Telcos to offer analytics-as-a-service: HP

Service providers, particularly telcos, are likely to start offering data analytics-as-a-service to entice SMB customers keen to on-board the big data trend, according to HP technology consultancy sales director, Daniel Aw.

Many larger organisations have been dabbling in big data for some time to gain valuable insight into customer behaviour. The trend has begun to filter down the food chain and HP has seen some of its service provider partners working closely with SMBs to develop their big data analytics capabilities.

"Service providers are in one of the best positions in the industry to reach out to SMBs," Aw told journalists at the HP World Tour event in Beijing, China. "We are working with a lot of service providers to help them develop services for big data, the same way we are doing that for cloud services."

Many telcos in Australia have brought out cloud offerings, including software-as-a-service (SaaS), that appeal to SMBs that don't have much money to spend on building their own IT infrastructures. Aw believes the same kind of model would work for big data and telcos could serve up analytics-as-a-service.

Telcos are in a good position to offer analytics-as-a-service because many already have a slew of cloud services that SMBs are currently using and it would be easy for them to collect the data generated on those cloud services, Aw said.

"Service providers, and even large IT companies, are starting to look at business intelligence (BI) services for SMBs," he said. "It doesn't make sense for SMBs to invest in infrastructure [for BI] and that is where I think telcos could come in. SMBs can have a Hadoop cluster [with the telcos], for example, put their information in there and telcos can do analytics around it.

"That, to me, is the future trend for SMBs."

Spandas Lui attended HP World Tour as a guest of HP.