Big Data for Interconnect Voice…What’s the Big Deal?

Okay, so by now, we have all heard about Big Data. Yes, it’s great. It’s awesome. It’s changing industries. It’s helping companies better understand their customers and, therefore, become more responsive. It’s making the business world more effective and efficient. It’s the panacea. It’s the holy grail.  

Big Data is clearly a Big Deal.

It is having major impacts across all industries, including interconnect voice. Big Data is now part and parcel of a carrier’s approach to their interconnect voice business. If it’s not, then that carrier better start looking into it asap, because their competitors are and those carriers who haven’t leveraged it yet, are going to fall behind quickly.

In the interconnect voice marketplace, where massive amounts of data are exchanged on a daily basis, Big Data is central to the day-to-day operations of a voice carrier. Think about it.  Take the number of carriers you are interconnected with and multiply that by the number of rows in their rate sheet. Is it 1k, 11k, 1Million? Now multiply that by the number of rate changes you get weekly and add to that the number of calls, CDRs, and hunt attempts you are processing. Now add in exchange rates. The numbers become quite staggering. It’s kind of funny that Big Data has become so popular because, in the telecom world, we are all like, “Really? What took you people so long? We’ve been confronting and leveraging big data for years!”

Interconnect voice OSS & BSS providers are particularly challenged because of the time window they need to process massive amounts of data. It’s no simple software or hardware task to manage. We dedicate a large portion of our R&D and software engineering resources to confront this challenge of volume and speed. The two are opposing forces that require innovation. Think about it. As the volume increases by an order of magnitude, the time frame never changes. It’s static. So, in the interconnect voice world, we see tripling, or even quadrupling of data volume of the past 12-18 months, but the time frame to process has not changed. Think about A# origination and the volume of rate information that is now generated and processed. It’s mind boggling.

Big Data is critical to interconnect voice.  It’s Big, really Big.

How are you handling it? How is your vendor handling it?