Competitive Edge For Telcos: Cost Effective, High Performance Storage Is Key

The telecommunications industry has changed dramatically over the past decade in response to evolving technology and revenue streams no longer come from the same directions they once did. With everything from infrastructure to voice calls and data becoming heavily commoditised, the only way for Telcos to compete is through customer service.

In order to do this, it is essential to deeply understand customers and their needs, which requires analysis of large sets of historical customer data. However, in a heavily commoditised market, it is just as critical to optimise costs wherever possible and storage is a significant cost centre.

Telcos need intelligent platforms to deliver cost-effective, high-performance storage to help them create a competitive edge in the market.

Increased pressure, decreased revenue

Telcos used to be formidable players in the technology space, with powerful data centres that enabled them to be among the first providers of cloud and hosting services. However, in the last ten years infrastructure has become a commodity and the competitive landscape has shifted with new players entering the market.

There is very little product differentiation among Telco providers and revenues cannot be derived from previously profitable streams like voice and data, which are also now commodities. As data volumes have increased, Telcos are also faced with rapidly accelerating storage requirements, which exacerbates the cost pressures that they are facing.

In order to remain competitive, Telcos need to find innovative ways of delivering new services and improving the customer experience while controlling costs to optimise margins. This requires sophisticated data analytics in near real-time, which in turn requires high-performance storage capability. Balancing the need to reduce storage costs while at the same time increasing storage performance is a challenge that can only be solved using intelligent storage platforms and technology.

Single platform, single view

Remaining competitive in the current landscape means Telcos have to offer more services and an improved experience to retain their customers. Analytics can provide the insights required but poses a number of challenges. Siloes of data make it all but impossible to gain a single view of a customer and a fragmented view results in inaccurate insights, which can result in poorly aligned services and products.

The infrastructure challenge also increases costs, since real-time analytics needs high-performance storage, which is typically expensive, and analytics cannot effectively be performed on archive data. The key is to have all data sets in one place and the ability to perform analytics on these data sets as a cohesive whole.

The intelligent approach

From a storage point of view, Telcos should look towards a consolidated platform that provides performance and scale at an affordable price, to facilitate analysis while controlling costs. An intelligent data storage platform offers capacity on demand that removes data siloes and enhances performance, enabling more effective analytical capabilities. This allows for more intelligent decision making and increased business agility, thus facilitating better customer service, with high performance, while at the same time reducing the cost of storage.

Today, Telcos need to improve their infrastructure and data storage capacities, enabling them to be more agile and capable of handling the growing amount of data that their customers create. They also need to be able to analyse their data to leverage insight and intelligence to improve their product offerings. Intelligent storage platforms are the solution to maximising data performance and reducing costs while facilitating these requirements for enhanced return on investment, better customer service and improved competitiveness.

Source: itnewsafrica