Team Up For Customer Service Excellence

Vitria May Newsletter Issue is 'Team Up For Customer Service Excellence.' Subscribe to receive the latest information on IoT and Advanced Analytics.

Dear David, We would like to invite you to subscribe to our monthly newsletter so that we can provide you with the latest news and information on Advanced Analytics, IoT, and Operational Intelligence. The Focus of this month's issue is 'Team Up For Customer Service Excellence'.  Click here to subscribe. Here are highlights and insights we wanted to share with you from the May Issue. For mobile WiFi providers, the old real estate adage of Location, location, location is taking on new meaning with the advent of location-based services. Thanks to the growing availability of device GPS and the ubiquity of mobile access points, a world of new-business opportunity is opening as fast as vendors – everyone from innovative startups to wireless infrastructure owners – can come up with new applications. Comcast's recently announced MachineQ enterprise IoT service has already found customers in health-sector wearables for indoor/outdoor patient tracking, sensor/meter reading, rodent control and business-asset monitoring. In Europe, Orange Business Services, a spin-off of France Telecom SA, is partnering with location-based services provider Pole Star, who markets indoor-positioning, geo-fencing and other solutions to malls, airports, hospitals and other big venues. Between these extremes are hundreds of other potential applications, many looking for products that will make use of location-based services, or LBS. As for big venues, many cities and city suppliers will be aspiring to become smarter in how they put technology to use to create and support improvements across their societal and business realms. These efforts are creating massive new business opportunities for vendors at all levels of the customer-service network stack. Because of their expertise and experience in delivering large-scale wireless services, mobile providers, including cable vendors bundling wireless services, will be well positioned to take advantage of these opportunities. Smart-City IoT Applications So called "smart-city" opportunities are seemingly limitless. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency wants to track bike ridership volumes at busy intersections in an effort to reduce motor-vehicle usage. Auto traffic is on the minds of planners in Louisville, Kentucky and Sacramento California, too, which expect to use IoT data to reduce traffic congestion and improve parking availability. The Lower Colorado River Authority wants to track stream levels in real time so they can warn against floods. And Los Angeles, which already has Internet-connected sensors in nearly 150,000 streetlights and 5,000 intersections, hopes to combine that data with the location information coming from people's smartphones and watches. Real-time data from sources such as these could be used in a number of applications, from traffic control to early earthquake warning. One real-time IoT application that likely will see wide use will be geo-fencing, which can be used by sports stadiums, shopping malls and other large venues to predict attendance levels at certain times of the day. This can be used for growth planning, event management, or dozens of other initiatives that are yet to come. If It Were Easy... "If it were that easy, everyone would be doing it," goes the saying. In the case of building smart-city IoT applications, practically everyone is doing it, or at least trying. What gives mobile providers the edge is their experience in deploying large-scale wireless services through Wi-Fi or Bluetooth infrastructures. But here is where mobile providers, and in particular cable-offering-wireless companies, must pay close attention. The road to success with smart city applications has two distinct lanes: improving support for current customers, and then preparing their customer-service infrastructure for the new demands of location-based applications. Why improve customer support? Studies have shown that customers can be fickle, and are justifiably offended by poor customer service. Today's customers expect an immediate response when they lose service. Real-time analytics technologies are available today that can respond instantly to network failure, and can even diagnose proactively the likelihood of failure. Customer-support reputation will be an important factor in winning large smart-city-related contracts. Real-time analytics will face even greater challenges from the coming onslaught of location and proximity-based service applications. One challenge is the newness of the phenomenon itself: it's no one's guess as to what near-future applications will look like or where they'll pop up. How IoT Analysis Makes Sense of The Data That data, which can be upwards of a million events per second, comes from various probes inserted into network elements and that deliver user and device identification to the analytics ingestion point. The analytics engine takes it from there, adding contest on the subscriber – background, preferences, and so on – and performs time-series analysis and predictive modeling to see where the subscriber, or possible customer, may be heading. Along the way the analytics add situational context, such as weather information, and assess the likelihood of possible scenarios, all the while tracking that customer's continued movement and displaying the results. To get this information, the analytics engine is drawing on a number of resources, from data warehouses and data lakes to pattern-matching, hypothesis-testing and other models. Delivering this level of information within an actionable time frame will demand ultra-fast performance. The good news is that this performance, and the cloud-IoT performance to go with it, is within the capabilities of some of today's analytics architectures. The best solutions will have these qualities in common: High-performance data handling – Data coming in from IoT applications will require an analytics engine that can perform in-memory computations at ultra-high speeds. This is critical for processing the incoming data and analyzing it in various contexts – and doing it in real time. Flexible end-to-end architecture – An agile analytics infrastructure will help citizen analysts and data scientists respond quickly to the demands of newer IoT applications as they come on board. In the same way, a flexible, building-block development environment will help developers create the predictive and prescriptive solutions that new location-services customers will demand. How effectively and how quickly mobile operators can put these tools in use could well determine which among them gets the coming contracts. INTERESTED TO LEARN MORE WE ASKED - WHAT IF? What if the volume and velocity of IoT data was no longer a concern? What if you could invoke timely actions based on analysis of batch AND streaming data? What if you could unify all types of analytics into one, agile analytics engine? What if your analytics platform provided ingest of data and a data lake purpose built for advanced analytics? What if non-programmers could collaborate with a fewer number of data scientists to create actionable analytics in real time? What if your business operations and LOBs had the visibility and insights to make future predictions and prescribe actions in the moment? Market Trends and Research How CSPs are Changing the IoT Connectivity Market Telecom Providers Lead to IOT Market Success: Here's How The Rapidly Evolving Intersection of IoT & Big Data IoT and Supply Chain Analytics – The Pace of Competition is Accelerating VIA by Vitria Explainer Video TELECOM TRENDS / RESEARCH WHAT IF? VITRIA EXECUTIVE EBOOK Vitria has developed a free EBook exploring the topic 'IoT- More than the Data'. Reserve your copy here. We are focusing on a seven week executive bulletin series regarding strategy that touches on the big data architecture, the data itself and the analytics platform. The series explores how to integrate the analytics that may come with the IoT applications and the broader platform for analytics provided by VIA by Vitria. Subscribe to the series here.   Your Analytically, The Vitria Team http://www.vitria.com/ Vitria Technology, Inc   4300 Bohannon Drive  Suite #200  Menlo Park,  CA   94025   United States You received this email because you are subscribed to IoT from Vitria Technology, Inc. Update your email preferences to choose the types of emails you receive.  Unsubscribe from all future emails