Building customer satisfaction with better network monitoring

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Today's smartphone has capabilities that make it much more than a basic communication tool. To keep up with the latest smartphone technology, Telecom Italia uses a multimedia service management structure for optimal provision of mobile and fixed-line services. SAS® Analytics helps Telecom Italia monitor service provisioning and to anticipate anomalies in network traffic.

Analytics key to governing value-added services

Telecom Italia provides its services on a distributed network throughout the entire country, which requires sophisticated analytics to monitor network traffic and service performance, anticipate evolutionary trends and prevent anomalies. Therefore, the organization's Value-Added Services (VAS) infrastructure has been using SAS since the late 1990s.

Anticipating evolution of traffic in real time

"Thanks to the portability of the SAS code, we've been able to perform multiple migrations within our VAS infrastructure and implement Web analytics," explains Roberto Del Ferraro, Multimedia Service Manager at Telecom Italia. "Using web analytics allows us to analyze historical trends in network traffic related to client usage and monitor service provision performance. Therefore, we can anticipate the evolution of traffic in real time, over an extremely short period of time.

“We also apply prediction procedures in SAS to calculate the traffic anticipated in the upcoming minutes, based on a series of historical data from the preceding weeks. We are thus able to assess (or evaluate) the deviations against (or compared to) a safe range of expected values ​​and enable the appropriate checks.”

Minimizing effect of service provisioning anomalies

The ability to detect any anomalies in service provisioning and proactively evaluate deviations compared to anticipated traffic is very important when it comes to network operations.

"Given the complexity of the network," says Del Ferraro, "and the branching of the distributed servers involved in the services, it is critical to gain a detailed insight of the service usage trend as well as anticipate any discontinuity due to either internal issues or to an external service provider. Analyzing usage trends helps us be prepared to quickly respond when we get generic notifications that don't tell us what the specific network problem is. We can also evaluate the impact that an effective failure, for example in a single access node, can have on national traffic volumes."

Web analytics for marketing

Telecom Italia's supervisory operators use SAS Analytics to monitor the map of national traffic 24 hours a day. System experts also use SAS to evaluate the performance of the network and its individual components during peak usage periods.

"The adoption of web analytics allows us to monitor trends in microbrowsing traffic on mobile phones and smartphones as compared to traffic directors in the public domain, such as Google or Facebook, says Del Ferraro. "It also allows our marketing colleagues to analyze the usage profile with respect to particular services or particular areas of the portal, in order to modify and enrich our offerings.

"To this end, the flexibility of the data processing and analysis environment greatly helps our marketing department. Our marketing colleagues simply communicate the URLs and reference domains for the service, and we can reuse the work already performed to rapidly prepare the data environment and reports for analysis."

Flexibility, stability, processing speed

While flexibility is a key element for aligning the SAS Platform with always-evolving market requirements and the needs of the company's divisions, stability and data processing speed are determining factors.

"In terms of operation, the availability of a stable environment that does not require continual revisions and regularly and systematically produces results that are measurable and comparable over time is of crucial importance," says Del Ferraro. "We must also have an environment that is able to rapidly and accurately grind through enormous quantities of data without causing congestion problems.

"The capabilities of the SAS Platform allow our analytics technicians to monitor usage, analyze traffic, anticipate anomalies, and align service provision and value. For us, these are the activities that help us improve client satisfaction."

This story was originally published on ita.sas.com.