Ontology Systems has recently announced the results of research carried out in April this year by Telesperience, the independent telecom and IT analysts. Data misalignment has long been recognized as a chronic problem for CSPs running large OSS/BSS infrastructure. Telesperience’s research reveals just how widespread a problem it is and how difficult it is to solve.
Data misalignment can be defined to mean: “A situation where software solutions either cannot get the data they need when they need it or else cannot rely on the data being accurate, both of which affect the solution’s performance”.
The highlights of the research are:
• Data misalignment kills CSP efficiency.
• 96% of CSPs surveyed suffer operational or financial impacts from misaligned data
• Customer experience and service management suffer.
• 75% find that data misalignment damages their customers’ experience
• Revenue leaks are a direct result.
• 75% need to align their data to improve billing accuracy
Most significantly, 0% of the CSPs surveyed have solved the data misalignment problem: 42% saying it’s too expensive, and over 50% saying it’s too complex and they can’t find effective tools.
Teresa Cottam, Research and Publications Director at Telesperience who carried out the research comments: “The overwhelming message from the research was that CSPs told us solving data misalignment would help them tackle their key revenue management, service management and customer experience goals, yet no CSP in the sample had solved the data misalignment problem citing cost and lack of available tools as the main barriers.”
The research reveals the following data misalignment trends:
• 96% of respondents said they suffer operational or financial impacts resulting from data misalignment
• 75% said data misalignment damages customer experience
• 75% said it prevents or delays full automation
• 63% said it drives up customer complaints
• 96% said solving the problem would have a positive impact on their customers
• 58% said they are continually trying to fix it…
• …yet no CSP in the sample has solved it to date, with:
• 58% saying it is too complex a problem
• 54% saying tools they have tried aren’t effective
• 42% saying it is too expensive
• 37% saying they spend more than USD500,000 on tackling it
Cottam noted: “The extent and impact of data misalignment upon CSPs’ business was worryingly high with 96% of respondents saying they did suffer either operational or commercial impacts from poorly aligned data.” Cottam continues: “Interestingly, those spending the most on fixing data misalignment were not the biggest CSPs, but instead those with 1-10 million subscribers who accounted for 56% of those spending more than USD500,000”.
Benedict Enweani, Ontology’s CEO, comments: “The research highlights the scale and size of the problems caused by misaligned data and the challenges that CSPs face trying to unleash the value in their OSS/BSS data.” Enweani continues: “From the get go, we knew that traditional tools and approaches would be costly to deploy and ultimately have very little impact. For this very reason, when we developed OSS/CAD, we turned to the field of semantics and ontologies as the only cost-effective and capable method of tackling data misalignment in complex systems such as OSS/BSS.”
Enweani concludes: “Today, experience with our customers who use OSS/CAD’s semantic engine to fix data misalignment and tackle OSS/BSS complexity, shows that they are able to align data and keep it aligned, stop revenue leaks and find stranded assets, manage services with confidence, and accelerate and unblock failing transformations. They are managing it with unprecedented speed and, according to the results of the survey, at a fraction of the cost of other CSPs.”
To carry out the research, Telesperience spoke to 24 service providers of various types (fixed/wireless, mobile/wireline, multi-service operator and ISP) and various sizes (from those with less than one million subscribers to those with over 40 million). Research participants came from many geographical markets including: Northern & Western Europe, Middle East & Africa, Central & Southern Asia, North America, Asia Pacific, and Central & Eastern Europe. The core of this sample was multi-service operators.
The full report is available for download from Ontology’s website at http://www.ontology.com/telesperience.