Future-proof charging solution helps Viettel deliver digital customer experience

Speaker 1: So now delighted we're going to go to a case study where we're going to look at how a future-proof charging infrastructure is allowing Viettel to deliver a seamless digital customer experience. And for this case study, I'm delighted we're going to hear from Hung Nguyen, the data analyst of Viettel High Technology Industries Corporation. We're also going to hear from Aveekshith Bushan, the APAC regional director and general manager of Aerospike. And Shahed Mazumder, the global director of Technical Telco Solutions at Aerospike. So welcome to you and I think, Hung, you are going to get started. So welcome. Speaker 2: Thank you, Aaron. Hi, everybody, I'm Hung. I'm working as a data analyst at Viettel High Technology Industries Corporation. In today talk, I'm glad to introduce you to our charging solution vOCS, short for Viettel Online Charging System. As Viettel is transforming into a true digital service provider is an era of 5G. vOCS has to evolve quickly to take out the challenge and Aerospike has been a great help to us during this journey. The previous version of our charging solution, vOCS 3.0, won the gold award for the most innovative IT service at the 2017 IT World Awards. vOCS also got Gold Stevie as the best new product of the year in the telecom area at the 2018 International Business Awards. At the time, Viettel had around 170 million customers in different markets all over the world, including Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Timor, Mozambique, Tanzania, Burundi, Cameroon, Haiti and Peru. The latest version, vOCS 4.0, expands on what the previous version does best. Our charging solution supports multiple services running on multiple networks. In particular, vOCS 4.0 supports both mobile broadband from 2G to 5G as well as fixed broadband. In the 5G era, telecom companies are actively trying to become digital risk providers. So far, our charging system should accommodate non-traditional services. We're talking e-commerce, digital wallet, e-banking, automated toll collection, automated payment for utilities like with our smart meters, paying for subscription services or pay-per-view content like movies or research articles. vOCS also experimental service such as cloud gaming or even remote surgery. vOCS also plays a crucial part in business intelligence because it maintains a 360 degree profile of each customer as well as their real time usage. Thanks to machine learning, vOCS can perform hyper-personalization with this data so that it can make recommendations dedicated to each customer. Furthermore, customers may be allowed to customize their own subscription plan. Thanks to [inaudible 00:04:05] tools and compliance tests, we ensure that our solution can be smoothly integrated in the systems of our partner. During our move from vOCS... Oh, a little hiccup there. During our move from vOCS 2.0 vOCS 3.0, we found Aerospike as an opportunity to Oracle TimesTen to overcome the latency and the throughput bottlenecks. It only took us six months to finish developing and testing vOCS 3.0. In Vietnam, we used Aerospike to store xDRs, which are data records such as voice code details and internet data usage from 90 million users. vOCS also keeps track of the static attributes such as gender, age, occupation, location in the form of an Aerospike record. Which can be combined with xDRs to gather business insights. Because of Aerospike's flexible scalability, remodeling data for the purpose of experimentation is efficient in both time and storage. And more experimentation done in less time means more products being pushed to the market to quickly address customer demand. With Aerospike, we reduced the average latency from five milliseconds to three milliseconds to read or write a two kilobyte data package. We also tripled the throughput from 20,000 to 60,000 transactions per second. In the cluster of 20 million accounts. Better performance translates to improved service provisioning and QoS assurance. In other words, from the customer standpoint, there would be no waiting after a service order and no disruption when using the service. Also, the top-notch performance helps us actualize real time hyper-personalization, which is basically using machine learning to improve customer experience on an individual basis. Now that we are transitioning into 5G, especially standalone 5G, it's important that we foster a risk taking mentality and [inaudible 00:06:42] that's conducive to experimentation and thus conducive to innovations. I strongly believe with the scalability and the performance of Aerospike, vOCS 4.0 is future proof and more than ready for 5G. And now I will hand over to Aveek. Speaker 3: Thank you, Hung. Good morning and good afternoon everyone. I'd also like to welcome Shahed to the panel. First of all, I'm Aveek. I work as a regional director and general manager for Aerospike in AsiaPac. Shahed is the global director of telecom solutions at Aerospike and he