HP Targets Telecoms’ Customer Data Needs

HP is banking on telecommunications companies’ growing need to get in-depth customer information at a moment’s notice, on Wednesday introducing its new OpenCall Profile Manager and HP Service Governance Framework applications.

OpenCall targets telecoms looking for a single snapshot of all their customer data in real time — no small order for information-saturated enterprises.

“In today’s service provider world, it’s a big challenge and it’s only getting worse,” Steve Dietch, vice president of HP OpenCall Software, told InternetNews.com. “There are multiple siloed repositories of the same customer information. It’s hard to get a single view of a customer and it’s very expensive to maintain.”

OpenCall Profile Manager, which is now available to telecom customers, federates isolated databases — for example, customers subscribing to voice messaging services or ring tones — in real time, providing sales and marketing teams with consistent data culled from various data repositories.

It also makes centralized service provisioning cheaper and enables telecoms to tailor personalized services and advertising campaigns based on a customer’s current subscription, physical location, social communities and known preferences.

Dietch said Profile Manager delivers real contextualized information that can be fed into a provider’s CRM application to provide more Web services to specific types of customers.

For third-party application developers, this federated view will allow them to push new products and services to telecom customers directly — rather than having to pull account information from multiple sources to find their target audience.

HP also unveiled its Service Governance Framework (SGF), an application built on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) technologies of HP’s Service Delivery Platform 2.0.

The technology provides a single framework that enables operators to integrate telecom, Web and enterprise resources into converged services.

SGF features a registration portal, which third-party developers can use to securely integrate Web 2.0 services — like an ever-growing catalog of communications mashups, real-time policy enforcement and a change-of-contracts facility between applications and services.

“It shields the complexity of the underlying communications but provides the enabling tools third-party developers need to build these mashups for service provider networks,” Dietch said. “It provides a means to register and manage all these third-party developers. Otherwise, all these third-party applications can really run amok and cause catastrophic problems for these providers.”

Establishing the proper governance and security protocols for wireless carriers will be an increasingly important after the government awards the rights to the much-coveted 700MHz spectrum currently up for grabs.

Regardless of which provider ultimately lands the spectrum rights, a good portion of the spectrum will be reserved for an open-access platform that would allow consumers to connect any legal device or software to the network.

“One of the facets of this auction is that certain service providers will need to open up their network to all comers,” Dietch said. “They’re going to need a secure, controllable mechanism to manage all these third-party applications and devices.”

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