Products & Solutions / Communications Analytics Architecture

SAS® Communications Analytics Architecture

Model the complete customer experience

SAS Communications Analytics Architecture provides a robust business analytics framework tailored to the unique business intelligence and analytical needs of communications service providers (CSPs). The solution takes data from multiple, disparate operational systems and formats, cleanses, transforms and stores it in a foundation data mart. The analytics architecture aligns with the Information Framework (SID) as defined by the leading communications industry standards group, the TM Forum.

Benefits

  • Optimize data management using industry standards.
  • Provide consistent, accurate, verifiable and up-to-date information.
  • Provide clear, structured information to all who need it.
  • Eliminate overlapping, redundant tools and systems.
  • Create an integrated, complete view of all your enterprise data.

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Features

  • Communications Data Model
  • Data Integration
  • Reporting and Business Intelligence

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" I'm a firm believer that analytics is a critical component for major operators to get them back into a fighting position with the likes of Google. Business analytics not only is a critical enabler for monetizing mobile advertising, but also allows the service providers to better understand their customers’ preferences, their preferred services, their purchasing/browsing behavior and their calling patterns. And this in turn can help with delivering a well-managed customer experience and in the targeting and timing of offers and content to the right user at the right moment."

— Martin Creaner, President & Chief Operations Officer, TM Forum



How SAS® Is Different

SAS Communications Analytics Architecture provides a unique combination of:

  • An industry-standard communications data model built on our experience with more than 200 operators and can jump-start your reporting capabilities with a communications-specific data model and prebuilt data integration capabilities that serve as a single source of information for an enterprise data warehouse. 
  • Superior data integration capabilities that automatically cleanse data as part of the data integration process so you can be confident in its integrity. 
  • Intuitive, Web-based reporting with ready access to online reports containing performance data in historical comparisons with drill-down capabilities on the latest key metrics, such as ARPU, churn and lifetime value.
  • Shared information with embedded query and reporting, and automatic production of regulatory reports from a scheduled process that lets your business analysts generate further reports, make changes and rerun reports as needed for faster response to requests without undue burden on IT.

Benefits

  • Optimize data management using industry standards. Architecture is a fully documented, customer-centric foundation data model (FDM) that contains all the data necessary to model the complete customer experience. The FDM is aligned with the TM Forum Information Framework (SID), the most widely adopted industry standard data model.
    The solution uses data from various operational and transactional systems such as billing, customer relationship management, order management, data warehouse and activity-based management. This flexible architecture ensures seamless integration with all these systems to extract the required data and information.
  • Provide consistent, accurate, verifiable and up-to-date information. Consistently getting correct data when and where it is needed provides increased confidence in accuracy and timeliness. Embedded data quality routines and a communications data model enable you to correct, standardize and verify data to provide accurate, up-to-date business intelligence and acquire and consolidate historical data from internal and external sources for analysis and reporting.
  • Provide clear, structured information to all who need it. The solution uses standard reports and an easy-to-use Web-based reporting environment to easily communicate critical business information to the right people within your organization. SAS incorporates a range of business intelligence capabilities to meet the needs of every type of user, including managers looking for dashboards; groups that want to view and build reports on the Web; business analysts who need advanced data exploration; and IT staff members who need to deploy, manage, control and maintain the entire solution.
  • Eliminate overlapping, redundant tools and systems. This is a flexible, reliable and complete solution that supports all the data integration and reporting needs of a CSP. It eliminates the piecemeal approach of linking and managing technologies from different vendors and provides a lower overall cost, reduced risk and faster results.
  • Create an integrated, complete view of all your enterprise data. We provide a comprehensive data dictionary, covering all key communications subject areas such as customer, account, financial accounting and communications. The pre-defined logical and physical data models serve as a single version of truth that standardizes more than 1,000 unique communications data elements, ensuring consistent terminology and reporting throughout the organization to support key business decisions.

