Tara Neal, Executive Editor at The Fast Mode ran a brief interview with Benny Yehezkel, Chief Revenue Officer at SQream on the company's showcases and demonstrations at the ongoing AsiaTech x Singapore 2022 event. Benny explores the growing opportunities that big data offers for operators, especially in improving customer experience and quality of service (QoS).
Tara: Do you think telecom operators are making the best use of all the data they generate? Why or why not?
Benny: Today, most telecom operators analyze less than 20% of their generated and collected data due to a lack of computing power, skills, and budget resources. For example, operators using Hadoop data lake experience performance pains - they are not able to analyze the stored data in full and cannot expand their analytics - and spend a lot of money on infrastructure.
In order to win, they must analyze more data, much faster and more cost-effectively. Moreover, transforming some of the workloads to the cloud (while leaving some on-prem) means that operators must work with hybrid tools allowing them to handle and query data both on-prem and in the cloud. This will also result in infrastructure cost savings.
Tara: How have 5G and IoT changed the collection and use of big data?
Benny: Big data is not only about collecting the data, but primarily about generating insights. The massive data and signal streams of all kinds such as geolocation, connectivity logs, IOT etc., coming from millions of connected devices and network elements, are creating even bigger data - both in terms of ability to ingest in time, and in terms of deriving insights while the data is still relevant. This requires the operator to scale up their data stack, to support daily petabytes of data with minimized time to insights.
Tara: What are the emerging trends within big data, analytics and AI that operators can leverage to improve areas such as network optimization, QoS, CX and NaaS?
Benny: Analyzing QoS, CX events and mostly NWDAF (network data analytics function) is challenging. The data is collected from several systems that are deployed to better understand service usage, and the analysts need to cross-join with the information from the BTS to capture the exact location of the subscriber and the customer complaints to Customer Service in the last 24-hours. The amount of events and data to be analyzed makes these cross-joins unfeasible on most platforms - and creates a situation that causes bad experiences and churns. Big data is not only about collecting the data. It is also about analyzing it in minimum time and getting actionable insights when it matters. Operators who understand that and use fast large-scale solutions such as SQream will win.
Tara: What are the other industries (apart from telco) where data and analytics is playing a significant part (in terms of operations, business strategies, etc)? What can telecom operators learn from these industries?
Benny: When facing customers, the urgency of solving issues and preventing churn is similar in every industry, such as finance and retail. In finance, fast big data analytics is crucial for better service, fraud detection, etc.
Also, in technological manufacturing, anomaly detection is a crucial part of the process in order to improve yield and reduce production costs. To keep the manufacturing efficiency, manufacturers must analyze as much data as possible, as soon as it is streamed, to find issues in minimum time and reduce the slack.
Tara: What are SQream's highlights for ATxSG 2022? What are your major showcases?
Benny: During the show, SQream will be demonstrating our rapid TTTI (Total Time to Insights) solution for peta-size datasets on telecom use cases. We will also show how SQream’s hybrid platform, which works both on cloud and on-prem, performs better versus other solutions in all aspects - Total Time to Insights, Total Cost of Ownership, and the ability to scale.
Benny is responsible for SQream’s global sales and business growth. Benny brings over 20 years of global business leadership. Prior to joining SQream, Benny served in various executive positions in startups and matured and listed Hi-Tech companies such as RadCloud, a cloud and security company; MyPensya, a cloud fintech platform; Quantum Telecom, a cloud-based cellular platform; and ECtel, revenue assurance and fraud detection analytics company.
