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

Want a demo? Call us!

contact@intersec.com / +33 1 55 70 33 55