DIGIMIND

Telecom Supplier Implements Data Analytics Tool

The 06/29/2009

Tekelec’s signaling solutions enable the interworking of different network applications, technologies and protocols, providing a smooth transition to next-generation networks. The company plays in a highly competitive market where decisions such as which products to develop, which features to include in a release, how to allocate marketing resources, etc., depend upon awareness of actions of competitors, customers, and other key technology trend data. Tekelec managers reviewed several new tools in an effort to help the product management and product marketing teams consolidate the sources they use to stay current on critical competitive information.

Recently, Tekelec automated the task of competitive intelligence including data collection, information management, data analysis and publication, by implementing the Digimind platform. “Our product managers and other development teams will be able to quickly incorporate this competitive market intelligence information into the product planning process, thanks to this sophisticated software,” said Anne Patton, Director of Corporate Marketing for Tekelec, Morrisville, North Carolina. “This will streamline the process for our teams, by reducing the need for individual efforts and eliminating the review of numerous separate email alerts.”

A fast-packed, highly competitive market space

The explosive growth of text messages, wireless subscribers and pre-paid services require telecom operators to support increasing amounts of traffic on their networks. The result is that telecom operators need more insight, control and management of traffic than ever before. The situation is complicated by the fact that operators are in the process of making the transition from time domain multiplexing SS7 systems to next-generation all-IP networks.

To manage the transition, Tekelec provides practical solutions that enable operators to offer new, revenue-generating solutions, while leveraging their existing infrastructure and taking a stepped approach to all-IP networks. Tekelec solutions are already trusted in the core of major telecom operator networks around the globe, including eight of 10 of the world’s largest wireless telecom operators and six of 10 of the world’s largest wireline telecom operators. Over the past two years Tekelec solutions have been deployed in 40 new customer networks. The company now has products in over 100 countries.

Manual tracking of competitive activities was time-consuming

Tekelec has several primary product groups that address operator needs including core infrastructure, mobile messaging and network performance monitoring. Each of these products and solutions has its own set of competitors. The company also competes in many different geographical areas and the company’s strongest competitors vary by region. This, coupled with the current environment of consolidation among both carriers and vendors, creates many challenges. In the past, gathering research from a wide variety of sources required a considerable amount of manual effort. The manual nature of the information gathering process opened the possibility that new information could be overlooked. Another concern was that with numerous teams engaged in specific research, there could be duplication of effort. There was a need for a more efficient competitive intelligence solution to enhance information sharing across product teams.

Implementing an automated solution

Several different automated competitive intelligence solutions were evaluated for potential deployment internally. “We found two solutions that seemed to address our needs by continuously and automatically monitoring online sources such as web pages, blogs, market research and vendor web sites, etc.,” one employee said. “Only Digimind’s solution addresses the complete competitive intelligence process including data collection, information management, analysis, analytical graphics and sharing. Digimind can also be considerably less expensive than other solutions.”

The Tekelec implementation team identified key information sources for each of the company’s main solution areas and developed search terms that generate a high proportion of relevant information. Digimind uses algorithms such as clustering, language detection, event analysis to extract and structure content to increase the proportion of valuable information. The software enables Tekelec to configure dashboards for each of the company’s solution areas delivering the specific information required by individual product teams.

Tekelec uses Digimind to search sources on the invisible web that are time consuming to access. The invisible web consists of sites, including many important industry publications that are not indexed by search engines. Searching these sites requires navigating to the specific site and entering the search terms directly in the site’s search engine. With the robust capability of Digimind’s software, these sites are automatically searched with the same frequency as other sites that are indexed by major search engines.

Putting info into visual form

Digimind provides graphical data analysis that helps visualize data trends. For example, regional maps indicate where a specific technology or product descriptor may be prevalent during a certain time period. This helps identify emerging trends by region. Other graphic capabilities reveal trends over time in the mention of key terms that make it easy to see which competitors and technologies are gaining traction and which ones are slipping. Decision-makers can drill down on the graphs to see the underlying details. For example, if the number of mentions of a particular competitor is growing rapidly the product manager can click on the chart to see the subject of the individual article which may reveal a new product introduction. Analytics saves time by making it possible to identify key trends without having to read individual articles. Analytics are particularly valuable in consolidating large amounts of data for internal briefings.

Tekelec uses Digimind’s unique relational mapping capabilities to visually organize large numbers of items in context with each other to understand emerging trends. For example, the company recently used this capability to look at the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), a signaling protocol that is widely used for setting up and tearing down multimedia communication sessions such as voice and video calls over the Internet. Tekelec has a leadership position in the emerging SIP space. The company recently created a relational map of SIP articles that instantly highlighted the subjects of these articles, making it possible to visualize thousands of articles in seconds and identify trends by company and country that are heavily linked with SIP or that are increasing their involvement with this emerging technology.

Identifying market trends in real-time

“Digimind has enhanced our capability to track telecom vendor activities, emerging technologies and identify new trends,” said one user of the tool. “It has the potential to provide each of our product teams with comprehensive information on their competitors’ activities. This provides a global view of competitor’s activity levels in specific product areas. We can identify new entrants into our global markets as well as analyze strategic shifts in technology adoption. The information that is generated is automatically archived so that product teams can go back in time to track competitors’ previous actions. Even if a competitor removes information from their website it remains stored in the archive. We also use the tool to better understand our customers’ initiatives and the dynamics of their competitive markets.”

Better information leads to better decisions

“We hope that the net result will be that our product teams can access a tool that improves their visibility and ability to monitor competitors and customers behavior so we can incorporate this into our own internal business scenario planning,” Patton concluded. “We are very pleased with the results we have achieved with the first phase of our implementation. We are about to embark on the second phase which will focus on integrating Digimind with Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 so that information generated on Digimind will immediately be available company-wide. This integration will provide further improvements in the speed with which information is monitored and available to our product teams and decision-makers.”