domain expertise will support the development of CSPs' services for

third-party organizations as CSPs are currently looking to monetize their data service

offerings. By using the mobile intelligence they hold, CSPs can bring more value and grow

revenues with existing customers.

aLDM does not include mapping of non-Amdocs products. While the target model

obtained from aLDM is designed for generic BSS/OSS products , thesource mapping of data

sources unto aLDM is mostly based on Amdocs products. Therefore, CSPs adopting aLDM

need to consider how to map data from non-Amdocs products unto aLDM. Specialist

capabilities from systems integrators will be required to develop data connectors to ingest and

map data from these non-Amdocs systems unto aLDM.

Opportunities

A broad BSS customer base provides for upsell opportunities. Ovum recognizes Amdocs

as a leader in the BSS space given the wide adoption of Amdocs' BSS portfolio among

operators and competitors. Customers of Amdocs BSS portfolio include Singapore's M1, Bell

Canada, Rogers Communications, and Telefónica's operations in Latin America (Brazil,

Argentina, Chile, and Peru). With a significant portion of market share for BSS systems in

telecoms, and given its move into the OSS domain following acquisition of Actix and Celcite,

the vendor has a large market which it can tap into to target its analytics offerings.

The recent launch of the Amdocs SmartBot will enhance its analytics offer to CSPs. In

partnership with IBM, Amdocs is launching SmartBot to support more value-driven



interactions. It can detect telecoms specific intents from customer conversations, mapping the

same with next-best-actions that align with CSP business processes.

Threats

An overdependence on its top-tier telco customers could impact on the vendor's ability to

grow revenues. Several of these top-tier operators are trying to build these analytics

capabilities on their own. While they may consider a vendor partner to help them with

jumpstarting their analytics initiatives, they seek to – in the long run – own and manage these

capabilities, in a bid to retain the skills in-house and reduce the costs associated with third-

party providers. Operators also understand the potentials that exist in the customer analytics

space and will seek to keep a larger share of the revenues, rather than loose them as

operating costs to the third-party companies. Therefore, Amdocs needs to extend its coverage

beyond these top-tier operators by targeting the lower-tiered operators.

Product innovation from competing players in the cross-vertical markets such as IBM

and SAS investing heavily in the customer analytics domain of the telecoms market, will pose

a strong threat to Amdocs' positioning in this market.

Recommendation: Market challenger

Apart from offering an end-to-end customer analytics offerings, which it continues to develop, the

vendor has a strong position within the telecoms space with industry-specific experience that spans

over three decades. Its customer experience platform, CES is used by many top-tier vendors such as

AT&T, Vodafone, and Telefónica. CSPs in lower-tiered markets should consider Amdocs in their RFP

processes as the vendor is quickly ramping up its cloud offerings to meet the needs of the broader

CSP market. The vendor also has a focus on meeting enterprise customer experience demands, with

recent launches such as CPQ aimed at improving the operations and experience delivered to these

customer segments. Adopting a cloud approach in reaching these telcos will drive even more

engagements as these players have a bigger appetite for cloud solutions. This is why the vendor has

been actively building out its cloud portfolio.



Ericsson (Ovum recommendation: Market challenger)Figure 7: Ericsson radar diagrams

Source: Ovum

Ovum assessment

Ericsson's customer analytics solution sits within the challenger group. Performance relating to

technology assessment was relatively stronger compared to execution and market impact

assessment.

Solution offering and strategy

Ericsson has continued to extend the capabilities of its EEA platform (previously branded as Customer

Experience Assurance) which is its core analytics offering to the telecoms market. EEA is a real-time,

end-to-end, big data analytics solution, with several applications addressing CSP analytical needs

such as service operations, customer care, product management, and marketing. Most of the

capabilities delivered using EEA have been inherited from preexisting products such as Ericsson

Experience Manager, Ericsson Revenue Management, Ericsson Network Manager, and Ericsson

Order Care.

In the last two years, Ericsson has grown its portfolio of analytics applications running on its EEA

platform. These include:

Engineering Insights is a dashboard application that enables the viewing of multiple-time-

series-based KPIs for specific customers. This dashboard facilitates troubleshooting as its

provides analysis across application and network layers.

Data Session Browser takes events relating to each customer's service data session,

highlighting events occurring in the user and the control planes, which is then presented in a



time-series format. The time-series data when utilized with machine-learning techniques

allows for real-time detection and reporting of network anomalies.

Customer Insights facilitates sharing of actionable insights on customers' behavior, or

service usage and other data assets, with third-party applications.

Service Quality Management (SQM) integrates Ericsson's SQM solutions with EEA. SQM

provides an additional view of customer experience based on OSS/BSS data. Using both

SQM and CEM together can improve root cause analysis and better define customer impacts

of events.

All the above applications utilize both real-time and batch (offline) data. As data is continuously

ingested, it is combined with offline data from network, CRM, and other telco-focused systems.

Analytical models and algorithms are then applied to these data sets to generate metrics such as

service level index and cell level index, which are then used in prepackaged applications such as

Ericsson Customer Care, Ericsson Roaming Analytics, Subscriber Experience, and OTT analytics.

The vendor has included new features to the analytics platform such as machine learning, real-time

event ingestion, and improved probe capacity to allow for more real-time, service-related data to be

collected on every customer.

Ovum SWOT assessment

Strengths

Ericsson is a leading provider of CSP equipment and software systems with more than

30 years of experience developing and selling solutions for the telecoms sector. Leveraging

its networks expertise, the vendor creates a single KPI – "Service Level Index" (SLi). The

measurement and tracking of SLi provides actionable insights to help understand how

network issues impacts a customer's perception of the service experience. By combining this

metric with other KPIs, CSPs can detect and react more quickly to factors that influence

customer behavior.

The vendor has a rich pool of services capabilities that it can draw on, which when

combined with its industry expertise enhances the vendor's ability to manage and analyze

telco data assets. Large managed services engagements also provide the vendor with the

capability to develop deeper insights on customer activities.

