Industry Overview
EMC Telecommunications Industry Solutions
Business Challenges
The telecommunications industry is experiencing a period of significant change. New technologies are evolving, user demands are increasing (the any time, anywhere access expectation), and the competitive landscape continues to intensify. In addition, network expansion and attendant complexities have sent management costs soaring. At the same time,
deregulation, legal rulings, regulatory requirements, and converging markets have created an environment of compliance, intense price comparisons, and pitched battles for market share.
As a result, three fundamental issues are facing telecommunications companies today:
First, there’s the need for greater operational efficiency and cost containment, which
means streamlining processes and improving functionality. Second, service providers are
seeking more efficient ways to develop and deliver new services to the marketplace as a
means to strengthen their market position and create new revenue opportunities. And
third, they need to map out and accelerate the integration of new and improved workflow
processes.
From a solutions perspective, their success will be determined largely by their ability to
unify business and operations support systems while integrating two historically separate
worlds: the networking operations and engineering world, and the world of data and information management. EMC’s Global Solutions Group, through a growing network of
telecommunications partners and expanded technology collaborations, offers solutions
aimed at these specific business problems and business opportunities in the telecommunications industry.
Focusing on Solutions Areas
EMC is focused on assisting service providers to reduce costs and drive new service revenues. Based on an EMC Automated Networked Storage™ approach, and enhanced by
powerful storage management tools and best practices, EMC is developing solutions for
improved business performance in six key areas.
Revenue Assurance (Billing, Mediation, Fraud, Prepaid)
Telecom carriers have long been focused on “revenue assurance.” After all, it is revenue that
allows the enterprise to go forward. EMC provides specific solutions such as Billing and
Mediation using SAN and NAS platforms to enable service providers to securely capture, share,
and distribute CDRs between distributed systems—all while protecting the carrier’s bottom line.
CDR Lifecycle Management
— CDR Collection, Back-End Archiving for Regulatory Compliance
In a telecom environment, Call Detail Records (CDRs or Events) have a lifecycle; that is to
say that many of Lines of Business (LOB) are involved in the CDR collection, correlation,
distribution, bill processing, data warehousing, and archiving. However, depending on the
access requirements and what business objective the data is needed for—each LOB or
functional group within the telco will look at the value of this data differently—and hence,
will place different values on the right infrastructure needed to support this data. EMC’s
multi-tiered storage platforms (Symmetrix®, CLARiiON®, and Centera™) provide data protection, availability, retention for regulatory and compliance needs, and automated policybased software for data mobility between storage tiers.
Customer Assurance
— Customer Service, Data Warehousing, Intelligence Support Systems
Service provider’s are beginning to look to telecom data (CDR data) to provide greater
insight into customer behavior for marketing and for improving service delivery. Customer
Assurance represents an effort to focus on customers “in depth,” and while it includes
CRM and data warehousing, it also expands into a new area called Intelligence Support
Systems (ISS); those software elements or units that interface with or are part of billing,
ordering, provisioning, and authentication systems. EMC storage solutions enable carriers
to share data across distributed environments using SAN and NAS technology for improved
flow of information between customer touch points (i.e., via a call center or the Web), eliminate unnecessary data duplication, and improve quality of service delivery.
Network Management
— OSSs; Network Provisioning, Management, Monitoring
EMC’s new NEBS certification for the CLARiiON CX series enables carriers to deploy automated networked storage for their legacy (OSS, Network Management) and next-generation applications (voice-mail, DSL) at the edge/central office location. Using EMC replication software, such as MirrorView™, SAN Copy™, and EMC OnCourse™, carriers can
securely move files between the central office and the data center environments for
increased reliability, availability, and centralized management.
New Services
— Offerings for MMS, Unified Messaging, Voice-Mail, VoIP, and DSL
The convergence of networks is driving carriers from voice to more IP data-service offerings. New billing models with content-rich services create new challenges for how content,
access, and usage data is collected, rated, stored, and billed. EMC storage solutions provide wireless and wireline carriers with high availability, scalability, and automated software to dynamically manage block and file-level data between common storage platforms
(SAN, NAS, CAS) to meet SLAs and protect brand identity.
Managed Services
— Data Transfers/Transports, BC/DR, PC/Server Backup, E-Mail Archiving
In order to leverage network bandwidth, service providers are looking to new service offerings to grow revenues. Therefore, instead of looking at bandwidth as the product to sell,
bandwidth becomes the enabler, allowing delivery of differentiated, revenue-generating
services to customers. EMC partners with a number of service providers worldwide who
offer best-practice Managed Service offerings for PC/desktop backup, e-mail archiving,
and optically-enabled SANs.
Solutions Value
EMC’s Global Solutions Areas address service providers’ top concerns by providing bestpractice storage infrastructure solutions that enable carriers to drive new revenue-generating services and improve their internal cost structure as depicted in the figure below.
TM
Single Point of Data Management
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2
EMC , EMC, CLARiiON, and Symmetrix are
registered trademarks and EMC Automated
Networked Storage, EMC ControlCenter, EMC
OnCourse, MirrorView, Centera, SAN Copy, and
where information lives are trademarks of EMC
Corporation. Other trademarks used herein are
the property of their respective owners.
Getting Started
To learn more about EMC’s Telecommunications Solutions, please visit
www.emc.com or contact your local EMC representative.
© 2003 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
Produced in the USA. 7/03
Industry Overview
H981
www.EMC.com