The demands on the telecom- munications industry today are creating an ever-increasing need to obtain the right information from the right place at the right time, specialist information technology (IT) company PBT Group director Nitesh Vallabh tells Engineering News.

He adds that business intelligence (BI), which allows for the analysis of business data, should be a key business focus area for telecommunications participants, as it is key to thriving in a competitive marketplace and staying ahead of the competition.

“What we are seeing, and this is from our clients in the telecommunications industry’s point of view, is that the demands facing the telecommunications industry are the ever-changing needs of customers,” comments Vallabh.

The industry has become cheaper and industry participants are looking at ways to keep customers, because the average revenue for each user is dropping.

“The issue has become how to sustain and increase revenue levels, while reducing cost of opera- tion. Even if one manages to increase revenue levels, and if one has a high cost of operation, one will still be unable to make a profit,” explains Vallabh, adding that not every customer is a big spender. One of the aspects BI lets clients look at is the communication usage patterns of subscribers.

“If someone is using a phone regu-larly and paying bills regularly, you do not want to lose the client to a second operator. With BI, one monitors the data from all operating systems and identifies high-usage subscribers,” says Vallabh.

He adds that BI allows clients to take data from different parts of the business, identify problem areas across the business, and intervene if need be.

Further, Vallabh comments that many vendors of BI solutions have made promises to the industry they have been unable to keep.

“It is easy to create a software demo that looks great when working with small sets of data. Clients think they can easily use the software by clicking a few buttons, while, in reality, there is a lot of back-end work that needs to be done,” explains Vallabh.

He adds that there is a large volume of data that comes in at different times. Bringing the data together at the same time is a complex process.

“Selling the software and implementing it are two different things. “When it comes to the implementation of the software, many product vendors have not kept their promises to clients,” says Vallabh.

PBT Group is product independent and focuses on the implementation of BI software solutions.

“We focus on implementing BI solutions. There are huge expectations from clients and we need to educate the clients to do a little bit at a time and complete the process piece by piece, rather than trying to do it all at once,” comments Vallabh.

“Companies are starting to converge and clients are starting to understand that one cannot take a normal systems approach as with a normal operating system. The same rules do not apply. It is a continuous educational process and each company is at a different stage of the life cycle and thus experiences things differently,” he notes.

Companies need to assess where in the life cycle they are. Start-up companies need basic operating information such as the number of subscribers.

He states that BI is all about predicting and anticipating what is happening and what is going to happen in the business.

“A lot of corporate companies have the basic BI in place and are implementing dashboards across all operations within the company. “They are not duplicating work and are getting the economy of scales right. Companies are, however, still not using BI when it comes to the higher-end analytics. They need to realise that BI is an experiential tool and one needs to work with it. You cannot just press a button and get answers; it’s more like looking for the best diamonds,” says Vallabh.

Further, many telecommunications companies do not really know their customers, although they are aware of how many subscribers they have.

“Lots of companies are going through the segmentation challenge and are trying to figure out who their customers are; however, it is a difficult challenge that cannot be solved overnight,” he comments.

In the meantime, revenue generation for new product developments is another reason for implementing BI solutions.

“New products are launched mainly to reduce the cost of operating or to increase revenue. The issue is how a company will know whether pro-duct development will achieve the desired results. One needs data and needs to put this data in simulation mode to determine the result,” notes Vallabh.

The PBT Group is a specialist IT company that provides business solutions and services to various industries. It was started in 1991 and has been black economically empowered since 2004.

“We have also started an application development competence, which is a natural growth area for us. Being product independent is key for our business. We focus on solution and system integration,” says Vallabh.

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