leads all our telecom engagements specifically in the telecom vertical and IOT verticals as well. So without further ado, it was a great presentation, Hung. I just had a question to start with to Shahed. Clearly what Viettel is doing in the OCS space is transformational and Hung talked about Aerospike's role in it. But just to get a sense from your end, what is it that leads to a great customer experience when it comes to this kind of a platform that Viettel has built, Shahed? Speaker 4: Good. Thank you, Aveek. Good morning and good afternoon everyone. First of all, thank you very much, Mr. Hung, for your very generous words for Aerospike. Aveek, you mentioned about customer experience. I'd say there are four key dimensions of customer experience. First of all, no drop in service. So that's the reliability dimension. Number two, a very fast response. So that would be the low latency angle that Mr. Hung talked about. Number three, which is often not that much talked about but actually should be, which is the consistency of the service. So low or no jitter if possible. So the service remain consistent so that the end user experience also remain consistent. And last but not least, the most important thing is personalization. Because if you are rolling out the service to 90 million subscribers, in Viettel's case for Vietnam deployment, you being the end user, you would like to be treated in a personalized way. So I think that's a key aspect. So those are high level dimensions. And beyond that, there are the performance metrics, there are the latency metrics. As a GTM, all of those things actually were highlighted in Mr. Hung's presentation. He mentioned that. In only six months, we were able to make the solution up and running. He showed before and after comparison like 3x improvement in terms of TPS, transactions per second. Also the latency was brought down from five millisec two millisec. Those metrics, all of those... I think I'm not going to repeat those, but all of those things in aggregate contribute to the premier customer experience that we talk about here. Speaker 3: Awesome. Thanks, Shahed. I'll pose the question back to Hung. Obviously you talked about why you chose Aerospike in the context of vOCS and the transformational stuff that you've been doing. So now that you've been on Aerospike for a while, how has your experience been so far, one? And secondly, how do you describe vOCS role in enhancing customer experience specifically in the context of the talk today, right? Speaker 2: Great question. So Aerospike helped us a lot with the latency and the scalability problems. First about latency. A lot of the talks about 5G have touched on the latency requirement. A lot of the innovative services cover extremely low latency. We have VR/AI streaming, cloud gaming or even remote surgery. And the structuring system is expected to keep up with these new services. Besides, low latency means that we are always aware in real time if something goes wrong with our services and we can then ask accordingly in a timely manner to improve the customer experience. And then about scalability. First of all, scalability is also crucial for the future of 5G. First of all, we need to accommodate the rising demand from our customers, not only from the traditional telecom services, but also from the new 5G services. Secondly, we'll need to cater to spontaneous network deployments, especially when network slicing becomes a reality. The last reason has to do with the fact that 5G monetization at this point is essentially uncharted waters. Telecom companies like retail are still trying out different business models with different services in different markets and all of which are cause for highly flexible scalability. Aerospike has proven their ability to cut down latency at enhanced scalability and that's why we have decided to continue our partnership with Aerospike for our latest version of vOCS. Speaker 3: Awesome. Thanks, Hung. Shahed, I'll pose the question back to you and obviously the context of charging and billing, right? Aerospike obviously works with a lot of other customers globally, but what's your sense about Aerospike's specific equipment in the billing and charging space, if you will? Speaker 4: Sure. Actually billing charging within the larger telco space is a sweet spot for us both in terms of operators and also on the OEM side. So on the operator side, I think the biggest testament is Viettel. As we saw in this presentation, it's not only about single market, single deployment. Mr. Hung talked about 10 plus deployments across markets and then 170 million. That was actually in 2018. So maybe the number actually went up from there. Over there, we are used as a backend database. On top of that, Viettel deploys the frontend application. So that's on the operative side. On OEM side, we actually are embedded database for two of Nokia's key charging product. One is SurePay, their online charging product. The other one is NCC, Nokia Converged Charging. We know there are tens of