Big Data empowered messaging
How to boost telco legacy services profitability?
Messaging: the other way.
Celebrating its 23rd year of existence, Text Messaging/SMS may be today considered as a
legacy technology, like any circuit switched-based services (e.g voice). Yet, despite the
ongoing trend in revenue decrease for legacy services, operators have to maintain
investments to keep their service up and running continuously, across all network
generations.
Messaging evolution is still unclear from a service layer perspective (IM, RCS or any other
telco OTT like initiative). However, basic SMS will be maintained for a very long time
despite the increasing competition of OTT messaging as market size still reaches $100B
per year*, and SMS still has stunning advantages over alternative OTT/Internet
technologies. Telcos’ solution providers may base their offer on RCS or on a very low price
strategy, but they prove insufficient to best address messaging market potential.
Another approach is possible. Main Big Data drivers enable Telco's to explore new revenues streams and to optimize QoS and costs (e.g network
planning etc.). What if legacy telco services like messaging could directly benefit from Big Data capabilities, for an increased long term unbeatable
profitability? The aim of this paper is to share another vision of the messaging market through our experience: Introducing Big Data empowered
messaging.
You said
Big Data?
*: CFCA –Informa Telecom and Media
Text Messaging is not dead!
Foreseeing a soon-to-be dead SMS becomes commonplace…sometimes for relevant reasons
(Absurdly complex operators’ tariff plans, lack of feature compared with OTT etc), but also because
in a fast-evolving environment, services are considered obsolete, at the very moment
they are actually peaking. Taking a step back and looking at real and tangible market figures may
provide a different perspective, more inspiring for Telcos’ messaging strategy in the coming years.
What analysts call the Person to Person/P2P messaging- is just a portion of the SMS
market. The other part includes all the SMS notifications you receive after subscribing
to a service, making a payment etc., called Application to Peer/A2P or Enterprise SMS. If
SMS P2P revenues are declining, A2P SMS is an opportunity that operators are
discretely grasping.
Despite the challenges ahead, an ideal messaging solution would enable operators to
fully exploit the A2P opportunity, by answering to the technical needs like
consolidation, future proofing, value generating features and the business needs (need
to best combat fraud, and reduce operational expenditures).
The discrete rise of A2P
SMS: the ever lasting benefits’
Operators have a prevalent position, as they only can deliver SMS.
As a consequence, operators are maintaining SMS service across all generations of networks. As an example, 4G
network standards have implemented SMS delivery functionality in MME (Sgs for CS fallback, and Sgd interface for
devices supporting 4G only). Operators ensure excellent reliability in messaging delivery, across all countries and
operators.
From an end-user perspective, Text SMS is perceived more reliable and secured. Thus for
sensitive information (password, bank notifications, etc.), an overwhelming 96% of them
would rather receive notifications through SMS than through any other messaging system.
From a marketer and content provider standpoint, the choice of SMS is obvious. When
launching marketing campaigns, a company can be fairly certain to reach any
customer via SMS thanks to its universality (device agnosticity), its reliability and its
instant-reach nature (statistics show 98% of users read their SMS less than 15 minutes after
receiving it).
Nowadays, no other messaging technology enables this!
What can we learn from end-users?
TODAY’S CHALLENGES FOR OPERATORS
Optimized costs & Future-proof infrastructures
In order to maintain an optimized level of profitability, operators are facing three main challenges:
Overlay networks enable to maximize profitability for messaging streams that are still generating revenues with no impact of the legacy, known for
being costly, very long projects with huge complexity. Overlay infrastructures shall therefore be based on different technology approach.
Why you should invest in a messaging overlay network?
Overlay infrastructure: the smartest answer?
