Another example of the renewed interest in business intelligence and analytics comes in the form of a contract Agilent Technologies inked with a Tier 1 North American mobile operator and the introduction of a new comprehensive reporting application for handset revenue analytics.

Agilent deployed what it calls the first OSS data-capture warehousing and reporting solution that handles the huge volumes of transaction detail records generated by packet-based services in new mobile broadband networks. The system is being installed on the network of one of largest mobile operators in the U.S.

The solution combines Agilent’s probe-based network monitoring and reporting capabilities with Teradata’s data warehousing and enterprise analytics platform.

The companies have co-engineered the solutions to correlate the massive amounts of OSS and BSS data associated with next-generation mobile networks. It can process, in near-real time, more than 2 billion TDRs a day, compared to the 200 million to 300 million Agilent says is typically processed by monitoring systems today.

The reporting tools are designed to provide actionable information on how a network is operating, which parts are near capacity, which elements are reaching overload, whether third-party providers are violating service-level agreements, how well particular handsets function and more.

Agilent also worked with Teradata on a handset analytics application that also combines OSS and BSS data, this time for mobile broadband networks.

“This is not a marketing relationship,” said Lisa Evans, senior director of the global industry solutions group at Teradata. “It is a joint venture where we are engineering our products so they are optimized for our mutual customers. It allows us to combine the network intelligence with customer and financial intelligence for the next generation of business intelligence.”

Using this Handset Revenue Analytics application, operators can evaluate the performance and popularity of specific handsets over time. It is part of Agilent’s assureME Intelligence reporting platform and allows operators to determine whether a handset is properly configured, downloads data successfully, connects to the network normally and is actually the handset type specified by the customer contract. This application also is built on Teradata’s data warehousing platform.

“We used to have a network-centric view of the universe, but now the center of the universe can be the customer,” said Alan Martin, business intelligence program manager at Agilent. “Teradata brings to the table all the information about the customer [such as] lifetime value, how they have been provisioned and all the BSS information relative to that customer, and we add the actual, real-time customer experience.”

Operators also can integrate billing, customer care and other business support systems into this application using numerical data such as phone numbers within individual TDRs to identify the appropriate business support system BSS records.