Weaknesses

Ericsson's declining revenue performance over the last two to three years is likely to

impact on its ability to continue to invest in evolving analytical technologies. Performance will

also impact customer's perception of the vendor's stability. While the vendor is focused on

maintaining technology leadership in all of its business areas with AI/automation and Analytics

as key catalysts, how quickly the vendor executes these plans will be critical to its position in

the customer analytics market.

The vendor's analytics offerings are currently not delivered over the public cloud.

Ovum is seeing increasing demand for public cloud offerings (as initial fears associated with

the public cloud environment are being alleviated). Market-leading analytics providers such as

SAS and IBM are leveraging the capabilities of their cloud offerings to deliver stronger

propositions to the CSP market. Ericsson has indicated that support for public cloud is



included in its roadmap, but is not doing so yet. How quickly the vendor makes real this vision

will impact its growth in the customer analytics space.

Ericsson's mobility features are still limited. While Ericsson's EEA offering may support

mobility features such as mobile application development and integration with mobile device

management platform. These features do not come out of the box. They are provided either

by add-on products or third-party providers.

Opportunities

The integration of EEA with its recently launched Integrated Video Insights will be

valuable to CSPs offering multiplay services which includes TV offerings. These CSPs can

benefit from the deep insights that can be generated from the consolidation of data relating to

both mobile and video services. Thus, operators gain end-to-end, 360-degree insights from a

single platform, regardless of service or network being utilized at the moment. For example, a

sales representation can renegotiate a contract or offerings based on customer's use of

specific services.

Large customer base and engagements which consists of not only companies using EEA

but other services provide the vendor with a large knowledge center to continue to innovate

and test solutions that enhance customer experience. In addition to the broader knowledge

base to develop its analytics solutions, its large telco customer base also provides the vendor

with a broad market for its EEA capabilities.

Threats

The vendor has limited proof points that emphasize its work in AI. This could impact on

the vendor's ability to compete with other vendors that are far along the curve when it comes

to AI. However, current trials and PoCs could provide proof points of Ericsson's capabilities in

AI.

The threat to Ericsson's extensive network footprint could limit the level of insights it

can deliver to its customers. While Ericsson considers itself a strong player in the network

infrastructure space (with a large footprint across the globe), that position is being threatened

by the move toward network virtualization. With the replacement of incumbent physical

infrastructure with virtualized infrastructure from multiple vendors, the depth of insights once

enjoyed by Ericsson will no longer be so dominant.


Ericsson's strong portfolio of network capabilities will be valuable to any CSP looking to implement

end-to-end customer analytics functionalities. Its network expertise will enable CSPs to support

multiple use cases that require the correlation of customer behavior with network performance. A

combination of network and digital customer-related features will enable the delivery of telco-specific

offerings. Its rich pool of services professionals (which includes more than 60,000 employees) further

strengthens the vendor's opportunities to engage with CSPs. To succeed in this rather competitive

market of analytics solutions, the vendor needs to fast track its development plans and provide

support for public cloud deployments for its analytics offerings. The vendor should take advantage of

its existing partnership with Amazon Web Services to accelerate its move to the public cloud.



HPE (Ovum recommendation: Market challenger)Figure 8: HPE radar diagrams

Source: Ovum

Overall assessment

Ovum's overall assessment of HPE's customer analytics solutions shows that HPE had a slightly

below average performance, with strengths in the data sourcing and data management domains, and

lower performance in the mobility features domain. For execution of strategy, the vendor recorded an

above-average score, returning high scores for its partner ecosystem and professional services

capabilities, and lower performance for deployment and scalability. The vendor recorded an average

score for market performance, having a strong global reach and investment base that have supported

development of its analytics offerings. However, scores within the revenue dimension were low.


HPE Communications and Media Solutions (HPE CMS) is responsible for the development and sale

of HPE's customer analytics solutions. HPE CMS' offerings include its Telecoms Analytics Smart

Profile Server (HPE TASPS), a suite of prepackaged applications, and a set of services capabilities

for consulting and design, delivery or managed as-a-service, and business continuity/support. The

HPE TASPS is the core of its telco analytics offerings and comes in different blocks of capabilities:

Complex event processor (CEP) provides real-time analytics capabilities using complex

event processing.

HPE TASPS (Data Analytics Layer – DAL) provides batch-based analytics functions. This is

also where all the orchestration of complex queries between the subcomponents that need to

be called for outputs, and all the orchestration is done in DAL.



Data Exposure Layer (DEL) and dashboard is mainly used for the data access and

exposure of analytical insights. DEL underpins what HPE refers to as value packs, which are

prepackaged applications containing complex queries or algorithms that are grouped and sold

to meet specific analytics demands (e.g., its Smart Offers application holds all the algorithms

for churn prediction, customer loyalty, cross-selling, and upselling). Other value packs include

Ad Experience Personalization and Network Usage Analytics.

Depending on the nature of the analytics request from a CSP, an assessment of the data

processing/querying capabilities is performed. HPE then puts together a solution that includes either

the CEP (for its real-time capabilities), or DAL (for batch or non-real-time functions), and DEL (for

exposure of insights). These three components then use data residing in a variety of sources that can

include Hadoop Impala/Hive/Spark, HPE Vertica (proprietary analytics database), HPE Deep Packet

Inspection (Dpi) probes, and databases from other third-party databases.

Market demand and changes within the HPE business have forced the vendor to review its

development strategy. Previously, its development strategy was focused on going to market with its

HPE Vertica and Autonomy capabilities at the core. However, with HPE close to completing the spinoff

of Vertica and Autonomy, and with the high demand from CSPs to support open source Hadoop

environments, HPE is now investing heavily to ensure that its analytics procedures effectively run on

Hadoop deployments. Currently, the execution of certain complex queries is proving difficult on a

Hadoop implementation when compared to its proprietary Vertica database. However, HPE is working

closely with some start-ups to improve the performance of these complex SQL queries on Hadoop.

The vendor indicates that within a few quarters, performance of their solution on Hadoop

implementation will catch up with Vertica's performance.


