One emerging trend in the Covid altered landscape of mid 2020 is that the telecom industry is not just unscathed – it shows us an inspiring snapshot of companies grabbing the reins of technology leadership.
Given our collective reliance on them; these companies’ business models are not only relatively unscathed but are also finding new, exciting growth opportunities as the need for digital connectivity is greater now more than ever.
Within the Telecom industry, Aerospike’s innovations in data platforms are used across a host of use cases like Customer 360, Fraud Prevention, Online Charging Systems, Churn Detection, core 5G and IoT applications, to name a few.
We’d like to highlight the specifics of the success at Viettel, Vietnam’s largest telecom carriers with a host of exciting initiatives underway, including being part of a consortium that is building a new high-speed under-sea cable connecting ASEAN countries with China and Japan. (This last will help in supporting increasingly bandwidth intensive applications in the 5G space.)
Viettel has always been at the forefront of innovation and we recently had a webinar to discuss the challenges and breakthroughs in a key marquee project, the Online Charging System, which makes excellent use of Aerospike’s unique technology.
Here are a few of the items shared by Quan Ngyen-Hoang, Viettel’s technical leader for this online charging system (OCS).
The Viettel Modern, Expandable OCS
According to Mr. Nguyen-Hong, the Viettel OCS platform is designed for convergence of traditional telecom system telecommunication services like broadcast, television, mobile to a new environment that includes services, capabilities and business support including general-purpose charging systems like mobile payment to more broad ranging commercial digital, IOT services for hospital, electric and water bill systems, and much more.
Figure 1: The Viettel Online Charging System (vOCS) is an evolved charging platform providing consumer and corporate, hybrid, bundle, multi-device services.
Having this rich infrastructure in place allows Viettel and their API gateway to participate in host of digital domain services, such as mobile payments and digital wallets; the explosive growth of ecommerce with robust product catalogs and campaign management, as well as supporting key growth areas like platform and infrastructure domain services. In short, if data is needed to run a business or carry out a life task, Viettel’s platform is optimized to support it with amazing reliability and responsiveness.
From Zero to Hero (with 40% cost savings, too.)
In the webinar, you see the current global footprint for a program that just two year ago had zero subscribers but now, serves more than 170 million subscribers in 11 countries with an availability of 99.999% and more than 3000 tariff packets/system.
And, by making a change to the current data platform (using the Aerospike technology) they were able to achieve a 40% reduction in TCO over Oracle TimesTen. Given the keen demands on reducing CapEx and OpEx – we think this alone makes this case study must-see viewing.
Customer 360 and Personalization – Must Haves
Any organisation, not just in the telecommunications space, must have a plan in place to be able to gather and use relevant information to provide the optimal experience. One of the key points was to look at an advanced implementation of gathering each customer’s profile components in a DIY fashion. Key elements of this personalization include:
The customer creates their own key features (birth date, zone of use, etc.)
The customer defining their own service package & its pertinent tools and apps
The customer being in control of a myriad payment options across services.
The customer getting exquisitely detailed data and choices about their level of consumption of data and services.
Figure 2: The platform has been designed to provide a future-ready set of services enabling a more delightful customer experience as well as easier care and management. You go to minute 13:30 of the webinar to learn how to create this reliable, high performance, easy to expand approach.
This service has won a host of global awards; and its rapid growth backs up the value they have built. Why not take the time to see how this might work in your organization?