Embeds more flexibility and
features to best address A2P market
opportunity
Is prepared for next generation networks
and is IMS ready
Is ready for next Industry
requirements opportunities, e.g. for SMS in M2M
1
Maintain legacy infrastructure
up and running while continuously lowering
their operational expenses through
consolidation, negotiation rounds with legacy
suppliers
Future proof messaging infrastructure
Operators need to maintain messaging services
across next generation networks evolutions - 4G
and IMS based services evolutions (drivers may
be VoLTE or communication offload over wifi).
Messaging infrastructures shall be ready for
virtualization and compliant with SDN standard
Keep enough flexibility
Enhance control of Content Providers/3rd
parties to maximize revenues, while exploring
new revenue streams for SMS like M2M (need
of new standard interfaces implementation)
for MTC (Machine Type Communication)
2 3
A2P Fraud P2P Fraud Spam & Scam Virus Abnormal Traffic
• Grey routes • SIM boxes
• MO Spoofing • MT Faking • Grey routes • SIM boxes
• Lottery Scam • 300M spams
sent /day
• Android SMS worm
• OTA virus
• Flooding • Repetition
$ 23B estimated revenue leakage between 2013 &
2018*
Average 30% of operators revenue lost on terminating
revenues*
• Induced costs (>$ 1M/attack)
• Brand image impact
Brand image impact • Abusive network usages
• Affected QoS
Fraud: stop revenue leakages!
Fraud impact on A2P messaging revenues deeply affects operators in certain regions (e.g LATAM), representing tens to hundreds millions dollars loss
for Tier-1 operators. Fraudsters’ imagination is unlimited and operators’ anti-fraud solutions are usually not flexible enough to adapt. Part of the
Fraud remains undetected, or when it’s known, operators usually may not have the ability to block it at early stage and to launch preventive actions.
FRAUD CASES
IMPACTS ON OPERATORS
SMS Firewalls are the standard solutions to
block messaging Fraud and have proven
efficient for certain kinds of Fraud like
spamming. However it is clearly inefficient for
advanced fraud patterns like IP based grey
routes (SIM Boxes) which can only be detected
through advanced analytic capabilities or with
3rd party solution (Test Call Generators etc ).
$23B $46B Telcos’ revenues loss due to Fraud every year *
Messaging revenues loss due to Fraud from 2013 to 2018 *
* CFCA -Communications Fraud Control Association * Source GSA Forum
The Big Data approach : SUBLIMATE THE EXISTING
Messaging market expects new rules intersec Big Data solutions are built upon common high-performance core technology that is specifically designed to manage Big Data streams, in real-time. Intersec solutions are designed to be efficient, mass-scale and highly performant, thanks to a genuine software development approach, which enables hardware-optimized capabilities whilst remaining portable and hardware-agnostic.
Intersec Messaging Suite/Ignition benefits from these fundamental unique advantages, allowing to offer a unique break through value proposition on the market. Operators leverage new advanced software capabilities to maximize legacy services profitability. Here below is explained how the Big Data empowered approach changes rules.
Messaging and Big data technology: tangible key benefits
There are obvious key benefits of Big Data empowered technology on legacy services, which are reflected on both commercial and technical layers:
A unique break through licensing model: Providing operators with a unique licensing model which is not based on traffic level, or number of subscribers. It’s an all you can eat model, operators just have no limit anymore in traffic licenses. Growth in traffic (during peaks, exceptional events or just because of sustainable subscriber base growth) is not a worry anymore.
Outstanding performance:
• Drastic Hardware footprint reductions: When legacy solutions usually require more than 15 servers to manage messaging traffic above 10.000 msg/sec, operators now can rely on 4 servers, with the same level of service availability.
• Best optimized HW resources consumption and cooling systems: to relieve operators’ pain points in regions where needs of energy is an everyday challenge.
Virtualization ready: Operators strategy aims to migrate legacy services towards Datacenters and virtualized infrastructures. Intersec technology is hardware agnostic, and embeds very little 3rd party code. Every critical software component (e.g SS7 stack, Database) is kept under control to enable appropriate optimizations. This is especially relevant in the context of a virtualization project.
