improved decision making using event processing program

WHITE PAPER

Improved decision making using

Event Processing Platform

- Praveen Kumar

Introduction

As the Multi Service Operators (MSO) companies march ahead through the current economic uncertainty, there is a lot of focus to reduce their operational costs. At the same time improve their customer experience with new products and services.

So what are the most common problems that these companies are trying to address? Based on research by Gartner and our own interactions with a lot of clients in this industry, the below seem to be on top priority for most of them -

• Enhance customer experience through value added features • Reduce call center volumes and costs, by pro-active event monitoring • Achieve real-time visibility on potential revenue impacting events to either improve potential sales or reduce churn • Improved speed to cash new products and services like Interactive TV

Both the business and IT sides of the organization are trying to find meaningful ways to address the above priorities. One such way is to create an IT solution that empowers business by providing visibility into key events as they occur within an enterprise for improved decision making. The solution would be able to correlate the events/triggers occurring within an enterprise in real-time which drive meaningful outcomes for the business to act on.

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Today’s increasingly competitive environment has helped the consumer to be able to move across brands and products almost seamlessly. The digital consumer is more informed, resulting in higher expectations in terms of the overall end-user experience from his service provider. As a result the organizations need to innovate and improve to provide an improved customer experience and optimize costs at the same time. This is where companies will need to have insight into their business process and the information flowing through these processes for them to make more informed and timely decision making.

As enterprises continue to adopt event driven architecture a scenario is created where there are a versatile set of events being generated by different systems within an organization. For instance for a Cable company, these events could be those generated by the set-top boxes when - a subscriber tunes into a particular channel, responds to a survey or an

advertisement, orders specific pay per view content, new service orders etc. Or if we look at other industries such as utilities the events could be those generated by smart meters, i.e. a meter reading going beyond a set threshold or events to indicate demand spikes etc.

With all this information and data available to an organization it could be turned into very powerful insight and action yet few business are acting on it. For example let’s take the instances of customer experience, one of the key focus of today’s enterprises. Traditionally, a customer calls for an issue in current service to the CSR to initiate a new ticket. It normally takes from few hours to a week based on the request for it to be acknowledged and completed. In today’s situation, the channels for a customer to connect with customer care are very nimble (IM, self-service, web, etc). The turn-around-time for acknowledging and responding to the issue effectively should also be quick enough. One way of improving this is to be able to pro-

actively identify an issue in the service through monitoring of certain events and triggers generated by end user devices like set-top boxes. By correlating the events and identifying potential problems, the customer care can engage the consumer early on such issues even before they actually happen. This will help improve the overall customer experience, but also potentially reduce the call center volume.

Organizations need to leverage their existing investments to create solutions and platforms that not only provide pro- active visibility into certain events but also support newer products and services. A carefully constructed event processing platform is one way to tackle these challenges, but how do you get started, how can an organization approach this and what are the pros and cons?.


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What is an Event Processing Platform?

The “Event Processing Platform” solution was primarily conceived for organizations having business applications, capable of generating business events directly (out of the box) or indirectly (through additional development) and include multiple source channels like in the case of an MSO. The solution is designed to capture business events occurring within an enterprise, correlate, enrich and create meaningful outcomes for the business to act on. The below diagram provides a high level view of what the solution would look like for a typical organization.

As outlined in the above diagram, the solution consists of a few key modules. Each of these modules handle specific functionality and described below.

The Event Delivery Network comprises of the engineering network infrastructure and the various channels which are responsible for delivering the event data from the source systems. This module could be set of systems and applications which are responsible for connecting the external facing engineering systems and networks with the internal IT applications of an organization. This module typically could include the following among other things, the delivery infrastructure which manages the signal path along the network, end user systems which are responsible for generating the events, Conduit servers acting as an event gateway for various channels etc. Example: In case of an MSO this constitutes the video engineering infrastructure.

