The future’s not just mobile, it’s unified



Vodafone has embarked on a new future this week after acquiring Spanish cable operator Ono – and branching out into internet and television services. This combination will create Spain’s second-biggest telecoms operator, challenge Telefonica’s dominance and continue a move towards Vodafone’s goal of becoming a major player in fixed-line services, as well as mobile.

Vittorio Colao, Vodafone’s chief executive, said the deal would create “a leading integrated communications provider in Spain” and that the company is now “a more unified provider, not just a mobile one.”

Vodafone is also looking to takeover Kabel Deutschland, the largest cable television operator in Germany, and is investing £7 billion in ‘Project Spring’ which is the development of its own infrastructure. This all being done with the aim of becoming a ‘multi-service’ operator: selling broadband, landline and television services, as well as mobile.

It’s obvious that the unified communications market is fast gaining momentum – but are providers able to cope with this massive increase in data from multiple sources?

Nobody seems to be taking the view of having all the data in one place and managing and analysing it from there. It’s still all done in separate silos and projects, which seems backwards in this area of fully integrated communications.

Analysing all data, from all sources, in one place, is essential in gaining a fully integrated and omnipresent view of the communication network. This is needed to assure customer experience, improve monitoring and service quality, identify problem areas, and aid network optimisation and capacity planning.

And there’s a solution for this in Zen. The big data applications suite can take information from anywhere and bring it into the same location – so the analysis of all data is carried out together. Zen’s big data engine has been designed so that it can cope with any amount of data from infinite number of sources. It provides a cross-play solution that encompasses broadband, IPTV, phones and beyond.

A number of our existing and potential Telco customers are moving in a similar direction to Vodafone (IPTV etc) so there’s life beyond the pure telecommunications business, and Zen is there to help. A truly integrated solution for this increasingly connected world.