Moving Telcos to Real-Time

Tupl was invited to speak during the “rapid-fire” round, and we also showcased our live product demo in one of the demo stands.

Yesterday, we attended an event in Silicon Valley organized by the Telecom Council. The topic under discussion was “Moving Telcos to Real-Time,” and the organization brought together a series of speakers, panellists and product demos from companies that are actively working in this space. The audience consisted of high calibre operators and telecom vendors from US, Japan, Europe and China, together with several innovative start-up companies creating a very vibrant environment for sharing and testing new innovations.

Tupl was invited to speak during the “rapid-fire” round, and we also showcased our live product demo in one of the demo stands.

The format of the Telecom Council events is quite interesting. Sponsored by large corporations looking to foster innovation in the industry, they bring together vendors, operators, investors and start-ups around specialized interest topics.

There were great presentations and discussions around the use cases that justify real-time operations, including a debate around what is really “real-time,” a concept which Kethees Ketheesan from NetScout nailed, in my opinion, when he justified that “real-time” really means “just in time.” In other words, the information is available before the user needs to access it, but how fast really depends on the use case (in some cases, it could be sub-second, while in others it could be hours).

Another interesting snippet of information came during the presentation from Adello, which discussed the structural changes required to operate systems in real-time. Consider a large corporation reacting to a situation that requires making a decision in a short time. With the current approach, it would require time to gather the data, discuss across departments, reach a consensus and then implement the action. Examples of this situation would be the reaction to a sudden peak in traffic, or a server outage. The answer, a small team of cross-layer experts that rely heavily on automation. Exactly the same approach we are taking at Tupl.

Most of the cases that were illustrated during the presentations were around marketing and advertising, and in some cases customer retention as it relates to sales offerings. Tupl was one of the only companies focusing on Network Operations use cases, and it was good to see the welcoming response from the audience to a fresh approach where a start-up company is addressing direct operational pain points and demonstrating solutions to solve them.

Petri discussed a few use cases that are most relevant to operators today – such as a fast response to network outages, resolution of customer complaints or analysis of subscribers QoE – and highlighted the importance that real-time processing, together with the cross-correlation of data feeds have to bring about these values. We’re glad to observe how the vision we set out to follow crystallizes as we progress with our customer trials, and the concepts we have been promoting are quickly maturing in the industry.

During our networking time, we met quite a few other interesting start-ups, and we will be exploring partnership opportunities with a couple of them that provide innovative approaches to acquiring additional data from handset devices, such as Morpho, which offers a SIM-based UE agent that collects performance data, and m2catalyst, which provides crowdsourcing data across all operators, enabling pretty interesting competitor analysis use cases.

Our next big stop will be Barcelona for the Mobile World Conference. We will be part of the booth with the Washington State Department of Commerce. Come see us for happy hour every day during the MWC week, from 5-6pm!

Come see us at MWC 2016!!