Frost & Sullivan analyst Jeff Cotrupe answers his own question in his report: “Business Intelligence for Operators: Can You Have it All?” According to Cotrupe, the answer is “yes” and the “how” is through Sandvine’s Network Analytics product. The independent report, produced by Stratecast, a Frost & Sullivan brand, delves into the world of Communications Service Providers (CSPs) and Business Intelligence (BI). 

The report highlights the need for CSPs to have BI tools tailored to their unique requirements, such as the complexity and amount of network information with which CSPs are presented and their operational objectives.  Cotrupe identifies the main reasons why CSPs need business intelligence, and goes on to describe the areas in which providers can benefit from business intelligence.  He states, “BI inspires billions of dollars in spending because implementing BI offers many business benefits.  In CSP environments, those benefits are most keenly felt in areas such as Network & Operations, Products & Marketing, Core Customer Data, Customer Experience Management (CEM), Billing and Revenue Assurance.”

The report then switches gears, examining the marketplace for solutions that address the needs of CSPs, saying, “In our continuing research and analysis of the market, we have identified a company, Sandvine, with a range of solutions that can deliver CSP-focused BI and that should eliminate any CSP excuses re: ‘BI is important, but BI providers don’t understand our business.’”

The report states that Sandvine “positions itself as providing Intelligent Broadband Networks through network policy control, and offers only one product with Analytics in its name; but CSPs who choose its full solution suite go a long way toward implementing a full-bore CSP BI solution.”

Cotrupe goes on to describe our business intelligence product suite, including the award-winning Network Analytics product and our Network Demographics reporting interface.  While describing Network Analytics and the product’s capabilities and dashboards, he pays particular attention to Real-Time Entertainment Dashboard, saying, “What we like even more about the Real-Time Entertainment Dashboard is that it…can help CSPs implement a strategy to deal with video that fits smoothly into their larger strategy of implementing CSP-specific BI.”

Stratecast will be covering the full Business Intelligence space for CSPs in future reports and, based on Cotrupe’s initial report on Sandvine, we eagerly anticipate the full analysis. In particular, it will be interesting to note whether the offerings of any other network policy control vendors would have been substantial enough to make the cut.

Here’s a little-known background story to our Network Analytics product: more than three years ago, we recognized the enormous potential that network business intelligence offered CSPs, as we directly heard many of the same issues and complaints that Cotrupe identified in his report. For more than a year we worked closely with several globally-recognizable operators to develop and test the product that became Network Analytics.  Almost two years after its release, Network Analytics remains the only true analytics platform designed for CSPs by a company that specializes in serving CSPs, and in those two years our customers have enjoyed remarkable insight and business intelligence that their peers and competitors lack.

Through his detailed understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing CSPs and the market for BI solutions, Cotrupe came to the conclusion that “…for CSPs still hesitating about when and how to implement BI, Stratecast cannot recommend more strongly that the time is now, and Sandvine offers viable answers to the question of how.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.