Strengths

HPE can connect to varied data sources within the telco environment. This capability is

made possible by its HPE enhanced Interactive Unified Mediation (HPE eIUM) platform which

consists of up to 700 data connectors. HPE also has the capability to create any data

connector of choice within a period of two to three days, and so is not dependent on the CSP

to provide connection to data sources for analytics.

HPE's approach to the development of new applications is flexible, making it easy for

operators to take advantage of the different analytics capabilities HPE has to offer. Analytics

algorithms are created in blocks which can then be used in whatever mode (either in a batch

processing environment or in a real-time environment) as the use case requires.

HPE has a strong partner ecosystem that includes resellers, as well as technology

providers. Resellers are extending the vendor's reach, both at the local and global market

levels. Partnerships with start-ups are especially noteworthy. Most of its engagements with

these start-ups are focused on improving the performance of its offerings on Hadoop

deployments. HPE is investing in capabilities that it expects to allow it to deliver equivalent

performance on both Hadoop and its proprietary Vertica database.

Weaknesses

HPE returned below average scores for solution deployment and scalability. HPE's

TASPS analytics solutions does not include cloud deployment options. With CSPs appetite for



the cloud growing, HPE would need to evolve its solution to support the cloud. The vendor's

solution is also limited with respect to the server platform environments that can be supported.

Current deployments support a lower subscriber base than that of other vendors

assessed during this research. In addition, daily processing capacity is lower compared to

what other vendor solutions support. The vendor claims that its solution can support much

larger subscriber bases but does not yet have commercial deployments to illustrate this. The

vendor will need to win more large-scale deals to demonstrate this capability.

The vendor's mobility features are minimal compared to other vendor solutions. The

vendor's ability to support the mobile environment is limited compared to other vendors'

solutions assessed during our research. Device support for analytics solutions needs to go

beyond the desktop, and to mobile devices such tablets and mobile phones, as these have

extensive uses in channels such as retail stores and are also used by executives.

Opportunities

The vendor's focus on supporting Hadoop deployments will be welcomed by most

CSPs. Hadoop is becoming the de facto data management platform for most CSPs today and

so providing support for these environments will facilitate the vendor's engagements with

telecoms prospects.

HPE's recent investment in a presentation tool (referred to as Unified OSS Console) will

be beneficial to operators. This new feature allows for the presentation of high level real-time

analytical results within the same web client. It also fast tracks the deployment and execution

of analytics use cases as integration with preexisting presentation tools will not be required.

HPE's partnership agreement with MicroStrategy presents opportunities for continued

commercial relationship. HPE spinoff Vertica and Autonomy to MicroStrategy which is

formerly HPE's software business and a business where HPE still stands as a shareholder.

Therefore, its engagement with MicroStrategy provides platform for continued relationships

with CSP clients that have deployed Autonomy and Vertica.

Threats

There are more players coming into the telecoms analytics space, players with strong

financial backing and good reach into the telecoms market. These companies are coming with

preintegrated capabilities for the processing of data being collected in real time.


HPE has a strong portfolio that allows CSPs to access a wide variety of data sources. HPE's support

for Hadoop as a core component of its data management portfolio will also resonate with CSPs

planning to deploy the open source data management platform. The vendor, however, needs to do

more work in proving how well its solution can scale to support larger subscriber bases such as those

within the Asia-Pacific region.



Huawei (Ovum recommendation: Market leader)Figure 9: Huawei radar diagrams

Source: Ovum

Ovum's overall assessment

Ovum's research places Huawei as a market leader. The vendor's analytics solution recorded the

second-highest overall score, returning the third-highest score for technology assessment, highest

score for strategy execution, and second-highest score for market impact.


Huawei's customer analytics solution is based on its FusionInsight big data solution which includes

FusionInsight-Hadoop big data platform and FusionInsight-Universe Analytics platform. FusionInsight-

Hadoop was launched in 2011 and serves as a unified platform delivering features for capabilities

such as mass storage and query for CSPs. FusionInsight-Universe Analytics is a big data analytics

platform which can run on the FusionInsight-Hadoop platform or any other Hadoop-based big data

platform. FusionInsight-Universe Analytics has a converged enterprise data model that combines

information from the BSS, OSS, and management information systems to provide a single view of the

CSP business, the network, and customers. It also includes data governance and big data cloud

services capabilities. In addition, analytics applications that meet specific analytical use cases like

customer behavior analysis, targeted marketing, upsell, and cross-sell are provided by FusionInsight-

Universe Analytics. Custom customer analytical applications can also be created and made available

to other users using the vendor's Universal Analytics Development Platform and application

development services.

The FusionInsight big data solution is the product of several years of collaboration with the open

source Apache Hadoop community.



Customer examples include Vodafone where the vendor is continuously analyzing customer behavior

and using the insights obtained to deliver personalized commercial offers to customers. Other CSPs

include China Mobile and China Telecom.

To strengthen its FusionInsight big data solution offering, Huawei has created Huawei Ready. Huawei

Ready is a big data compatibility certification program that validates the compatibility of partner

products and solutions with Huawei FusionInsight. This certification program demonstrates to

customers that Huawei's solutions can be jointly supported by partners and Huawei, with the same

level of standards for compatibility and interoperability being maintained. Partners that have attained

this certification include IBM and Informatica.

The future roadmap will see Huawei evolve its solution to integrate data from third-party service

providers.


Strengths

Huawei has a strong footprint in the CSP market. It is currently ranked as one of the top

three NEPs with network infrastructure spanning almost the entire globe.

The vendor has ramped up contributions to the Apache Hadoop open source

community. Although late to the market, with its solution coming into the market about three

years ago, the vendor has been active within the Hadoop open source community. For

example, the vendor has developed projects using Hadoop-based technologies which have

been embedded into its FusionInsight platform.

The vendor has also embraced the cloud as one of its deployment models making its

solution attractive to those CSPs embracing the cloud as their platform of choice for the

delivery of software and services.

CSP customers see Huawei's analytics solution as demonstrating deep understanding

of their business. Client feedback suggests that Huawei has been responsive to their needs

and is quick to act on feedback from customers in enhancing their offerings to the CSP.

