Real-time data platform for 5G in telecom: Aerospike

As telecommunications companies take a financial hit transitioning to 5G with numerous obstacles to overcome, now is the time for them to enter new verticals. Aerospike sees a way forward: replicate successful data use cases from other verticals in the telecom space.

There is a massive amount of streaming data coming in from mobile, 5G, and IoT sensor applications. The challenge is to manage, leverage, and analyze this data across silos, optimizing new investments in modern infrastructure and applications, and to provide the best customer experience – all at real-time speeds.

Aerospike real-time data platform lives at the edge where it handles billions of transactions per second with sub-millisecond latency and 99.999% uptime. Aerospike powers massive device connectivity across highly distributed networks so you can instantly launch new services – even at petabyte scale. Aerospike has served several customers, such as Airtel and Nokia.

Here, Aveekshith Bushan, Regional Director and GM, Asia Pacific, Aerospike, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview.

V&D: What are the successful data use cases that can be replicated from other verticals in the telecom space?

Aveekshith Bushan: In the telecom industry, Aerospike’s use cases include enabling billing/charging, policy control, subscriber data management, and real-time/geospatial microservices solutions. At Aerospike, we are replicating game-changing solutions from other verticals to telecoms such as in online gaming, image and video analytics, fraud detection/prevention, and product recommendations in the context of mobile commerce.

With the transition to 5G, telecommunication companies are likely to have a financial setback and to be able to stay profitable, it is a suitable time for them to consider new revenue streams in parallel areas. For example, value-added applications such as fraud detection and prevention, image and video analytics, online gaming, and product recommendations can bring in additional revenue.

Organizations are losing an average of $4.5 million every year because of fraudulent online transactions. Aerospike has already marked its presence in fraud prevention for its customers. For instance, PayPal has seen a 30x reduction in fraudulent transactions missed otherwise by leveraging Aerospike’s patent-winning Hybrid Memory Architecture (HMA).

Telecoms are also in a unique position to track app usage by their subscribers and can bring in insights from cross-app analytics. Aerospike’s powerful real-time data platform is vertical agnostic and has a huge potential in cross-referencing use cases among different industries.

V&D: How are you managing, leveraging, and analyzing data across silos?

Aveekshith Bushan: Data silos play a critical role in being a big blocker for decision making and in turn organizations face a lot of challenges in their data structuring. Firstly, the ability of the data platform to manage or to store large volumes of data is a challenge as we are limited by the performance of the database. Secondly, these data are already built into certain third-party applications which every telco already has, hence the challenge is to bring structured data into Aerospike platforms.

The focus is to eradicate data silos. At Aerospike, we are breaking down silos and encouraging a cultural shift by helping our customers move data from their existing platform. For instance, we are seamlessly powering the Airtel App and Airtel Thanks service to move the data in real-time from the applications to Aerospike platforms.

Organizations are leveraging our real-time data solutions to manage and scale up their data movement journey. This scaled performance is generating enhanced results and improving the business optimization process.

V&D: How are you optimizing new investments in modern infrastructure and applications?

Aveekshith Bushan: IT leaders are investing in modern IT infrastructure, tools and promoting collaboration to overcome complexity and business risks and in parallel reduce economic pressures. To ensure delivering faster time to market and customer satisfaction improvement for the business, businesses are also driving cross-team collaboration and process automation across their development, infrastructure, and operations teams to deliver higher levels of customer satisfaction at lower costs.

Over the last 5 to 10 years, there has been a drastic change in terms of what we are seeing in the infrastructure models. Initially what used to be the four walls’ Data Center is now a public cloud service or a private cloud service.

V&D: Elaborate on the Aerospike real-time data platform.

Aveekshith Bushan: We see an enormous amount of data generated every single day. As per the Assocham-PwC study, India’s data consumption is expected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 72.6 percent to 10,96,58,793 million MB by 2022.

However, this vast amount of data is of no use unless businesses invest in the right data management strategies. Having access to excellent quality data will bring in the difference between success and failure in today’s always-on, right-now economy. What we have seen is that legacy systems lack data consistency and cannot reach petabyte-scale and performance; mainframes remain costly and do not scale horizontally.

We, at Aerospike, can overcome these challenges with our real-time data platform that can be easily deployed in any public, private or multi-cloud architecture. With the help of Aerospike’s Real-time Data Platform, our customers are looking at making their data even more accessible and valuable through better query capabilities.

V&D: Elaborate on the work done with Airtel.

Aveekshith Bushan: The customer base for Airtel is huge in India, hence the fierce competition. Airtel needed to provide a better customer experience and was looking to:

* Unify its data from its various business services

* Upgrade to a highly accessible, responsive architecture for scalability, speed, and agility

* Develop a unique footprint for customers

* Deliver better-customized experiences and services.

To help Airtel reach its Customers 360 goals, Aerospike provided them the ability to ingest data from 350 million customers across all customer data channels and bring that into one database at a rate of more than 40,000 transactions per second with sub-millisecond performance to significantly improve their reads and writes. Over time, Aerospike was able to:

* Increase scalability, allowing Airtel to process more than 100 billion records in one day

* Provide better reliability, agility, and speed of 40K+ transactions per second

* Assured 99.999% reliability

* Ensured resilient persistence to prevent any data loss

* 90% reduction in TCO.

V&D: Elaborate on the work done with Nokia.

Aveekshith Bushan: Nokia Networks delivers applications that help telcos and communications service providers (CSPs) maximize revenue and optimize performance. The team needed to build new applications to take advantage of structural changes in the dynamics of the industry.

Over the years we have also seen an increase in customer engagements in multi-access edge compute (MEC)/telco edge. Nokia Networks leveraged Aerospike’s Real-time Database to provide new billing and charging applications designed to capitalize on real-time inputs from the edge of the user experience. These modern applications built on Aerospike, enable carriers to meet customer demand for real-time information about usage patterns, subscriber preferences, needs, and lifestyles.

Application capabilities realized with Aerospike are:

* Quickly create and manage differentiated data plans based on real-time information

* Economically scale with the ebb and flow of new shared data plans and sponsored data promotions

* Provide real-time subscriber notifications about data usage

* Per-account routing rules with edge systems

* Traffic shaping to implement account policies

* Accessible user provisioning applications (self-serve and through support personnel)

Infrastructure results with Aerospike:

* Predictable, sub-millisecond latency and high throughput

* 5-9’s availability; reliable, failure-resistant system

* Cross datacenter replication (XDR) support

* Dramatic TCO savings over in-memory platforms such as Oracle TimesTen via Flash-based storage to enable fast data center build-outs.

Aerospike’s real-time data platform makes it possible for telco service providers and CSPs to build next-generation applications that offer a clear point of differentiation, a key imperative in a highly competitive and fast-evolving market.

V&D: What are your plans moving forward?

Aveekshith Bushan: Aerospike will continue to invest in the digital transformation occurring in India where the demand for real-time data 'decisioning’ at a huge scale is growing. Importantly, we understand that the companies that will win are those that continue to innovate. At Aerospike, we firmly believe that transformational innovation shouldn’t be constrained by data architecture, and on the contrary, should play a decisive role in shaping growth led by digital transformation.

Aerospike is committed to accelerating digital transformation in India. With over eight years of presence in India, Aerospike is trusted by leading enterprises such as Airtel, Jio, Snapdeal, PhonePe, Paytm, DBS Bank, Naukri.com, BigBasket, Ola, Dream11, to help them confidently deploy mission-critical, strategic operational applications that make digital transformation possible.