Written by Sailesh Krishnamurthy, Principal Engineer
Service providers around the world are seeing an unprecedented explosion of data in their networks. This explosion is characterized by the "Three Vs" (volume, variety and velocity) that are the typical hallmarks of challenging data problems. The service providers that embrace these problems creatively stand to unlock enormous monetization opportunities. The good news is that service providers are uniquely positioned to correlate and analyze data from across the ecosystem (client, network and cloud).
This blog post will describe some of these analytics opportunities. In my next post, I'll discuss Cisco's strategic plans to help service providers in this process with Cisco Prime Analytics.
Data Explosion
The data explosion in service provider networks is extremely diverse ("Variety") and comes from various sources including:
Unlike other players (manufacturers, content/service/app providers), service providers areuniquely positioned to correlate and analyze data from across their ecosystem. In particular they can see data from clients (location/presence, payments, content consumption, data usage patterns, etc.), the network itself (DPI feeds, IPFIX flows from switches, route information, network management data, etc.) and the cloud (application/service usage, content metadata, CDN interactions etc.).
The Analytics Value Proposition
Analytics over these data sources provides the intelligence for service providers to recapture the value of their networks. Analytics is, however, a broadly overused term that means many different things to each constituency. Moreover, each opportunity has a different profile in terms of execution effort as well as upside potential. Over and above all of this, the sheer volume of data involved as well as the relative newness of these opportunities make it important for service providers to "crawl before they walk" -i.e., tackle the easier problems before the harder ones. One way to understand these different analytics opportunities is to categorize them based on their impact to a service provider's top or bottom line as follows:
Summary
Service providers are right in the middle of an enormous data explosion that, if properly exploited using innovative analytics technologies, offers significant monetization opportunities. While the three Vs (volume, variety and velocity) are well understood in terms of how they characterize the data, a critical aspect to analytics over network data is handling data-in-motion as well as data at rest. This is a transformational period for the industry, and those service providers who seize the moment have an opportunity to significantly outpace competitors who are not as effective. In my next blog, I'll discuss how Cisco Prime Analytics, a new high-performance, real-time, network-centric analytics platform that allows for adaptation to customer environments and use cases, can help service providers realize this opportunity.