Weaknesses

A relatively lower score for mobility features compared to other vendor solutions

assessed. Well-developed mobility features are critical to customer analytics, as they ensure

easy reach to analytical insights, whenever and on whatever mobile device is used by

business users.

The platform's user interface does not currently meet user requirements. Some

customers indicated that user interface on the platform required improvement. Huawei hopes

to achieve this through its recent partnership with Tableau. The vendor will be using Tableau's

data visualization software to transform the insights obtained from its analytics platform into

easy-to-understand measurable outcomes.

Huawei's current customer base for its analytics offerings is dominated by the Chinese

market. While there have been several European customers, the Chinese market remains the

vendor's stronghold. The North American market remains a difficult one for the vendor

because of the national security concerns expressed by the US.



Opportunities

Huawei's converged enterprise data model supports use cases beyond customer

analytics such as networks, thereby extending its touch points within a telcos' environment. It

also enables CSPs to quickly deploy analytical models that can take advantage of the

correlation of both customer and network data sets to build a well-rounded view of the

customer.

The vendor's focus on data management especially big data governance allows the

vendor to quickly extend its analytics offering. The development of its data management and

governance capabilities have benefited from partnerships with strong data management

players such as IBM and SAP.

Activities surrounding the creation of customer analytics solutions for external

verticals using CSP data will be valuable to CSPs as they look to innovative ways to

monetize their data assets. For example, Huawei's credit assessment application will attract

the attention of CSPs looking to target banks with their data to support credit operations.

Threats

The fact that the vendor is being prevented from expanding in the US market limits its

analytics revenue opportunities. This is a problem because US CSPs are actively adopting

advanced analytics to deliver better service experience to their customers.

Recommendation: Market leader

Huawei's customer analytics offer is extensive. The vendor's offer delivers data management,

analytics, and application development capabilities, all from a single platform. While the vendor has

been actively developing these capabilities on its own, it has also leveraged partnership from the open

source community and partnerships with industry players such as IBM and SAP to further strengthen

its offer. Huawei, however, needs to enhance its mobile capabilities by developing features that allow

users to consume analytical insights on their mobile devices. The vendor needs to strengthen the

messaging behind its customer analytics capabilities, as current messaging is strongly focused on the

FusionInsight Platform which houses its data management capabilities. Vendor solutions customer

analytics presented as a combination of both data management and analytics capabilities have a

strong appeal to CSPs.



IBM (Ovum recommendation: Market leader)Figure 10: IBM radar diagrams

Source: Ovum

Overall assessment

IBM continues to lead the customer analytics domain within the telecoms market. The vendor

obtained the overall highest score for all analytics solutions assessed during our research. It recorded

highest scores in the technology and market impact domains, only missing the top spot for strategy

execution by a few points.

Product offering and strategy

Due to its scale, presence in the analytics domain, and acquisitions, the vendor has managed to

maintain its market-leading position. For IBM, its focus on utilizing analytics to deliver automated

business operations has seen the vendor evolve its analytics specialization. This focus has resulted in

the creation of an enhanced Telecoms Analytics Solutions (TAS) portfolio, launched in 2016. IBM's

TAS adopts IBM's cognitive analytics capabilities to use cases in sales, marketing, customer services,

and network operations, with a view to enhance these operations with actionable intelligence when

required (e.g., the next best offer).

The solution runs on the IBM Watson Data Platform which is an integrated platform that includes

products for data ingestion, storage, analysis, and deployment. The operations associated with these

platforms are governed by a centralized governance structure. The TAS suite runs on top of the

Watson Data Platform focusing on three key areas important to CSPs: Digital customer engagement,

network and platform agility, and enterprise transformation. The solutions set for the digital customer

engagement pillar is the vendor's core customer analytics solutions for the telecoms industry and it

includes the following products:



Customer Care Insight is an analytics application that analyses subscriber behavior to

generate a single data record – the subscriber analytics record (SAR). SAR holds calculated

subscriber related metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), subscriber experience metrics,

and subscriber usage metrics. The SAR can then be correlated with other data sets relating to

network infrastructure to determine which elements within the network, devices, or location

throughputs that could impact a CSP's overall NPS score. Subscribers can then be

segmented into various segments based on this analysis.

IBM Analytics Accelerator Framework for CSPs (IBM AAF for CSPs) is a framework which

includes adapter-based ingestion, Hadoop-based data storage, and API-based data access

for consuming applications (IBM-supplied or from third-party apps). IBM AAF bundles key

products into a single solution:

SPSS for predictive analytics; and

IBM WebSphere Streams for real-time analytics using complex event processing.

IBM AAF allows for the correlation of network data, such as service usage data, with customer

behavior data, such as customer buying patterns and NPS from Customer Insight. IBM's Now Factory

Customer and Network Analytics offerings also runs on the IBM AAF as prepackaged applications.

IBM has built up its expertise in the telecom space through organic and inorganic growth. Partners

also play a critical role when it comes to development and resale. However, IBM often defaults to

using its global services capabilities for delivery.


Strengths

IBM has developed a strong and well-recognized analytics portfolio which is used

extensively in the telecoms domain. It has had several years' experience developing solutions

at both the technology and vertical levels.

The vendor returned high scores for its data sourcing capabilities. The creation of the

IBM AAF for CSPs enhances access to as many data sources as possible within the CSP

environment.

IBM has grown its telecoms analytics capabilities through acquisitions and

partnerships. Its acquisition of Now Factory has strengthened the vendor's network analytics

features which are also being enriched to support customer centricity within the network

domain. Partnerships include technology players in the IT and telecoms domain as well

resellers. Technology players include Amdocs, Dumo, Huawei, Matrixx, Salesforce, and

Vlocity. For example, IBM has cooperated with Amdocs on a chatbot that can not only provide

response to customer immediate queries but can provide more information to support an

optimal customer experience.

Weaknesses

IBM has a broad range of products included in its TAS portfolio which makes it difficult to

determine the right product set that meets specific requirements. There are currently 16

products included in IBM's TAS set. Some of these products have overlapping features,

implying increased costs for the use of duplicated features or longer sales processes, as

multiple products need to be evaluated by CSPs, as opposed to a smaller product set which

integrates features from the vendor's analytics portfolio.



