The world is awash with data, no more so than in the telecommunications (telco) industry. With some Cloudera customers ingesting multiple petabytes of data every single day— that’s multiple thousands of terabytes!—there is the potential to understand, in great detail, how people, businesses, cities and ecosystems function. This information is essential for the management of the telco business, from fault resolution to making sure families have the right content package for their needs, to supply chain dashboards for businesses based on IoT data.
The world has changed—business and people are connected! Access and the exchange of data is critical for managing the operations in many industries. For example in retail, connections between customers and stores/distribution centers allow the businesses within the ecosystem to understand who’s shopping, where they are shopping and what they are buying. In government services keeping citizens safe and protected— awareness and real-time data access is key. In the automotive aftermarket industry, doing over the air updates for connected vehicles ensures performance of a vehicle is top of mind. The telco industry is at the heart of managing the communication networks that make this happen. Set against this, of course, are the demands of privacy and consumer protection, as well as data security. The fact remains, however, that carriers have a latent asset that is potentially of great use to third-party businesses. The question is how to monetize the data assets enabling connected businesses and people?
Real-world data monetization opportunities in telco
Part of the assessment begins with identifying uniqueness. For telco businesses—especially wireless telecommunications—a key element of uniqueness is location within a geography.Understanding in great detail how traffic flows, how pedestrians move in a city, over time, is extremely important for city planners, retailers, real-estate executives, and infrastructure projects. Recognizing anomalies in established patterns can be valuable for policing and security services, as well as providing interesting insights such as advance warning of traffic incidents. Digital out-of-home advertising is an increasingly programmatic domain, and location information can help to drive better targeting to public signage.
Online, of course, the data set is even more rich. Many telcos have extensive in-country content assets, beginning with their online retail store, but often extending into rich, paid-for content such as sports, movies, and gaming. Modeling consumption patterns in these environments can provide insights for advertisers, while combining those insights with in-home set-top-box activity can further enrich the model.
The exponential growth of IoT and more devices being connected to the internet further creates an opportunity to model behavior indoors—whether footfall in commercial buildings, dwell patterns in retail stores, or in home occupancy. This data can provide rich opportunities for advertisers, store managers, and content partners interested in developing new offerings for the home, and countless other consumer businesses, like household appliance manufacturers offering warranty support, or utilities companies like water, gas, and electricity.
Laying the groundwork for management and monetization
In order to generate a return from data, the design of the business starts with the market—as described above—identifying segments and targets where the data yield will be monetized. Generally, this should fit into a B2B portfolio of “conventional” telecommunications offerings such as connectivity, customer premise equipment (CPE), and other devices. Next—working backwards—collaboration tooling such as dashboards and developer environments like those on Amazon Web Services (AWS), are also key components to consider. Underneath all of this are the data assets themselves, with appropriate governance (e.g. masking and anonymization to protect privacy concerns), security (user access control), and comprehensive observability (for billing purposes), all of which come as standard features in Cloudera SDX (Shared Data Experience). Ultimately, the data management must be well governed, robustly persisted, across a hybrid data cloud, allowing for maximum utilization of infrastructure resources in the public cloud, such as AWS, or onprem where regulations or client demand requires it.
Internal and external data products
Telcos enjoy a level of intimacy in their customer relationships that few other organizations can rival. Combined with the fine-grained levels of detail about their customer’s location, mobility, preferences, and behaviors derived in near-real time from the network, telcos are uniquely positioned to capitalize on the power and potential of their data.
In addition to the direct internal and external data monetization opportunities outlined above, telcos can leverage their cloud-based IT architectures to act as “data brokers.” This means ingesting and combining first- and third-party data sources into their analytical infrastructure to create enriched, monetizable data products that can be leveraged by internal stakeholders and marketed externally to drive a wide variety of use cases and capabilities cross vertically, across any number of value and supply chains.
Building your data monetization strategy on Cloudera and AWS
AWS provides several products and solutions to support this approach. AWS clean rooms overcome many of the challenges associated with data sharing and privacy protection by providing an analytics service that helps customers and their partners more easily and securely analyze and collaborate on their collective datasets—without sharing or revealing the underlying data.
Organizations can now create secure data clean rooms in minutes, and collaborate with the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP), synergistically combining strengths to provide a robust and comprehensive solution for telcos seeking to monetize their data through advanced data management and analytics capabilities. CDP seamlessly integrates with AWS’s scalable cloud infrastructure and services, allowing telcos to efficiently collect, store, process, and analyze vast amounts of data. Leveraging Cloudera’s powerful data management tools alongside AWS’s scalable computing resources, storage options, and specialized services can optimize data-driven insights, enabling informed decision-making, innovative applications, and streamlined data monetization strategies.
Data can be shared internally and with third parties via AWS Data Exchange (ADX), allowing telcos to seamlessly discover, subscribe to, and integrate valuable data sources directly from the data lake—for example cell tower coverage or geospatial data sets. Deeper insights and additional context can be introduced through integration with Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC). This potentially enables Telcos to combine their knowledge of their customer base with anonymized and segmented retail-based insights, such as product browsing and buying behaviors derived from amazon.com to drive more effectively targeted campaigns.
Once these layers are in place, the data offering can be made available as a persistent, subscription-based offering, or as a consumption-based API, exposing well-governed and compliant data resources to a market hungry for insights.
Cloudera and AWS collaborate to help telcos reap cost savings
Cloudera and AWS are collaborating to address telecommunications industry challenges all over the world. For example, we can provide a customer-specific analysis of deploying hybrid CDP to demonstrate cost savings with public cloud vs data center overhead. We can show organizations how to use intelligent storage tiering solutions from AWS combined with Cloudera CDP to minimize the cost of operations.
Also, with a hybrid architecture, Cloudera and AWS can show organizations how to move less sensitive data into the public cloud while maintaining an on-prem presence under the umbrella of a single data platform—that’s a powerful capability for a transforming industry. Based on all of this, organizations can build future-proof LLM and generative AI solutions that can transform the employee and customer experience.
Learn more about how Cloudera and AWS are working together .
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