Customer experience management identifies problems that have or will have a negative impact on the users perception of service quality. The customer experience for IP video, voice and data services is much more than can be measured using network information alone. A user is now more likely to interact with a web portal for service activation and upgrades, more likely to suffer from failed or slow downloads, or be impacted by poor response times from the service desk.

Traditional approaches have merit, but also inherent flaws. For example, deriving KPIs and exceptions through network probes and raw performance data is expensive, both in terms cost and network resources. The primary issue is the expense and complexity of capturing and processing massive volumes of raw data in order to identify a relatively low number of operational exceptions. Monitoring applications in the handsets and set top boxes were heralded as the panacea, but still reflect only one view, and have performance issues.

Real-time analytics with SQLstream

SQLstream provides a standards-based stream computing platform for customer experience monitoring and alerting applications, capable of processing and combining huge volumes of dynamic data in real-time. SQLstream enables dynamic, real-time monitoring and alerting, addressing the needle in a haystack problem, whilst enabling the data warehouse functions for forecasting and data mining to scale effectively.

• Fast, reliable and accurate customer experience monitoring.

• A cost effective solution for processing vast volumes of dynamic data.

• Combining data in real-time from sources such as web servers, probes and IT applications, as well traditional assurance applications, performance and probe data.

• Flexible and scalable solutions that can be extended easily for new services, products and technologies.

SQLstream can even be used as the platform to combine customer experience data from all your current customer experience and service monitoring applications, providing a single, real-time view of the customer and their interaction with your services.

The SQLstream solution

SQLstream provides a radically different architecture for customer experience monitoring, a platform that enables the IT departments of telecommunications service providers to develop and consolidate their experience monitoring applications. SQLstream enables dynamic, real-time monitoring and alerting, addressing the needle in a haystack problem, whilst enabling the data warehouse functions for forecasting and data mining to scale effectively. In summary, SQLstream provides:

• SQL standards-based architecture, specifically for the collection and processing of dynamic data for real-time and continuous data applications.

• Reduces the complexity and cost of service level monitoring solutions by providing a solution designed to manage vast volumes of real-time, distributed data.

• Enables flexible and configurable solutions, using SQL, and enabling the same SQL queries that process historical, stored data, to execute across real-time dynamic data on the wire.