Opportunities

Existing outsourcing engagements provide opportunities for further development and

recognition of its expertise. Exposure obtained from current engagements provide

opportunity to enhance analytical models to deliver optimal results to its CSP customers.

These engagements also provide proof points of its capabilities to other CSPs. Recent

outsourcing wins with companies such as Telstra, which outsourced its cloud and analytics

business to IBM, signals to other operators that IBM has strong capabilities in this space.

The strong marketing push behind IBM's cognitive capabilities has begun to capture

CSPs' attention. Some CSPs and telco focused vendors now recognize the value that

cognitive analytics bring to their business. Orange, for example, has deployed an AI-based

virtual assistant called virtual adviser. The virtual adviser was developed using IBM Watson

big data engine to respond to customer queries and offer advice relating to the CSP's latest

banking service. Amdocs has also released its SmartBot which leverages IBM Watson's AI

functions. Ovum expects to see more of these activities from the CSP space as IBM develops

its cognitive offer for the CSP market.

IBM's approach to cloud, with respect to delivering analytics-as-a-service, will appeal

to CSPs as their appetite for cloud delivery models grows. Through the vendor's Watson

APIs, the vendor can also inject advanced technologies to its analytics offerings to deliver

improved operations to CSP customers. However, the concern around customer data

handling and privacy will always come up in every cloud discussion.

Threats

The telecoms customer analytics market is fast becoming a hot area. NEPs are fast

evolving their existing network analytics functions to include the customer domain, while the

bigger telecoms software players such as Amdocs are acquiring companies with strong

analytical expertise to augment their existing analytics offerings. IBM will need to continuously

push forward with respect to innovation to remain relevant.

Increasing competition from players with AI capabilities. As AI finds more use cases

within the CSP market, IBM's position will be threatened. Companies such as Microsoft and

Google are investing heavily in this space, working in partnership with telco-focused vendors

to deliver solutions specific to the industry. IBM Watson does currently provide IBM with an

edge. However, we expect to see more solutions that can compete on the same levels as

Watson.


IBM's TAS portfolio has a broad appeal within the CSP space. IBM's portfolio is comprehensive and

the vendor continues to make investments in the evolving cognitive analytics domain. These efforts

have been taken with a view to ensuring the delivery of relevant and personalized experiences to CSP

customers. Most CSPs (top- to mid-tier) are currently working with IBM to deliver several customer-

focused analytics use cases, positioning the vendor as the vendor to beat in the customer analytics

space.



Netcracker (Ovum recommendation: Market leader)Figure 11: Netcracker radar diagrams

Source: Ovum


Netcracker has maintained is position in the leader group. The vendor recorded an overall score

which is above average, receiving one of the highest scores for technology assessment and market

impact.


Netcracker's customer analytics offering helps CSPs get an integrated view of their customers and

services they consume. This focus has led to the creation of its big data analytics solution developed

to obtain meaningful insights from the massive volumes of data that CSPs hold within their BSS/OSS

systems. Insights obtained from the correlations of data sets at customer level are then used to

support business processes such as marketing, sales, customer care, and network operations.

Netcracker's analytics solution includes a set of predefined out-of-the-box use cases which have been

adopted by several CSPs with fixed, mobile, and TV service offerings. The solution comes

preintegrated with the vendor's product suite and so allows CSPs to incorporate data driven insights

into their existing business processes. Custom integration would be required to integrate non-

Netcracker systems that serve either as data sources to its big data analytics platform or applications

that consume insights from the platform. Current customers include AT&T, Bright House, NTT

DoCoMo, Suddenlink, Softbank Swisscom, and Telefónica.

For Netcracker, the future of customer analytics will be seen in the adoption of AI in areas like

managing customer journeys. Netcracker plans to take advantage of its parent company NEC's

investment in AI to execute the development of technology that supports customer journey analytics.



NEC has been actively developing solutions that utilize AI technologies for industries such as

healthcare and public sector. Some of Netcracker's recent work on the AI front can be seen in its

recently launched Digital Customer Enablement (DCE) offerings, which includes its Customer Journey

Management platform, designed to utilize AI techniques like machine learning to personalize customer

experience and service offerings.


Strengths

Netcracker has the backing of NEC which has been investing extensively in the analytics

space, especially in the area of AI. NEC has developed IP in facial recognition which

Netcracker can utilize to extend its analytics use cases in areas such as improving customer

in-store experience, driving traffic to the store, and security analytics.

The vendor has developed several out-of-the-box analytics applications that cuts across

sales, marketing, product management, network management, and customer experience. The

availability of use cases that span multiple points of engagement in the CSP organization

ensure a return on investment that is higher than that for solutions that are more narrowly

focused.

Netcracker's customer analytics solution addresses not just a CSP's core products and

services offerings but also services provided in partnership with third-party organizations

such as OTT players. For example, when targeting offers to customers, the vendor's

analytical solution takes into account offerings from CSP partners that are suited to each

customer. This capability supports service personalization as CSPs bundle third-party

services to improve their revenues.

Weaknesses

Netcracker's weakest link is seen in its lean reseller partner ecosystem. With a go-to-

market strategy solely dependent on its internal sales organization, the vendor's reach is

limited.

Opportunities

Netcracker's development roadmap aligns with CSPs' core challenge which is improving

personalized experience. The vendor is taking advantage of its footprint in the OSS and BSS

space to develop a platform that allows CSPs to define and tailor customer journeys for every

customer. Continuous monitoring and tracking capabilities are built into the flow to allow CSPs

to identify what processes involved in the customer journey are contributing to poor customer

experience. The vendor is also developing features that would allow CSPs to define the

expected experience for every customer across every channel.

The vendor's strong professional services capabilities strengthen its position when

engaging with CSPs. It offers the vendor the opportunity to lead discussions with consulting

services capabilities that are aimed at multiple business domains responsible for the delivery

of customer experience, thereby extending its reach and influence within the telco business.

