What Communication Service Providers need from Location Intelligence - Alex MacKay, CEO

As I thought about Twitter Places in last week's post and what it signalled, I immediately began to think about the concept of "big data" which David Sonnen, IDC Senior Analyst, raised in our blog post of June 2nd. The use of a lot of data to help make decisions is at the heart of location intelligence (LI). LI by its very nature, creates extremely large datasets. When you think about Twitter Places, it's the beginning of a form of the digital data steam rising off the planet that David referred to on June 2nd. When you also realize that all Twitter data effective back to 2006 is going to be digitally stored in the USA Library of Congress you realize just how important this information is and what the knowledge/intelligence is that will be available. The ability to analyze this type of big data and make smart business decisions from seeing the patterns and gaining the intelligence is going to be yet another race for those who want to compete in location intelligence. At DMTI we see this big data knowledge being served up within the context of different vertical industries. What's important to insurance companies (property specific information) may be quite different from the information required for a Communications Service Provider (CSP). For CSP's they use location intelligence for two main purposes:

1. Marketing & Sales - Knowing where your customers and prospects are relative to demographics and your network assets and coverage areas to maximize effectiveness and....
2. Engineering - More efficient network planning....using LI to make more cost effective decisions on where to deploy network assets at minimal cost and maximum effect.

The amount of data CSP's thirst for to help make these decisions is huge and while its different than the specific data insurance is after, they share one common characteristic: both want as precise and as localized information as they can get with the only restriction being privacy legislation. The thirst to utilize much more intelligence around location specific data is growing rapidly and the tools to analyze it are even more important. Twitter Places does provide a really simple example of how location context can add special value at the same time driving the awareness and therefore the advocacy of utilizing location intelligence.