Too Much subscriber data - unable to drive key actionable insights?

I wrote this post for Openwave couple of weeks back, just posting here.

Marketers have an unquenchable thirst for data. They are always on the prowl for more and more sources of data with which to gain insights into consumer behavior. These insights are the spun gold of the marketing world, as they enable more precise targeting and higher ROI for the entire advertising ecosystem.

The better the marketing team, the better their ability to piece together valuable insights from whatever data is available. But even the best marketing gurus will benefit from more information about their target audience. The biggest challenge is accounting for the holes, or blind spots, that incomplete or unavailable data create. The constant battle to get closer to consumers requires a variety of tools and techniques like web analytics, behavioral targeting, multivariate testing, Nielsen/ComScore, CRM systems, and most important, a way to integrate all these systems.

A New Kind of Challenge
Mobile operators have the enviable problem of too much information about their customers. Operators sit on a goldmine of data like billing and location information, mobile transactions, online behavior and network conditions, but the sheer volume of data makes it incredibly unwieldy. A tier-one operator has millions of subscribers which yield billions of transactions per day – close to a Petabyte of data (that’s one million gigabytes). The problem is only getting more complex with the growing demand for data services -- subscriber data consumption is growing over 93% CAGR year over year.

A New Kind of Solution
Obviously, the right solution for today’s Big Data challenges must be able to process billions of transactions – or a Petabyte of data – on a daily basis at near real-time without a large investment of in hardware to processes this data. Key ways to solve these issues:

• Intelligent aggregation methods enable analyst, marketers to quickly generate multiple high-level insights.
• Pre-processing data into multiple streams to accommodate operational, internal marketers, advertisers, external marketers and content providers reporting and analysis needs.
• A flexible database architecture gives you the capability to integrate new and multiple feeds for a 360-degree view across multiple platforms.
• Smart sampling maintains granularity at a segment level and profile level, thus making the solution very economical.
• A flexible reporting environment allows ad hoc reporting, empowering marketers, operational teams, analysts and adversities to fill in the holes which arise from pre-defined reports without relying on IT resources.

Openwave® Analytics is a smarter approach to leveraging the incredible amount of data available to mobile operators. Besides drastically reducing the storage and processing costs of such large data sets, Openwave Analytics delivers all the capabilities marketing and operations teams need to manage and monetize their network.