The vendor's activity in the virtualization space positions it as a strong partner to help CSPs

meet their customer experience targets within a hybrid network environment.



Threats

The vendor's customer reach could be threatened by the growing demand for best-of-breed

products which has seen nontraditional telecoms vendor thrive in a previously locked-up

telecom vendor ecosystem. This demand for solutions from multiple vendors has moved the

attention of CSPs from favoring embedded analytics portfolio toward favoring standalone

analytics solutions that can integrate data, not just from OSS/BSS systems, but also data from

other data sources such as network elements.


While the vendor's solution may be coming from a portfolio of embedded analytics functions,

Netcracker is taking advantage of big data to augment its analytics portfolio. The vendor has a broad

scope of customers and service engagements which has added to its varied expertise when it comes

to the area of customer analytics. Netcracker does, however, need to develop its partner ecosystem

for its customer analytics offerings. While its pedigree may be strong, the vendor's vision for AI will

thrive most in a partnership community that provides access to cutting edge AI capabilities.

Nokia (Ovum recommendation: Market challenger)Figure 12: Nokia radar diagrams

Source: Ovum


In terms of our overall assessment, Nokia's customer analytics offer ranks among those challenging

the lead players. The vendor achieved an average overall score, but delivering an above-average

performance in the technology and market impact domains.




Nokia is utilizing its telecoms network expertise to develop a customer analytics offer with a strong

telecoms angle. Nokia has served the telecoms industry globally for decades, delivering network

infrastructure and related software. Having gone through several changes – divesting parts of the

business and acquiring new assets – in the last decade, the vendor is positioning itself as a provider

of innovative solutions including customer analytics. These solutions are aimed at enabling CSPs to

thrive in the digital economy.

Acquisitions have played a critical role in strengthening Nokia's position in the customer analytics

market, including the acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent in 2015, and Comptel and Deepfield in 2017.

Comptel, for example, has developed analytics capabilities that enable prediction and

recommendation as it relates to customer interactions and automation of business processes. These

features are based on insights drawn from customer behavior and journey analysis. CSPs can then

utilize these analytical insights to personalize engagements with customers. These acquisitions and

further investments by the vendor have led to the development of its Cognitive Analytics Suite. Its

Cognitive Analytics Suite includes several analytics products covering networks and customer

analytics use cases. For customer analytics use cases, the portfolio includes:

Autonomous Customer Care predicts and resolves issues that affect services before the

users notice them. The product interfaces with several agents to allow consumers to leverage

natural language to troubleshoot or request for new services.

Cognitive Analytics for Customer Insight provides a 360-degree view of the customer to

enable the CSP to deliver an optimized customer experience.

Cognitive Analytics for Crowd Insight continuously analyses and learns from customer

behavior with a view to helping CSPs find new ways to monetize their data services. For

example, it can identify untapped areas with high traffic activities for the location of new retail

stores.

Cognitive Analytics for Marketing Insight performs real-time predictive analytics of

subscriber behavior to deliver personalized customer communications.


Strengths

Nokia has a strong background in the telecoms space and serves up to 250 telecoms

customers in the analytics space. Acquisitions have further strengthened the vendor's

capabilities. The vendor is tying in its networks capabilities with its customer insight

capabilities to ensure that traditional network functions like field operations deliver a clear and

recognized impact on customers. Its recent award-winning engagement with Vodafone for

voice experience optimization demonstrates this vendor's capability.

Nokia has an extensive analytic application framework which enables CSPs to develop

new use case applications within an hour. This feature enables not just the research teams

working at the customer premise to create these apps quickly but also the sales teams to

create solutions based on customer requirements. Consequently, the vendor's go-to-market

strategy is fast tracked as customized solutions are delivered quickly.

Nokia has a strong services portfolio that leverages its analytical capabilities in delivering

services to CSP customers.



Weaknesses

The vendor has no reselling partners and so is fully dependent on its in-house sales

organization. Its acquisition strategy, however, is aimed at strengthening its sales organization

in areas where its capabilities are not as strong. A good example is the acquisition of Comptel

which is positioned to strengthened its sales organization. However, this approach comes as

a more expensive option than partnering with other companies.

Opportunities

Recent acquisitions will help the vendor move more quickly into the AI space where

real-time insights can be utilized to trigger immediate and relevant actions. For example,

Comptel offerings have several elements which will enrich Nokia's portfolio (e.g., its real-time

orchestration can trigger automatic actions related to insights obtained from functions such as

advanced anomaly detection, and KPIs such as social networking and churn scores). The

acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent has seen the vendor take ownership of Bell Labs, which will

further strengthen the vendor's ability to innovate in analytics and AI.

Nokia's AVA platform (created in 2015 and now in commercial use) will fast track the

vendor's customer engagements with CSPs. It allows for the running and management of

the analytics use cases that are delivered by the vendor's analytics suite. Hosted on the AVA

services platform is the predictive services suite which delivers the vendor's predictive care

and preventive compliant analysis solutions. The inclusion of the AVA services platform will

allow for the quick and smarter delivery of services projects as it is a cloud-based platform

providing a centralized big data and analytics structure that supports all service delivery

activities.

Threats

The vendor's focus on the network analytics space could negatively impact

perceptions of it as a customer analytics vendor when compared with other players such as

IBM, SAS, and Amdocs, which all have a much larger footprint when it comes to customer-

related projects. While recent developments and acquisitions are aimed at filling these gaps,

the vendor will need to apply a lot of effort in convincing CSP customers of its capabilities in

this space.


Nokia is a veteran in the network equipment space with years of experience working in the telecoms

market. The vendor also has a strong focus on analytics and how to leverage it to help CSPs deliver

improved services to customers. While more than three years ago the vendor may have been

considered to possess just mobile infrastructure expertise, its acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent and recent

development activities have catapulted the vendor's ability to support both fixed and mobile service

providers with enriched analytics capabilities. Consequently, CSPs looking for a customer analytics

offer that supports both mobile and fixed networks can look to Nokia. However, the vendor needs to

demonstrate and clearly outline how the capabilities of its latest assets will support further

development of its customer analytics offer. In addition, speeding up the integration of these assets

with its current offer will enable Nokia compete more favorably within the analytics market.



