Big Data

In today's connected world and increased digitization of information, the speed and amount of data created is increasing daily at an exponential rate. According to a study by EMC, in 2011 alone, more than 1.8 zettabytes were created. This is equivalent to 28 Billion 64GB smartphones, or the equivalent of four such smartphones for every person in the world.

With the volume of data available, Enterprises could find themselves overwhelmed and unaware of their value. This is further compounded by the fact that majority of the world's data today is unstructured. Information passing through the telecommunication networks plays a major role in this data creation. Running through these connectivity and content layer are terabytes of data and information that carries insights, behaviours and profiles of customers that can be valuable to Enterprises which are not accessible anywhere else.

Despite this, more and more Enterprises recognize the tremendous opportunities that big data presents for their businesses. New insights can now be discovered - they understand their customers better and know how relevant their products and services can be to their target audiences. Productivity and operations planning can be enhanced and made more efficient. New business opportunities are unravelled.

Key question is how do businesses extract the value in these data, understand the relevance of them to their business needs and further transform them into monetary opportunities.

Accordingly to Gartner’s definition, Analytics leverage data in a particular functional process (or application) to enable context-specific insights that are actionable. Many technology companies in the last decade have started to provide solutions to not only help customers manage these copius amount of data but also provide actionable insights to capture the business value.

Telcos are in a unique position to provide valuable data insights for Enterprises. The availability of near real time location-based data provides huge potential for Enterprises in many industries. One key industry is retail. For the retail owners, a key insight is to be able to understand the movement patterns of shoppers and their dwelling times in malls across Singapore. Did you know that JEM’s visitors with the longest average dwell time of almost 2 hours came from Woodlands? Engagement with this segment should be tailored to drive spend within the mall through tailored promotions of their interests and preferences.

Insights like catchment analysis, overlaid with shopper profiles, empower mall operators and retailers to plan and strategize their marketing campaigns and even decide the next optimal store location. Marketing and leasing teams in the retail industry are one of the key users of data analytics, with the intention to source for the right mall tenants and to provide differentiated experiences for their mall visitors.

As more activities moved from offline to online, companies are also turning into digital analytics to find out more about the digital behaviour of their target segment for a more contextual engagement. For a leading local news mobile app, its readers are three times more likely to share an article on Facebook when reading the news online versus reading it through the application.

Media agencies and research companies can also leverage on Telco’s data analytics to augment their existing data sources, to provide more in-depth and holistic view of target audiences for their clients. Ad exposure for Out-Of-Home (OOH) advertising is easily calculated using location-centric data, including insights to the audience profile. In the month of December 2015, we observed 30% more females between 25-30 years along the stretch of Telok Blangah on weekends compared to weekdays. Digital outdoor media can serve ads that can be changed in real-time to reflect changing audience.

Turn the big data revolution into an opportunity for your business. Speak to us today and we will help you make the most out of our rich insights.

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