LIVE FROM GSMA MOBILE 360-MIDDLE EAST: While operators may not identify big data as one of their priorities, it is a key tool to meet objectives related to customer experience management, network optimisation, and best practice, Igor Leprince, SVP Middle East & Africa at Nokia Solutions and Networks, said.

“If you talk to operators, maybe you won’t get a straight answer that big data is their number one priority. But when you analyse their need for efficiency improvement, their push for customer experience management, their push for network optimisation, and the key question of how do I correlate my network performance with my customer experience, they wouldn’t be able to do that without big data,” the executive commented.

Obviously, by its very name big data is generally associated with the manipulation of large quantities of information. But this is only one aspect, Leprince argued.

“For telecom operators it is extremely important for this data to also be real-time, to be decision-making, to be able to take some proactive action. It’s not only about the volume, it’s about how you use this data,” he said.

And the variety of data types an operator has available also adds to the challenge. “This is not only about the traditional transactional and operational data we’ve had for years, it’s also a set of unstructured or semi-structured data we get from the social media, from websites. It’s a pretty complex mix of high volume, real-time, coming from many different sources that are not structured in the way we are used to,” Leprince added.

This sentiment was echoed by Ben Parker, principal technologist for specialist vendor Guavus: “All operators have large business intelligence systems. It doesn’t mean they have big data. It’s the fusion of multiple data sets and the output velocity which is big data.”

“At the end of the day, all operators generally have the same sort of data, we’re not inventing any sources. What’s new is the fusion of that data with other data to create context, that’s relevant to the business today,” he continued.