There are obvious key benefits of Big Data empowered technology on legacy services, which can be reflected on both commercial and technical layers:
Big data capabilities can sublimate traditional messaging features, and provide a pragmatic answer to today’s
operators’ challenges in maintaining optimal profitability on messaging services. Intersec Messaging Solution
successfully addresses this by focusing on the following fields:
Sublimate traditional messaging
Messaging Fraud Management System
Intersec Messaging Solution embeds a unique consolidated Messaging Fraud Management System. It combines
traditional Messaging Firewall capabilities with advanced real time Big Data analytics capabilities. Thus enabling
the following main key benefits for Operators:
• Detect a much wider portfolio of fraudulent patterns
• Reduce time between detection and blocking rules implementation, significantly
• Counteract fraudsters imagination through a pragmatic and flexible analytics approach
Operators can now detect advanced fraudulent patterns, and implement consequently the relevant blocking rules to protect their customers and
sustainably reduce revenues leakages due to messaging Fraud. Operators implementing Fraud management systems to protect from
messaging Fraud realized they were loosing above 80% of their messaging revenues.
Combining flexible firewall and advanced analytics is a promising opportunity to reduce messaging Fraud losses and costs of Fraud
Unified reporting: easy!
Reporting capabilities are required by different operators’ teams: Operation& Maintenance Customer Care, Marketing.
Telco Value Added Services are usually made of silos, from different vendors. Obtaining a data rich consolidated reporting, that can
transversally fulfill the needs of the operators, remains painful and sometimes an impossible challenge for operators. O&M Reporting Tools Customer Care
Business Reporting Tools
VAS platforms Core Network Others
VMS
SMSC
MMSC
USSD STP
HLR
MSC
EIR OTH.
OTH. DWH
CRM
HARD WORK HARD WORK HARD WORK
SOME REAL KEY BENEFITS
• Consolidation: O&M, Business Reporting and Customer Care, all in one
• Empowerment: no more silos, all Business Units benefit from enriched information
• Monetization: Reporting services available to third parties
O&M Reporting Tools Customer Care
Business Reporting Tools
VAS platforms Core Network Others
VMS
SMSC
MMSC
USSD
STP
HLR
MSC
EIR OTH.
OTH. DWH
CRM
Unified Reporting
From painful reporting process To easy unified reporting
Simplify & future proof Operators’ legacy infrastructures evolutions has led to building new components on top of already existing network elements. Most of the
situations result in operators getting complex silo infrastructures involving different vendors, with potential interoperability issues, and lack of
agility.
A consolidated approach enables
operators to reduce up to 50% of
CAPEX and OPEX
IP
Content providers
3rd party VAS
SS7
MSC HLR IMS Core
OCS IN
SMS-C IP MMS-C
One consolidated framework
Consolidation enables getting rid of interoperability issues
between traditional separated and vendor dependent core
components. Service continuity towards network evolution is made less
complex. Whether a message has to be delivered with SS7 or SIP(IMS
network), now becomes a matter of software feature activation.
Intersec’s Big Data empowered messaging
Intersec’s flexible architecture and messaging features
consolidation capabilities enable operators to build a tailored and
future proof overlay network to best address messaging Business
profitability challenges. Big Data empowered messaging value
proposition aims to provide operators with the last messaging
infrastructure they will ever need to buy.
About Intersec
Leading provider of real-time telco Big Data processing
software, Intersec designs innovative platforms converting Big
Data into real time actionable assets.
Intersec’s award-winning products are designed to efficiently
implement operator’s loyalty & retention, value creation and
cost optimization strategies.
Through its disruptive technology, Intersec empowers mobile
network operators with many value-creation business cases in
the fields of Customer Experience Management, mass-scale
LBS monetization and augmented messaging profitability.
Acclaimed by 70+ references, Intersec technology enhances
the experience of several hundred million subscribers
worldwide and manages over a billion events day after day.
www.intersec.com