The Event Aggregation & Processing Platform is one of the key pieces in the overall solution, which is responsible for capturing the event messages routed by the delivery network. This platform is responsible for capturing, aggregating and correlating the incoming events with application metadata and customer data to derive meaningful information for an enterprise. There could be an optional enrichment of the event data (based on the event type and the application associated with it).

The platform could typically include a Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine


Customer Data Subscriber Data

Meta Data Application Meta Data

Event Delivery Module Managers

Reporting Module Internet

Mobile Network Event Aggregation & Processing Module Reporting

Dashboard

Process Work ow Call Center Alerts & Events

Delivery Infrastructure Event Cache

ESB CEP

Home TV Network Downstream Module

Downstream & 3rd Party External Systems

Field Agents

Figure 1: Event Processing Platform

along with BPM-EAI products. CEP enables in analyzing the event stream and deriving patterns out of them, to identify if the events match a particular pattern. Such events could then be fed into a workflow, governed by specific business rules – for aggregating the events and derive a meaningful outcome.

Customer Data Module holds the information for the customer profile details like - the Customer name and address, device and asset information associated with the customer (MAC address, device information etc.). Usually this could typically be a CRM system in an organization which would be the system of record for the customer data.

The Reporting Module can provide a dashboard view of things that are happening within the enterprise in real time. The correlated data from previous

modules can be fed into this module for appropriate reporting to the stakeholder teams. In essence this module will be the consumer of the aggregated and enriched events for defining actionable outcomes. This could include business activity monitoring (BAM) dashboards, alerting modules – for proactive monitoring by the stakeholders etc. The alerting activity could be integrated with other applications to notify key stakeholder teams like Call Center, Field Agents, Managers etc., on specific happenings in a business process within an enterprise to be acted on.

Downstream Modules can be the consumer systems which act on the enriched information. Further on, once the responses are aggregated, processed and enriched, the aggregation platform will need to integrate with downstream systems for consumption of this data.

How has a leading Cable firm benefitted from an Event Processing Approach?

The company specializes in cable and broadband services across the US region. As part of client’s business focus for enhanced user experience, they had planned to launch a series of interactive TV applications as part of their offering, staring with interactive advertising. Interactive advertising is an innovative product, where in TV viewers can interact with advertises in real time by providing their choices and opinions on the advertised products. As part of this journey the key focus items for IT to support this program by building a processing engine for the user responses.

The solution implemented to support the interactive TV application was based on Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format (EBIF) standard, which is an industry standard specification for defining multimedia content. The interactive TV applications create enhanced TV experience to the end users, by allowing them to interact with programs being aired through set-top boxes, using their remotes. The various types of interactive applications include - pure TV based interactive applications like Request for Information (RFI) via Interactive Advertising, Polling, Trivia, Voting etc. – or TV integration with Online applications such as Interactive Bidding, Social Media (integration with facebook, twitter etc.).

Requirement:

As part of the interactive TV applications initiative the requirement for the client was to build a solution to capture, correlate and aggregate user responses to the programs aired, provide visibility into any network issues that might impact the TV signals reaching user set-top box, generate summary reporting for each advertising campaign for user participation and their responses.

RFI is an interactive, information gathering and brand engagement tool that lets marketers gain quick, actionable consumer insights through in-Ad questions and letting viewers interact with the questions via their remote controller (for set-top box).

Key to the success of this program was the implementation of two key platforms, a video engineering and an IT platform.

The video engineering platform was made up of the video engineering and signal path network setup for encoding the advertising content and relaying them to the end user set-top boxes. The key part to this is the user agent application that is built into the set-top boxes. The user agents are responsible for de-coding the interactive Ads and display them onto the end user TV screens as a non-intrusive splash bars. They are also responsible for capturing the selections made as part of

the user interaction via the set-top box remote controller. These selections are then converted into an event with key information (like the set-top box address, user selection data, receiver info etc.) for a particular Ad campaign and relay them to the internal IT applications for further processing.

