Big Data, Cloud & Indian Telecom Industry Date:   Wednesday , October 22, 2014 Founded in 2000, Netxcell Limited is an ISO 9001:2008 certified application services provider company catering to telecom domain. Indian telecom industry has crossed two decades post privatization of this sector. Since then a lot of innovation, consolidation and maturation have happened in the industry and today we have about twelve major mobile telecom operators operating in India. Presently, the total revenue of telcos is about Rs. 1.8 trillion with a burden of Rs. 2.5 trillion debts with a dwindling voice and SMS revenue. This is happening due to severe tariff competition in case of voice and SMS revenue is declining due to advent of new instant messaging applications etc. The only stabilizing factor for telcos is revenues from Data provisioning. Data provisioning and activations include managing huge amount of consumer data and keeping it confidential. Data analytics thereby is gaining momentum in the telecom industry for customer retention and predicting customer behavior. The big data market in India, which presents a huge market opportunity for the IT services and analytics firms, will grow to $1 billion in 2015 and the global \'Big Data\' market opportunity is estimated to grow at 45 per cent annually to reach $25 billion by 2015, according to a report launched by IT industry body Nasscom and Crisil. Indian enterprises are experiencing considerable technology transformation across infrastructure, applications and end-user computing. This is due to proliferation of newer devices like smartphones and tablets, increasing enterprise IT adoption, implementation of Government projects of considerable size, such as UIDAI and National Knowledge Network. Rapid adoption of wireless broadband and increasing use of online retail, travel and banking will keep the big data market moving. Over the next decade, digital information in India will grow from 40,000 petabytes of data to 2.3 million petabytes, twice as fast as the worldwide rate. With 900 million+ mobile connections, 100 million+ active mobile data users and increasing number of connected devices, consumer and enterprise data will grow exponentially. Today about 80 percent of organizations are in the early stages of big data initiatives and 60 percent are still at the \"exploratory stage\" of evolution. Concerns relating to availability of skillsets, low levels of technology awareness and lack of management sponsorship are limiting big data adoption in India. 75 percent of organizations are confident of driving new revenue streams using big data. However, only 35 percent plan to invest in building big data capabilities related to analytics, security software and real-time applications; as per E&Y survey in 2013. Analytics in Telecom Industry Currently the telecom industry uses analytics to predict consumer behavior and segment the target audience for marketing purposes. It is at a very nascent stage when compared to its usage in the IT sector. Telecom could be boosted with the potential of data analytics, especially when hosted on Cloud. Since cloud services are shared and variable, it makes perfect sense for Telcos to host and analyze data on cloud. Further advantage for Telcos is the operational capability of hosting data on cloud. Cloud delivers unlimited capacity and pay-as-you-go economics, plus connections to an extremely dynamic business environment. Virtualization is driving a fundamental shift in how operators think about data center environments. It is lowering capital and operational costs, enabling IT agility, underlying Green IT initiatives and fueling the cloud. This convergence helps us to be aware of this paradigm shift and discusses the benefits of virtualization for the telecom sector. Pros and Cons of Analytics on Cloud Any data point of technical and commercial significance to telcos such as MSISDN, time for accessing data, duration of surfing, talk time, outgoing and incoming call frequency and duration. Once analyzed properly, telcos could offer the right service for the right subscriber. Implementation of data analytics requires huge CAPEX and OPEX part from specific skill set and technology. Cloud could be an excellent enabler for the following reasons. To protect the service quality, usually any outsourcing contracts will be having stringent SLAs with a defined TAT and mutually agreed uptime. The only concern for big data analytics in cloud environment today is security maintenance. Big data, cloud, social media and mobility are the four \"transformative megatrends\" that will shape global technology adoption over the next decade. Enterprises are excited about cloud computing but little of it is ready to use yet. Clouds present security risks, and many enterprise applications have to be completely rewritten to run on scalable clouds. Forward-thinking business leaders have overcome these challenges by using cloud to analyze data on real time, thereby generating better segmentation and newer revenue streams. Once the new telecom policy is formalized we expect market consolidation with approximately eight to nine Indian telecom players prevalent. Healthier business will then fuel the usage of big data on cloud to enhance their operational and financial efficiency.