Guavus – leading the way with analytics in a complex world

I have been criticised in the past for championing Guavus, by competitors who say that they have similar capability so why do I differentiate. I have been talking to Guavus again and will once more champion their cause because I believe that they are doing more to provide solutions and not just capability than the competition, and this to me is a vital differentiator.

As you are aware things are changing fast in the world of Telco and Media, and the main players are all making great strides towards being quad play providers; that is Fixed line, mobile, broadband and television services. This is a complex offering, and to ensure that the right products and services are being offered and maintained is far from obvious. This pattern of change and complexity is being mirrored in other sectors, but this is one that I am most familiar with. It is into this world that Guavus make their offering. This is a world in which the traditional approaches to analytics are no longer as compelling as they used to be. Most obviously traditional analytics has tended to be looking for answers to known issues, but when you are opening up new complex markets what you actually want is answers to problems that you were not even aware of.

Big data has led to the creation of massive data lakes and to make sense of them analytics are essential, but where do you start to look? That is where Guavus are pitching their capability. They are looking at the blending of data from the multitude of data that big data has exposed. They are looking at the blending of streaming data with data at rest. They are placing great emphasis on the importance of analyse first store later, whilst traditional analytics is all about capture, codify store then analyse, and by the time an answer is found the business opportunity has moved on. Traditional BI within these leading edge industries is bedevilled with latency issues and failing to address the business requirement.

Guavus are breaking down the barrier that exists between the OSS (Operational Systems Support) and BSS (Business Systems Support) that has underpinned the organisations of those businesses for so long. In the OSS world data is current and fast changing, but can often lack context. In the BSS world we have the context but are struggling with issues of latency. The business requires that the two be unified and answers be provided that address how to use resources most effectively, how to serve customers most effectively, and how to do those things in real time and not after the event.

By intelligently looking at all of the data all of the time you are able to start to answer the key questions of what, why, where and when. As you start to answer that then the subject matter experts inside the organisation start to develop key insights, and can start to direct their efforts most effectively breaking out of preconceived ideas and becoming really customer focussed and not just using the words whilst remaining tethered to traditional resource centric thinking and actions. And the reason that all of this is so important is that that is the key to being able to monetise what is otherwise just being seen as something that is fast becoming a commoditised offering.

So, to reiterate, Guavus have a proven track record with Tier 1 Service Providers (Telco and Cable) with 5 of the top 5 North American mobile operators, 4 of the 5 Backbone carriers, and 7 of the 8 cable operators in North America, and have momentum in the market having signed 8 new tier 1 customers in the last year. To emphasise their enterprise ready credentials they have key technology partnerships that includes Cisco, Samsung, and Deloitte.

The Guavus Reflex Operational Intelligence platform is capable of handling a plethora of connected devices, the complex business and network models that underpin the current market place. They offer capability to handle massive scale, they can integrate data at scale and across great diversity, they offer the ability to sit at the edge between the data lakes of traditional BI, and the operational world of sensor data and catalogue data. They can transform traditionally static assets into high availability timely sources of insight, delivered within a context that makes actions and outcomes readily understood and implemented.

The Reflex platform targets key areas of Planning; with service management, network analytics, and content demand analysis; Operations, with performance and service management, and root cause analysis; and Marketing with acquisitions, retentions, loyalty and up-sell opportunities. The platform handles the collection, computation and presentation of results, they have the full range of analytical functions, and they tailor them to address specific solutions. Many of the companies I work with possess the data, the tools and the skills, but fail to bring everything together to realise the payback the level of investment demands. With Guavus the missing direction is addressed, with customers being shown more directly what is required to realise the benefits so long talked about.

Having started with Telco they are now bringing that same expertise to other sectors such as transportation, oil and gas, and utilities. They have identified the key use cases and will be delivering tailored solutions through 2015 and 2016. I think that they have to ability to make the promise of BI and analytics realisable to a mass market if people are prepared to look at their offering, against their incumbent capability.