deployments for those two products and through... I mean, if there's an operator here today in this presentation, if you have SurePay or NCC and if you like your product, maybe some credit comes to us as well since, I mean, we have been powering those solutions as embedded database underneath the front-end application coming from Nokia. We are presenting some other applications as well. But as I mentioned earlier, we have experience on working in this space. Like in Nokia's case, we have been embedded DB for SurePay for the last seven years. Just one last comment, sometimes Nokia tells us that some of the SurePay customers sometimes don't want to migrate from SurePay to the newer product because the stability of the product. Again, I mean it has to do with the front-end application that Nokia builds, but also some of the credit comes to Aerospike underlying embedded DB, which gives you that reliable service and scalable future proof service. Speaker 3: Got it. Makes sense, Shahed. So, Hung, and obviously we talked about billing and charging, but outside of these two areas, given your experience with Aerospike, where else do you see Aerospike potentially being a good fit, especially when it comes to customer experience management or announcement if you'll? Speaker 2: I can definitely see Aerospike being used in a system that has to deal with a great amount of transactional data such as the backend of an IOT platform or an e-commerce website or a financial system like a digital wallet, the IOT and domains in which retail is actively making progress. So I think Aerospike might potentially be helpful to us in those areas. Speaker 3: Got it. Thanks, Hung. So, Shahed, and again just to summarize in terms of what we discussed so far with Viettel, but really obviously Airtel did a presentation last week about how they transformed their business. And like we all know, one of the key components of that was Aerospike in terms of we being part of the journey to enhance their Customer 360 platform as well. So from your perspective, working with customers all over the world and really APAC as well, are there any specific use cases that you find to be very relevant to other telcos that you think might be interesting to share here? Speaker 4: Sure. So you brought up Airtel. They have been our customer for the last five-ish years starting with Customer 360, but now spanning over 20 different use cases. So that tells us Airtel [inaudible 00:15:11] how much they trust us. Hopefully it'll come through all their public presentations. So that's Airtel. There's another large telco out of India for which we are providing the backend database for their HSS, for the IOT, narrowband IOT network. 100 million sensors in India, all over India. So HSS, as you know, the brain of the network. When you are powering the backend to the base of that brain of your network, that again is a big testament of how much stable, reliable and scalable your platform is. The third one with Viettel we just heard from Mr. Hung today in the context of vOCS, not only for telco service but also non telco services. He showed some examples like tool collection, like smart metering. All of those being fed by or actually being serviced by Aerospike data platform. End product being vOCS and the platform wise. Last but not least, we also have another deployment in ASEAN region actually, in this region, where we are used as the database platform for the real time geospatial microservices in Philippines that one. And then I talked about Nokia. Amdocs also actually has our product as the embedded DB in their policy control product. Between Nokia and Amdocs, we are deployed to close to 100 operators for those five different products. I mean, we have a pretty robust set of reference across the regions, directly through the operators and also through the OEMs. Speaker 3: Great point, Shahed. Obviously what we found even in the beginning of the talk as well is differentiated customer experience, critical retention and growth for every service provider. And with 5G happening, all of a sudden you're going to see a data explosion. And obviously the thing that becomes very relevant is as this happens, what kind of an experience the customer gets online? Quick access to data, like you said. And also one of the things that we find is availability of system is very critical as customers are more and more online like we would've heard in the Viettel presentation as well. Availability of the platform becomes very critical. All this has to happen at a very, very low cost. And in today's post Covid world, I think that's a common theme that you would hear. So this is what we at Aerospike have been focusing on and hopefully it gave you a sense of the areas we are working on in this space. So thanks, Hung. Thanks, Shahed, for your talk. Over to you, Aaron. Thanks. Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Aveek. That was brilliant, Aveek, Hung and Shahed, that was a really great presentation and thank you very much for joining us today.