Industry Leader in Telecom Data Analytics and Revenue Assurance

Being in the software business for 20+ years, I’ve both feared and admired open-source.  On the one hand, we’ve benefited from it so thoroughly that it’s easy to overlook that we’re standing on ‘shoulders of giants’ every morning from the moment we boot up a Linux VM, to whatever PERL or Python module we’ll download or upgrade during the day.  We’ve made modest contributions along the way, but we’ve never taken the plunge of actually open-sourcing our own wares -- even though, economically and technically, our own customers have benefited from indirectly from them. After all, building our apps around open source has - over the long-term - kept our own customer’s total cost of ownership down, and kept openness and reliability up.  In this post, I’d like to explore an often-overlooked aspect of open-source:  it’s ability to help you close more sales by including an ‘infrastructure call option’ for your prospects.

At ATS, we work at the intersection of Telecom and IT and, in order to focus our efforts on what we’re really good at, we outsource our IT wherever possible.  So, naturally, we’ve turned to a few of the big cloud providers for help here.  If you’re using our services, you’re also using AWS’ and Google Cloud Platform -- they’re both too big and impressive for any mid-size software company like us to ignore, and we firmly believe our customers are better served when we focus on what we're really good at, which is developing software.   But, when you dig a little deeper, you realize that some of the cloud providers' tech offerings tell a tale of how they got big and impressive in the first place.  What can the Telco industry learn from the rise of these Retail and Search giants, given what they've exposed as cloud services?  

If you’re reading this, you’re probably the kind of person who’s attended a Big Data conference, and maybe find yourself sitting in on those “How to scale to your first x million users”.  The problem is that in the real world, the problem isn’t so much scaling up from a prototype into production, but having enough horsepower to wrangle data in the conceptual phase, then scale down into a business application (then scale up again when customers want access to the raw data, but I’m getting ahead of myself.)  As an industry, we’ve relied too heavily on borrowed-terms from architecture because the analogy breaks down when you consider that an architect doesn’t usually have to build first.   Here, we’ll look at how  Google’s BigQuery helped us do just that.

ATS’ COO Peter Mueller was asked to present at the KTA-TTA Fall Conference on the topic of Big Data Analytics for Rural ILECs.  Peter covers topics ranging from how to get started with cloud storage to how carriers can user their data to increase revenue and improve service levels.  The presentation has been broken up into 6 sections.

In this episode of ATS Chalk Talk, COO Peter Mueller looks at the technical and economic rationale for having telcos embrace the public cloud. A brief explanation of MapReduce and Amazon Web Services are presented from the vantage point of sifting through Call Detail Records (CDRs).

Revenue Assurance, as an industry, has always been in a bit of a Catch-22: You’re only great if you find a lot of (otherwise) lost revenue, but your tools and processes aren’t worth much if you keep finding the same kinds of errors year after year. By definition, then, (and much to the chagrin of many an RA consultant) a good RA tool is one that finds less and less as time goes on.