Ask anyone what “real-time” actually means, and you’ll get a different answer. From trading to telecoms, the answers will range from milliseconds to minutes and “real-time” will come with an entirely different set of implications depending on whether you are a Global Head of e-FX at a Tier 1 bank, or the Head of Networks at a Tier 1 Telco.
Actual “real-time” in telecoms has changed quite drastically over the years, with the speed at which companies can get data in front of the customers improving significantly year by year. Vendors such as Ericsson producing both their own hardware and solutions and delivering data exclusively between the two are doing particularly well because of the simplicity of their singular environments.
Independent providers like SysMech have also done well by addressing many of the latency challenges that come with aspiring to real-time in a multi-vendor environment, while also providing a unique level of support difficult to find amongst larger providers.
Here’s the real question
But whether you’re asking the Head of e-Commerce in the capital markets, or the Head of Networks in a large telecoms operator, there is one thing they will agree on: With decreased latency, comes increased expectation.
The faster data is delivered, the more people seem to expect. Whether it’s what’s next for real-time VoLTE or real time for SON, everyone is talking about real-time. And while the focus seems to be on the requirement for low latency solutions, from our point of view, the focus should actually be on what network providers are actually going to do with all this data.
Optimised solutions have created a huge increase in different types of data, which vendors pull in at lower levels of granularity, effectively seeing the volume of data increase thousands of times over.
What do you think?
We’ve finally reached a stage where, in a growing number of cases, technical issues are no longer preventing the business benefits all this real-time activity is meant to deliver.
But surely now that real-time is creating data so much more efficiently, the real question now is whether network providers have the storage, backup and recovery and ability to deal with the volumes of data being created. It’s no longer a question of the new real-time, but rather the new big data.
What do you think? Can you deal with the volume of all this new data? Better yet, what do you want to do with the new data? With only the sky as your limit, what’s next for data and how can it be managed and applied to help grow your business?