Features

Communications Data Model
  • Provides a comprehensive and consistent dictionary for describing communications data elements.
  • Maps physical data structures to business terms in an easy-to-use interface.
  • Defines entities and relationships.
  • Confirms an understanding of the business.
  • Identifies which source system should supply data.
Data Integration
  • Employs wizards for accessing source systems, creating target structures, importing and exporting metadata, and building and executing data access, transformation and load process flows.
  • Uses a dedicated GUI to profile data and identify and repair source system issues, while retaining the business rules for later use in the ETL processes.
  • Supports real-time services for real-time data cleansing and augmentation as well as other real-time processes.
  • Provides support for unstructured and semistructured data.
  • Provides an array of out-of-the box standardization rules for conforming data to corporate standards, and you can build customized rules for special situations.
  • Profile operational data and monitor ongoing data activities with an interactive GUI designed specifically for data stewards' needs.
  • Customize and reuse data quality business rules that can be accessed directly within process job flows.
  • Migrate or synchronize data between database structures, enterprise applications, mainframe legacy files, text, XML, message queues and a host of other sources.
  • Join data across data sources for real-time access and analysis.
Reporting and Business Intelligence
  • Provides a Web-based, interactive reporting interface for business users.
  • Requires no ETL to generate nonstandard reports.
  • Enables query capabilities for all levels of users across multiple BI interfaces.
  • Slices and dices multidimensional data using a special slicer and by applying filters on any level of a hierarchy.
  • Uses critical first-alert, call-to-action dashboards for performance results.
  • Incorporates dynamic business visualization for interactive data exploration, visual queries and more.
  • Accesses SAS capabilities for data access, reporting and analytics directly from Microsoft Office, including Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
  • Enables creation of wizard-driven reports within Microsoft Office tools.

System Requirements

Client environment

Microsoft Windows (x86-32): Windows XP Professional, Windows Server 2003 family, Windows Server 2008 family, Windows Vista*, Windows 7**

Server environment
  • AIX: 5.3 and 6.1 on POWER architectures
  • HP-UX Itanium: HP-UX 11iv2 (11.23), 11iv3 (11.31)
  • HP-UX PA-RISC: HP-UX 11iv2  (11.23), 11iv3 (11.31)
  • Linux for x86 (x86-32): RHEL 4 and 5, SuSE SLES 9, 10 and 11
  • Linux for x64 (EM64T/AMD64): RHEL 4 and 5, SuSE SLES 9, 100 and 11
  • Microsoft Windows (x86-32): Windows XP Professional, Windows Server 2003 family, Windows Server 2008 family, Windows Vista*, Windows 7**
  • Microsoft Windows on x64 (EM64T/AMD64): Windows XP Professional for x64, Windows Server 2003 for x64, Windows Server 2008 for x64, Windows Server 2008 R2 for x64, Windows Vista* for x64, Windows 7**  for x64
  • Solaris on SPARC: Version 9, 10
  • Solaris on x64: Version 10
Midtier environment
  • AIX: 5.3 and 6.1 on POWER architectures
  • HP-UX Itanium: HP-UX 11iv2 (11.23), 11iv3 (11.31)
  • Linux for x64 (EM64T/AMD64): RHEL 4 and 5, SuSE SLES 9, 100 and 11
  • Microsoft Windows (x86-32): Windows XP Professional, Windows Server 2003 family, Windows Server 2008 family, Windows Vista*, Windows 7**
  • Microsoft Windows on x64 (EM64T/AMD64): Windows XP Professional for x64, Windows Server 2003 for x64, Windows Server 2008 for x64, Windows Server 2008 R2 for x64, Windows Vista* for x64, Windows 7**  for x64
  • Solaris on SPARC: Version 9, 10
  • Solaris on x64: Version 10

* NOTE: Windows Vista supported editions are: Enterprise, Business and Ultimate.
** NOTE: Windows 7 supported editions are: Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate.

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