Pegasystems (Ovum recommendation: Market challenger)Figure 13: Pegasystems radar diagrams

Source: Ovum

Overall assessment

Ovum's overall assessment of Pegasystems' customer analytics solution places it within the

challenger group. The vendor recorded slightly below average scores across all three domains with

the technology domain returning the vendor's highest performance.


The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company, Pegasystems, offers a broad portfolio of customer-

focused business solutions such as CRM and business process management (BPM). The vendor's

CDH forms the core of its analytics offerings for CSPs. There are also two telecoms-focused analytics

applications – Pega Marketing and Pega Customer Service for Communications. These applications

utilize capabilities delivered by CDH to meet analytical requirements for marketing and customer

service operations. For example, the Pega Marketing application uses the advanced capabilities from

CDH to build and execute personalized and targeted campaigns, deliver cross-sell/upsell or retention

through any channel, and push ads into paid media.

The CDH integrates and analyzes real-time and historic data to generate a contextual understanding

of every customer intent and determine the next best action. CDH holds all data, the analytical models

and algorithms, and machine-learning capabilities. The analytical insights obtained from CDH are then

passed unto Pegasystems' telco-focused applications or integrated directly into a CSP's legacy

solutions (which includes third-party systems).



Pegasystems has several partnerships with a view to complementing its offerings and those of its

partners. Partners include leading telecoms network providers such as Ericsson, and IT service

providers such as Accenture, Capgemni, and Cognizant.


Strengths

Pegasystems' CDH delivers analytics that serves multiple domains: Pegasystems' CDH

is a real-time decisioning engine which orchestrates business activities with a view to deliver

value to customers across marketing, customer care, and sales. Several use cases are

delivered by combining and analyzing historic data with real-time data, to obtain relevant and

actionable insights that support customer engagement.

Well-structured data management functionality: The vendor's in-memory data

virtualization capability allows for a more unified view of a customer even when data sources

are distributed across several data storage systems. This approach allows for reduced efforts

associated with complex extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes, resulting in shorter

times to production and cost reductions.

Well-developed BPM capabilities support CSPs' complete end-to-end processes. These

processes smoothen the path of every interaction for each customer, as data from every

interaction involved in each process is constantly monitored, even when the process involves

third-party applications.

Weaknesses

Low scalability: The number of subscribers supported by Pegasystems' largest deployment

is low compared to many of the other vendor solutions assessed.

Professional services: Pegasystems has a limited services portfolio compared to other

vendors assessed during our research. However, to fill this gap, the vendor has partnered

with companies such as Accenture.

Opportunities

Extending current engagements with operators with multicountry operations: CSPs

such as Vodafone and Etisalat, with operations in several countries and regions, provide the

vendor with opportunities to expand its reach within a single CSP account. The vendor needs

to focus on growing business within these accounts while reaching out to new prospects.

Increase engagements with telecoms-focused vendors: Partnering with more companies

such as Ericsson with a broad footprintof telco OSS/BSS products across the globe provide

access to data sources that help to build the right customer context for all customer

engagements. These partnerships can also help Pegasystems to expand its engagement with

operators with multicountry operations.

Pegasystems' capabilities in robotic automation will be beneficial to CSPs as they look

to drive operational efficiency of front-facing customer operations such as marketing and care

using automation.

Threats

Telecoms-focused players with deep pockets and strong presence in the telecoms market

such as Amdocs, Ericsson, and Huawei, and analytics specialists such as IBM and SAS, are



fast ramping up their analytical capabilities, thereby making the market highly competitive for

Pegasystems.


Pegasystems comes with strong expertise in CRM and BPM, which when combined with the analytics

capabilities derived from its CDH, can meet multiple CSP customer analytics use cases. The vendor

also comes with cross-industry experiences which has allowed it develop best practices in customer

analytics. However, the vendor needs to consider providing direct services offerings like consulting

and systems integrations, as these make for a complete customer analytics offerings and further

strengthens its go-to-market strategies.

SAS (Ovum recommendation: Market leader)Figure 14: SAS radar diagrams

Source: Ovum


SAS obtained the third-highest overall score in the Ovum Decision Matrix following our assessment of

its customer analytics offering for telecoms. Assessment of the vendor's strategy execution was

delivered the vendor's strongest performance relative to its market impact and technology

assessment.

Product and strategy

SAS is a well-established player in the analytics space, drawing on its extensive analytics capabilities

to help CSPs excel at achieving customer centricity. In addition to its strong analytical capabilities, the

vendor has been investing in AI techniques such as machine learning to help CSPs deliver unique



and personalized customer experience, deliver real-time omnichannel customer engagement, and

optimize the customer journey.

The vendor has enhanced its analytics offer for the telco industry. In addition to the vendor's broad

portfolio of customer analytics offerings to the CSP market, the vendor recently added a new product

offering – SAS Customer Intelligence 360. SAS Customer Intelligence 360 is a SaaS-based marketing

analytics suite that allows CSPs to create relevant customer engagements, based on customer data

obtained from digital channels. SAS Customer Intelligence 360 complements the vendor's on-

premises Customer Intelligence product, by providing a link to the later to gain a 360-degree view of

the customer. SAS Customer Intelligence 360 runs on the SAS Analytics platform and consists of two

main applications:

360 Discover collects data from digital interactions and feeds the SAS analytics engine to

obtain insights.

360 Engage then uses the insights from the SAS analytics engine to deliver meaningful

engagement with customers across digital channels such as web, chat, email, and mobile

apps.

Core to the vendor's telecoms-specific customer analytics offering is the Customer Link Analytics

solution. Customer Link Analytics aims to improve customer acquisition, retention, cross-sell, and

upsell. It provides a visualization of customers' social connections, allowing CSPs to identify influential

customers and their followers. Once influencers are identified and their behavior analyzed, CSPs can

plan targeted campaigns for them and test new campaigns, products, and services. Clearly, the

vendor's partnership strategy is paying off, as many CSPs have adopted Customer Link Analytics,

with examples including Deutsche Telekom operations in Greece (OTE Group), Poland, and the US,

Claro in Brazil and Chile, Telecom Italia, and Orascom in Tunisia.


