Blog >> Stone Age bets on Big Data to bring savings to the telecom sector
The concept of Big Data is gradually gaining traction in the telecommunications sector. In the case of the Brazilian management solutions provider Stone Age, the service of managing unstructured data is not exactly new: it has been providing services to the telecom market since 2004, with clients including Embratel and Oi.
The company, which began by offering a traffic and service provision declaration document (Detraf), went on to provide a legal search service, a database where invoices are stored for several years for cases of legal support and requests for duplicate invoices. At the current stage, the company has a platform for a project to issue invoices, meeting the requirement to issue invoices for both post-paid and pre-paid plans. "This was a problem because most of (the mobile operator base) is prepaid, it was a technological challenge, we had to manage the layout of these invoices, get the change right and not impact the generation," explains the coordinator of Stone Age's software area, Fernando Guimarães.
As a result, the mobile operator generates 150 million invoices a day, which is a challenge not only for the operation, but also for storage. "It's a huge amount of data to consolidate and issue invoices," says Guimarães.
Before adopting the Big Data management platform, the client couldn't break down the taxation for call and data costs, which led them to be taxed at the most expensive rate. "In order to have detailed taxation, they had to break down all the calls, and this further expanded the volume problem," says Stone Age managing partner Ricardo Gomes da Costa. According to him, after implementing the solution, which is integrated with the telco's OSS/BSS system, the project paid for itself in a month.
For future mobile networks, which will be able to provide voice over LTE (VoLTE) services, for example, taxation would no longer be a problem. Charges are made according to the telephone service provided. For data storage, a service considered to be simpler, savings are made in infrastructure by using various data compression techniques that reduce a 70 TB database to 20 TB. All processed by ordinary CPUs running Windows systems or machines in virtualized environments.
In fact, the company was already offering Big Data services in the 1990s for the government, in a project for the Ministry of Labor, and then in the financial market. "They invented a new name for what we've been doing for 28 years," says Stone Age's strategic planning manager, Vladimir Motta. According to him, companies have become more accepting of using our services after seeing successful cases. "Our projects always have a specific purpose, such as legal issues, speeding up the sales process and analyzing credit, always with measurable benefits." The sector, says Motta, accounts for 30% to 40% of Stone Age's total revenues. Next year, the company will review its portfolio in preparation for a focus on monetizing value-added mobile services. "Our perception is that the market is a little immature in the country when it comes to transforming revenues into data," he says. The executive says that the company has sought to work with direct sales, carrying out a program of alliances and partnerships with consulting specialists. "We already have a name, and we're going to have (greater) reach in the telecom sector," says Motta, promising this project for the first quarter of 2014.
Another focus of the company's work is investment in research and development, which Motta guarantees is "a very significant percentage of turnover". As a result, in 2014 Stone Age is due to launch a revamped version of the database that will allow access via tablets and smartphones, as well as supporting more cloud services, data monetization and sharing of the database for cross-checking information. "Today, our product already supports this, but this (new) database has been written to be totally natural in the cloud," he says. The company will also offer an engine for one-off accesses, which allows data to be searched in real time.
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