Cardinality.io
Bolstering The Value Propositions of Telcos

May 6th, 2017: The Economist releases a story titled “The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data.” Though the topic about the intrinsic value of big data has warranted discussions even before the publication, its relevance four years later is hardly challenged. The communications service provider (CSP) industry, in particular, faces a massive daily influx of several petabytes’ worth of data, which needs to be analysed to expedite internal operations and measure/monitor the customer experience. Intelligent data use is the key to success in meeting the inherent challenges and maximising the opportunities presented by big data. To master the volume, variety and velocity of all this data and derive maximum value from it, CSPs need a system to manage, analyse, and act on data in a timely and streamlined way.

Understanding that different departments need custom data analytics solutions to meet their specific needs, Dell Technologies offers infrastructure technology optimised for big data and designed to allow CSPs to start small and scale over time as business needs dictate. And in order to maximise the value of its infrastructure offerings for telco data analytics, Dell Technologies has developed a robust partner ecosystem with firms who have an in-depth, vertical understanding of the analytical issues that CSPs face.



Cardinality.io—with its enterprise-grade data analytics & AI technology and unique domain expertise in telecommunications—works with Dell Technologies to help customers tame the complexity of big data and derive actionable insights from their data that drastically raise profits and steadily drive organisational growth. “The marriage of Cardinality.io’s software platform and subject matter expertise with Dell Technologies world-leading infrastructure portfolio is what makes our partnership so impactful,” says Prashant Kumar, CTO and Co-Founder of Cardinality.io. Cardinality.io brings award-winning technology and near limitless scalability to CSPs to help them transform from communications service providers into digital service providers.

Big Data Simplified and Streamlined

The Cardinality.io platform is an end-to-end data analytics & AI platform, consisting of the Cardinality.io DataOps Engine and the Cardinality.io Use Case Engine. The DataOps Engine works to ingest and integrate data from a wide variety of real-time and at-rest data sources, format the data for analytics, and make it ready for analytics. That analytics occurs in the Use Case Engine, whose outputs can be displayed in reports, dashboards and visualization tools, piped vis APIs to other applications, or used as input for training machine learning models.

Both the DataOps and Use Case Engine components are available separately or bundled together as the Cardinality. io platform, and both are cloud-native and can run anywhere, from the edge to the datacenter to the public, private or hybrid clouds. Cardinality.io running on Dell Technologies infrastructure provides CSPs with a highly versatile and scalable data platform that enables CSPs to surmount the many challenges that can stand in the way of refining insights from data, the new oil.

The first and perhaps most pressing challenge that customers face is the complexity of aggregating data from many diverse data sources. These data sources can include real-time events streamed off a mobile network, data warehouses sitting either on-prem or in the cloud, formats including object, file, structured, semi-structured and unstructured, and many more. Managing this disparity of data often proves to be costly, time-consuming and error prone for CSPs. Cardinality. io provides a large library of telecom-optimized data collectors for every conceivable data source. This library of telecom-optimized data collectors enables Cardinality.io to easily plug into telecom network environments and begin delivering value in days or weeks versus months for more general-purpose data platforms.

A related challenge is managing the exploding volume, velocity and variety of data created by 5G and IoT. 5G networks will eclipse 4G in terms of faster speeds and a vast increase in the amount of data of devices supported and will unlock use cases as varied as autonomous vehicles, mobile edge computing (MEC), smart cities, immersive entertainment. One thing all these use cases have a common is a requirement for low-latency, real-time analytics. Cardinality.io running on Dell Technologies provides lightning-fast data streaming and analytics, streaming over 50 billion events in some production environments today.

Being able to analyze highly complex data at speed will be required by any CSP seeking to achieve the levels of automation and orchestration required in the era of 5G. Recognizing the importances of this, the telecom industry has defined a data standard called the Network Data Analytics Function (NWDAF). Cardinality.io can work with the NWDAF standard today, building on its technical leadership in 3G and 4G. “Running on top of Dell EMC infrastructure, Cardinality.io adds value in improving customer experience, efficient network management, and bolsters their telecom value proposition as they build their leadership in the global Communications Service Provider market,” states Anton Prenneis, CMO and U.S. General Manager at Cardinality.io.

Using Data Analytics to Deliver Amazing Business Outcomes

Once the many challenges of data integration have been addressed, customers now face a choice—what business use cases to address first? This is a questin best answered by aligning use cases to business objectives. A marketing department measured on customer acquisition and net promoter scores might prioritise using data to deepen customer intimacy, whereas a network operations department measured on reducing OPEX might prioritise operational efficiency.

Meanwhile, a product development organisation will likely want to analyze historical product performance and usage data to inform the design of future products.

Using a process that starts with working with customers to prioritize business objectives, Cardinality.io provides a repeatable mechanism for moving a use case through a variety of phases, from concept to design, testing, implementation and continuous improvement. And with its library of pre-built use cases and intuitive visual interface, Cardinality.io makes it easy for even non-technical users to build use case applications rapidly and reliably.

All of this adds up to revolutionary business value. In one case, Cardinality.io and Dell Technologies have received industry recognition for delivering award-winning AI capabilities to O2 (Telefónica UK) with O2/s Network Customer Experience (NCX) solution. NCX uses machine learning to evaluate patterns in massive volumes of network data to assign an individual NCX score to every subscriber on O2’s network. The NCX algorithm sifts through billions of network events each day to evaluate over 300 network KPIs based on their relative impact on customer satisfaction to generate an NCX score that is used by multiple departments within O2 to drive decisions about network performance, reducing customer churn, and improving the customer experience. Customers like O2 benefit from the solution from Dell Technologies and Cardinality.io in solving specific use cases to achieve their business objectives.

“We worked with Cardinality.io and Dell Technologies to develop a platform to be able to predict how customers would react to changes in the network. We worked as one team for a long period of time and we were lucky to be working with two great partners who had huge amounts of focus and experience. The working relationship we had with Cardinality.io and Dell Technologies was huge and it was a real factor in the success of NCX. And I'm really proud to say that NCX is a board-level KPI in the O2 U.K. business,” affirms a client.

Cardinality.io’s know-how in the telco space can be attributed to the team’s considerable experience working in the industry. Before founding Cardinality.io, Prashant spent over a decade working with major telecommunications service providers like Telefonica and AT&T. Responsible for architecting big data solutions for some of the most prominent names in the industry, he brings a wealth of knowledge to Cardinality.io and is now working with the organization to build on its success in telecom to deliver solutions to businesses in sectors beyond telecom as wide ranging as airports, utilities, healthcare and insurance.