Strengths

SAS is a well-recognized player in the analytics space. The vendor continues to evolve its

analytics capabilities as a differentiator, using state-of-the-art analytics capabilities like

machine learning to deliver personalized customer experiences.

A strong partner ecosystem which includes vendors such as Amdocs has helped SAS

develop key telecoms-focused customer analytics offerings such as Customer Link

Analytics. In the services space, SAS has been working with Accenture and Capgemini to

bring its offerings to the telecoms market.

SAS has a strong customer base within the telecoms space. Customer wins cut across

top-tier telcos such as Telstra, AT&T, Telenor, Telecom Italia, T-Mobile US, and Telefónica.

The latest additions to SAS portfolio – 360 Engage and 360 Discover – demonstrate the

vendor's digital capabilities. These products are delivered as cloud-based analytical offerings,

meaning that customers can get access to regular updates and latest releases, by contrast

with traditional solutions that are updated once or twice a year.

Weaknesses

SAS's dependence on its partner ecosystem for its go-to-market strategy sees the

vendor not owning most of the relationships. Also, with a high proportion of revenues



coming from software licenses, margins are smaller compared to offerings where the vendor

can deliver both services and products to the telecoms customers.

The vendor has fewer customer analytics customer references in domains other than

marketing and sales. Marketing remains the vendor's strongest offer into the telecoms

industry. This limitation in terms of coverage is likely to impact the vendor's position as it sells

into the CSP market.

Compared to other vendors assessed in this research, SAS had the least number of

services employees dedicated to the telecoms industry. While the vendor has partnered

with several high-ranking IT service providers to fill its services gap, its capabilities to deliver a

full end-to-end analytics solution is limited by the extent of its services.

The large number of products included within SAS customer analytics offering implies that a

high level of systems integration is required to deliver a solution to a telco customer.

Opportunities

The SAS Data Management offering (includes several SAS products focused on the

management and processing of data assets), if included to its customer analytics offer to the

telco, will be beneficial in multiple ways. For example, as a solution to enable CSPs to comply

with EU's GDPR legislation would be valuable, as CSPs look to the monetization of data

services.

The recent release of SAS Viya is likely to provide more potential for rolling out more

integrated solutions for SAS's telecoms clients. Through SAS Viya, the vendor is

attempting to build a common platform for its business intelligence, analytics, and big data

products. SAS Viya is a cloud-enabled analytics engine providing a HTML5-based user

interface which provides business users with access to the vendor's BI capabilities. CSP

customers that buy into SAS Viya can get access to specific capabilities as required without

incurring high license costs for the entire stack.

Threats

While SAS has a strong position in the analytics space, especially with respect to marketing

automation and optimization, the vendor could lose market share to vendors that can satisfy

the need for customer analytics in network-related areas such as network optimization. In the

move toward being customer centric, CSPs are adopting customer analytics capabilities like

customer segmentation in network operations to ensure that their network operations have a

direct impact on customer experience. Thus, NEP players such as Huawei, Ericsson, and

Nokia, which are quickly ramping up their analytics capabilities, could win the attention of

CSPs. SAS will need to deliver more solutions in the network-related domains to compete

effectively against the network players.

SAS's position could be threatened by players that are innovating solutions specific to

the CSP market. To compete effectively, SAS needs to go beyond Customer Link Analytics

as its only telecoms-specific analytics solution. Several developments are occurring within the

industry which provides SAS with more leverage to deploy industry-specific solutions. For

example, mining data coming from IoT devices, and connecting the data with network-related

data, and customer profile data, will provide CSPs with new opportunities. SDN and NFV

technologies also provides another platform for the vendor to deliver more value to its CSP



customers. Packaging an offer specific to CSPs, which takes advantage of the industry's

expertise and evolving trends, will go a long way to fortifying the vendor's position.


SAS remains a strong analytics player within the telecoms industry. It has a deep and extensive suite

of analytics capabilities that many CSPs have bought into and which supports many of the innovations

that these CSPs have delivered. However, its relatively limited services capabilities limit its ability to

own these relationships. Telecoms-focused vendors could pose a threat to SAS as these vendors

ramp up their analytics assets, partnering with other analytics providers to strengthen their offerings.

SAS needs to take on more strategic steps to drive ownership of its CSP engagements while at the

same developing new telco-specific offerings. The industry is ripe with several opportunities for

analytics beyond marketing.

Appendix

MethodologyVendor positioning is based on the analysis of a number of subcriteria for each of three primary

criteria: Technology, execution, and market impact. A breakdown of each vendor's scores across each

dimension is provided within each vendor profile. Based on the combined scoring, Ovum evaluates

the top vendors that telcos should shortlist, consider, or explore in a customer analytics solution

selection process.

This assessment is based on the following methodology:

Based on our initial assessment of the customer analytics solutions market for telcos, we

invited a number of vendors to respond to a detailed RFI that asked them to provide data and

supporting documentation around three primary criteria: Market impact, customer analytics

technology, and execution.

In addition to the RFI responses, Ovum invited vendors to provide solution briefings and

product demonstrations.

Analysis of the three primary criteria was based on a scoring assessment exercise

undertaken for a number of subcriteria. For each response within the RFI that aligned to the

respective subcriteria, Ovum rated vendors on a scale of 0–10 based on a consistent set of

best practice standards or benchmarks defined by Ovum. We then aggregated these to

provide a score for each of the three primary criteria.

Further reading C-Level Insights on Telcos' Use of Customer Analytics Tools, IT0012-000125 (June 2015)

AuthorAdaora Okeleke, Senior Analyst, Telecoms Operations and IT

[email protected]


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Ovum ConsultingWe hope that this analysis will help you make informed and imaginative business decisions. If you

have further requirements, Ovum’s consulting team may be able to help you. For more information

about Ovum’s consulting capabilities, please contact us directly at [email protected].

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