An Analytics Engine Architecture for Service Provider Deployments

Service providers are continually looking for new applications to increase revenues, enhance the end user experience, and be a part of an emerging next-generation services value chain. Service providers can play an important role in this emerging market by leveraging data mining and analytics. In this paper, we propose an analytics engine (AE), an application enabler that accepts inputs from various sources in real time and non-real time, such as subscriber historic, static, dynamic, and application data available in the service provider's network and from external sources including end users. It analyzes the data to develop and continuously refine user profiles that can be used by other applications. There is a growing demand for real time business intelligence which correlates to a shift in how that information is being used. The idea is to use some small aggregate summary output of analytics to help guide the real time decisions, such as in providing relevant advertising and in service simplification/personalization. Use of an analytics engine will enable service providers quickly to monetize information available in their networks today (C) 2008 Alcatel-Lucent.