In previous posts I summarized EMC CTO John Roese’s key message from EMC World:
Many of the new products announced at EMC World allow existing enterprise customers to extend their data centers to support IDC’s definition of the third platform (mobile, social, cloud, big data).
John’s statement is highlighted by the graphic below. Note that this is a health care use case but others are equally relevant (e.g. the telecommunications use case described below). The first two columns on the left highlight EMC enterprise customers who augmented their secure, structured-data infrastructures (e.g. VMAX, VNX) with secure, unstructured data products (e.g. Isilon, Atmos). The third column highlights the new set of products that help enterprise customers build 3rd platform architectures that can also handle massive amounts of consumer data.
It’s not enough to be a provider of this infrastructure; enterprise customers also require a comprehensive strategy to analyze data across structured, unstructured, and consumer boundaries (no matter where the data lives). In fact, John mentioned a specific use case that highlights an analytics success story spanning structured, unstructured, and consumer data.
The use case involves a wireless carrier trying to prevent customer churn (losing a customer). Anything the carrier can do to improve the customer experience (and prevent defections) is a win. Carriers have hundreds of millions of customers, and they recognize that their customers often feel like “just another number”. For example, if a mobile customer experiences dropped calls, they will eventually get fed up and sign up with another carrier.
Dropped calls fall into the third category above (consumer data). Of all the consumer data streaming into the carrier’s network environment, dropped calls are often a blip in a sea of activity, immediately drowning into an unrecognized event.
But what if this real-time, streaming dropped call event could be immediately correlated against the rich, historical customer data contained in the carrier’s existing data center? Could an apology instantly be texted to the customer? Followed by an opportunity to reconnect at no charge? Could additional goods or services be subsequently offered to those customers that have proven loyal to the carrier (or paid their bills on time) for many years?
Adding this capability requires a unified analytics strategy like Pivotal. In fact, Paul Maritz highlighted just such a use case as part of a Pivotal deployment at a telecommunications service provider earlier this year. This hybrid analytics approach works best when it couples a data-grid and/or CEP approach with a multi-tiered flash deployment. Both of these strategies (Flash and Pivotal) are depicted below as spanning the entire infrastructure.
John concluded his thoughts on the Pivotal strategy by stating that what’s good for the enterprise is good for the service provider/carrier. I’ll dive deeper into some of the EMC World announcements as they relate to service provider and carrier in future posts.
Steve
Twitter: @SteveTodd
EMC Fellow
