KUALA LUMPUR, 26 November, 2008: Five billion people will be connected in 2015, with most applications on the Internet, broadband everywhere and a multitude of business models, according to Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN).

In such a scenario, one person can have multiple devices, subscribe to multiple services and operators will need to keep track of all the different identities, services, activities, rights and privileges, interests, likes, dislikes call and purchase histories, credit, balance, billing, location, presence and time zone of each subscriber on their network.

Even today, a typical operator has instances where the account activities of just one of its subscribers are stored in 20 different databases, so successful operators must consolidate all that information to have an overall view of each subscribers, so it can create new service opportunities for each subscriber.

One of these many applications is mobile number portability (MNP), launched in Malaysia in October and  NSN established its Subscriber Data Management (SDM) offering, which offered an MNP system to a major local cellular operator so it could recognise subscriber centricity.

“Another example is the operator BLYK which gives away free SIM cards and to customers aged between 16 and 24 who have MMS-capable phones and they can make calls for free provided they agree to download advertisements sent to their phone,” said Rajeev Sunder, NSN head of sales, Asia Pacific, Converged Core, Subscriber Data Management.

NSN’s vision for the Telco 2.0 opportunity comprises on the one hand a telco world which is subscriber-centric, subscriber data focused with subscriber data profiling and with business model innovation and on the other, a content-driven Internet world is user-centred, user data focused with user profiling and which also has business model innovation, with both these two aspects exchanging information between each other.

Its SDM technology, which is based on X.500 industry-standard database, provides for this interchange of subscriber information, including contextual identity, profiles and policies information, authentication, authentication & accounting, location and presence information, billing & payment, personalization information, profiling and recommendations.

It’s like a data warehouse but operates in real time to provide operators with subscriber intelligence, including real-time reporting dashboards, profiling and modeling.

“One of its benefits to subscribers is a single log-on and the freedom to switch between services, without having to log-on and answer questions at each step,” said Rajeev.