Tea at the Dorchester

I’m at a telecoms conference this week, and in previous years i’m told the talk here had all been of networks and switches and bandwidths and copper. This year it’s all about content and customers and services and customization. Very interesting how the industry is moving from building infrastructure & acquiring market share to adding value for customers and delivering content.

The new watchword 'is the customer data is king'. I talked to an infrastructure provider who is planning to collect data on the content they deliver on behalf of customers and then sell access to that data back to advertisers. We talked about an analytics-in-the-cloud type service for the advertisers. And another innovative mobile provider was very interested in the churn management application one of our partner has, although what she really wants is predictive analytics that tell her which subscribers to call, because they might become dissatisfied.

The example was subscribers who live near the edge of a cell and get higher than normal dropped calls. Does that need spatial data? Not sure, but even if it does it’s not massively complex. I suggested that combinations of call history to dynamically identify ‘friends and family’ of very recent defectors might be interesting and we talked about a few other possibilities. I don’t think she realized it was feasible to deliver demanding analyes of huge data volumes quickly enough to support this kind of agility in the business. More than one person I spoke to today appreciated that if they didn’t push the boundaries with how they get value from their data, their competitors will.

Of course there’s a big advantage to Netezza (with our newly enriched in-database analytics) for customers to identify more and more complex ways to analyse more and more data. But that doesn’t mean I would steer the conversations in that direction. No sirree, not me. (where’s that Pinocchio emoticon when you need it).

I had to get to the conference at 7am to set up the stand. About 10:30 the previous night i got a call from the sales executive who was supposed to be there to help me to tell me she’d be delayed. I’m still a newbie so this is my first time building and manning the exhibitor’s stand. Good job there were instructions in the case. That way I could ignore them and struggle – well I am a man. We can’t be following instructions until all other possibilities have been exhausted.

And my predictive analytics tell me my sales executive colleague – who incidentally worked her (insert your own inappropriate simile here) all day – will have another urgent appointment come tear-down time tomorrow. We’ll see.

PS. Top conference catering – courtesy of the Dorchester. We got the same pastries at afternoon break as the dowagers taking tea next door. Nice.