ET Bureau NEW DELHI: Technology major IBM is in active talks with India's mobile phone carriers for implementing data analytics tools to help service providers get more revenue out of existing customers and improve their product offering by better understanding customer demands.
With telcos sitting on tonnes of information about each mobile phone user, Vikas Sehgal, IBM India and South Asia's director for telecom industry, feels authorised information can be tapped into for giving more intuitive and tailor made solutions to customers.
He added telcos were adopting new technologies but for different reasons. For instance, some want to know which smartphones subscribers use to download what kind of content or which over-the-top (OTT) applications are subscribers accessing on the network.
IBM India and South Asia's chief technologist, Ramesh Gopinath, added telcos sit on large amounts of data that they can't touch, tremendously increasing the risk of them becoming 'dumb pipes', unless they leverage data to understand customers better.
Gopinath, who is also director of IBM Research India, said the company had built Vibes, a tool that can help telcos to identify communities of like-minded people that can be targeted for specific promotions. People in Motion, another tool, can be used to create trajectories of movements of subscribers based on their locations, which can in turn be relied upon to offer promotional offers.
Globally, such services based on 'geo-fencing' are being experimented with for giving customers specialised services, including discount coupons or specific deals from a retailer in a small geographical area, for instance a mall. Gopinath predicts video consumption among Indians to rise manifold with smartphones becoming cheaper and Indians demanding low-cost high speed internet from telcos, which lead to higher costs as telcos upgrade their networks to manage the massive pressure. IBM has created Async that can delay high bandwidth consumption, for example app updates, to a time when the telco's network is least congested.
With telcos sitting on tonnes of information about each mobile phone user, Vikas Sehgal, IBM India and South Asia's director for telecom industry, feels authorised information can be tapped into for giving more intuitive and tailor made solutions to customers.
"The technologies to bring data from network, call records, web, social media use and internet use into a mode where it can be churned and exploited to take decisions that are much deeper and informed, are picking up," he said.
He added telcos were adopting new technologies but for different reasons. For instance, some want to know which smartphones subscribers use to download what kind of content or which over-the-top (OTT) applications are subscribers accessing on the network.
IBM India and South Asia's chief technologist, Ramesh Gopinath, added telcos sit on large amounts of data that they can't touch, tremendously increasing the risk of them becoming 'dumb pipes', unless they leverage data to understand customers better.
Gopinath, who is also director of IBM Research India, said the company had built Vibes, a tool that can help telcos to identify communities of like-minded people that can be targeted for specific promotions. People in Motion, another tool, can be used to create trajectories of movements of subscribers based on their locations, which can in turn be relied upon to offer promotional offers.
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Globally, such services based on 'geo-fencing' are being experimented with for giving customers specialised services, including discount coupons or specific deals from a retailer in a small geographical area, for instance a mall. Gopinath predicts video consumption among Indians to rise manifold with smartphones becoming cheaper and Indians demanding low-cost high speed internet from telcos, which lead to higher costs as telcos upgrade their networks to manage the massive pressure. IBM has created Async that can delay high bandwidth consumption, for example app updates, to a time when the telco's network is least congested.
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