The second key feature of the user agent was to generate the iEvents from the user set-top box. An iEvent is a response event generated against a standard (dummy) campaign across the MSO’s nationwide network (this is similar to a ping on a network), from the user set-top boxes. The iEvents are then aggregated to create a statistical map to generate the signal path matrix across the MSO network. This will help identify any potential issues with the signal path for a specific region. This helps in pro-active monitoring of the signal path network and to take corrective actions. This in turn reduces the possibility of an event not reaching the intended target audience, thereby reducing potential call center volumes and resulting in a better user experience.


The IT Platform is an event aggregation and enrichment platform which forms the key component in an overall interactive advertising solution. This platform incorporates the business workflows and logic to capture, process and enrich the interactive responses from the end user devices and generate the fulfillment request for the customers. It also generates statistical metrics based on the events and report the to the stakeholder teams/applications. For example an advertiser might be interested in knowing how many customers were tuned into the channel where the Ad campaign was played on, how many participated in the campaign, how many did not, what type of customers participated in the Ad campaign etc. This type of information can be invaluable for the advertisers in developing targeted Ad campaigns. The high level solution is outlined below:

Subscriber Data Module

Subscriber Data

Meta Data Module

Campaign Meta Data

Event Delivery Module Event Aggregation & Enrichment

Reporting Module

BAM Dashboard

Oracle BPEL

2-Way Conduit Servers

Home TV Network

Event Data Store (Oracle DB)

COH Data Grid OSB

Downstream Module Ful llment House Statistical

Measurement

Figure 2: Interactive Advertisement Processing Platform for MSO

The solution was built on a typical BPM-EAI product suite, in this case Oracle Fusion Middleware – for aggregating the user events based on the type of campaign.

The event processing platform constituted key components that made up the end to end solution. Like the Event Cache, a highly available in-memory cache grid that was built using Oracle Coherence, to enable the delivery module to post the events in real time without any latency. The event cache, since it is an in-memory data grid provides a very high performance throughput along with being scalable (supports both vertical and horizontal scaling).

The Event Data Store is the holding area for the user events that are captured by the event cache and written into the event tables on the data store. The data store was built on Oracle RAC DB for high availability and load balanced. The DB was designed not only to handle large volumes of data and but also support faster reads/writes by applying appropriate partitioning and index strategies.

The Process Workflow component was built using Oracle BPEL, incorporating


orchestration and workflow logic for event processing. The process component would, based on the campaign type, execute the appropriate workflow to aggregate and enrich the user events based on business rules defined and route them to the appropriate downstream application and/or external entities. In this case, the process component involved workflow for processing the interactive Ad response events for the RFI application which included - the workflow would sweep the events from the event data store for every campaign, enrich the event data with additional information from subscriber module (subscriber data warehouse) and campaign meta data, apply the business rules to aggregate the events (Eg: aggregate the events by zip code) to create the fulfillment map for qualifying events, create the statistical map for the events based on the business criterion defined to provide additional sampling information on the user interaction. Eg: User response measurement for a campaign, User product preferences, demographic data etc.

The Enterprise Service Bus forms the core integration layer. This component

was built using Oracle Service Bus (OSB), and was responsible for integration of the process component with the event data store, subscriber module, campaign meta-data module etc. Along with that it was responsible – more importantly – for connectivity with the external fulfillment house and the statistical processing house. It was also responsible for handling the security – using client & server certificates – for connectivity with external systems.

The reporting module primarily constituted of the Reporting Dashboard, designed using the Oracle BAM component. The dashboard would give the business team a high level view into how a campaign went through and also measure response across the demography. It provided a view of -

• The total number of positive fulfillments created for a particular campaign • The statistical view of the campaign response from users • Any exceptions as part of the workflow

Key Benefits of the Solution

The platform was built to address certain key objectives to benefit the business. The solution had to not only scale to the existing subscriber volume, but also be scalable for future expansion. Some of the key performance indicators and the benefits achieved by the solution are outlined below.

