IBM made two acquisitions over the last week aimed at enhancing both big data and customer experience. Focusing on communications service providers (CSPs), Big Blue announced a definitive agreement to acquire The Now Factory, a privately held provider of analytics software that helps CSPs deliver a better customer experience and drive new revenue opportunities.
IBM said that The Now Factory complements the IBM MobileFirst Analytics portfolio and targets CSPs since it provides telcoms an opportunity to gain real-time insight into their customers’ behavior by analyzing massive quantities of network and business data. “With this type of insight, CSPs can provide an enhanced quality of service to their customers by better managing negative experiences and network outages,” IBM stated.
In another move, IBM aimed to address the huge amount of rapidly growing unstructured data. The recent acquisition of Daeja Image Systems Ltd. will help IBM make it easier for business and IT professionals to view large documents and images.
Financial terms of both acquisitions were not disclosed.
Millionaire opportunity—Mind Commerce announced that the big data driven telecom analytics market will grow at a CAGR of nearly 50% between 2014 and 2019, reaching $5.4 billion in annual revenue by the end of 2019. The market research firm noted that mobile network operators have already begun big data investments to facilitate analytics. Mind Commerce citied South Korea’s SK Telecom as an example. The company is utilizing the technology to cut churn and to generate new revenue. AT&T and China Mobile are also eyeing opportunities to generate revenue from the subscriber data they hold in their back-office systems.
SK Telecom chooses local firm—SK Telecom, the biggest telecom operator in Korea, has chosen to adopt a local big data service provider instead of a foreign company. SK Telecom tapped Gruter’s platform for big data analytics . Park Geun-tae, the SK Telecom manager who is taking part in the project, told local papers that SK Telecom has opted to work together with Gruter because its technological standards are on par with those of foreign companies, and coordination with the local company is expected to be much smoother.
More news from the telecom analytics market:
- Bull acquired FastConnect to speed up its development in cloud computing and big data.
- Devtodev, an all-in-one mobile analytics platform, has opened a free developer beta version to mobile app developers. The next generation platform aims to provide key in-app analytics and market intelligence.
- The “connected enterprise” and big data analytics will be the top machine-to-machine (M2M) trends in 2014. The wireless analyst firm Berg Insight noted in a report that the number of mobile network connections used for wireless M2M communication will increase by 22% in 2013 to reach 164.5 million worldwide.
The telecom analytics series provides weekly insights on trends, new products and other topics that touch on the advantages and monetization opportunities of analytics tools for telecom operators, including big data, business intelligence, customer experience analysis and management, business analytics and network analytics.