Key Performance Indicator

User Response Volumes

Transaction Throughput

DB Size

Fulfillment Map SLA

Statistical Map SLA

Geography Covered

Performance Achieved

10 Million (2 M Positives)

32000 Transactions/Second

1.5 Billion Records

< 8 Minutes

< 7 Minutes

US National

Details

The sample size was 10 M responses with 2 M positive responses

Transaction rate processed and persisted into the event data store

Number of records in the event data store to be filtered for events for a particular campaign

Per campaign placement

Per campaign placement

For national campaign footprint


How can the solution help organizations?

Although the example just mentioned is a cable company the approach can be applied to other industries where business events correlate with measurable business outcomes. Below are some of the advantages that can be gained out of such a platform -

re-routing a field agent to address a critical event in the same neighborhood as he is currently servicing etc.

Such pro-active interventions would enhance the relationship with subscribers and improve loyalty and trust. This would also ensure that by engaging the customers through pro-active communication, the overall support calls from the customer can also be reduced, resulting in lowering costs to the company.

on user behavior to generate the following insight:

• Audience measurement for a particular program or advertisement • Capture and build demographic maps, based on user choices • Build a feedback loop with the end- users based on their interactions

This kind of intelligence can be invaluable to program content providers and advertisers alike, so they can identify a target audience for particular program or an advert based on demographics etc.

Improve Customer Experience:

For example the use case of “Construct Signal Path Map” explained in the above case study can be leveraged to identify issues with the signal paths within the MSO network. In case of any issues identified, pro-actively create notifications to the stakeholder teams (like the networking teams, call center agents and/or field agents) to alert them on such issues. The actions could be - pro-actively analyze and identify any network/application related issues, communicate to the impacted subscribers on issues and communicate corrective measures, dispatching the engineers to check the specific locality/ zip code in question for any impending problems in the network, notify the call center agents about the issue and affected areas/zip codes, so they can offer improved customer service to the related issues.

Today field technicians are mobile enabled and reaching out to them is much easier than ever before. This can be leveraged to an organizations benefit, for example


Support New Products and Services:

The solution can be extended to support other event based use cases like Voting (voting for MVP during NFL matches), Polling & Trivia etc. The platform can support nationwide advertising campaign as well local advertising. The platform can be extended beyond the realm of the above mentioned products by defining new rules and workflows that govern the event processing for those products and services. These rules and workflows can be easily plugged into the existing platform.

Support for Mobility:

With the widespread adoption of mobile devices, the customer interactions with media content happen more on mobile platforms than the traditional TVs. The event processing platform solution discussed here is not tied to any particular channel of input. The event stream could be generated either from a set-top box, a mobile device (mobile phone, tablets etc.) or even from a website. As long as the event conforms to a pre- defined meta-data structure, the solution can process them.

Enhanced business intelligence:

The solution can be leveraged to build intelligence to create value based information for the business. For example, in case of cable companies - the platform can be leveraged to aggregate the events based

Solution Implementation Strategies

This section outlines the different options that are available to an enterprise looking to build the Event Processing Platform solution. There typically could be two broad strategies that organizations can look at in terms of implementing the even processing platform – an On-Premise Implementation or Cloud Implementation. Below are few pros and cons of these approaches.

PROS CONS

1. Higher initial development cost for the solution from scratch, this includes hardware, software licensing and application development costs

2. Recurring yearly maintenance cost, again includes hardware, software licensing and application support costs

3. Might result in sub-optimal utilization of resources (hardware, software and labor)

4. IT is only an enabler for MSOs and not a core business operation

On-Premise Development

This is typical in house development by organizations as part of their IT spends. This involves application development by the IT teams.

1. Organizations have full control on the design and development of the application

2. All the modules will be within the organizational domain, bringing them together as part of an end-end solution, hence might be straight forward

Cloud based Implementation

This is an alternative approach, where in enterprises can look at working with IT partners like Infosys in realizing the platform as a service (cloud offering) and pay as you go model.

1. There might be minimal or no upfront implementation costs to the organizations

2. No recurring support or maintenance costs

3. Reduced TCO with a “pay as you go” model

4. Flexibility in extending the platform for other types of channels like internet based programs, mobile media etc., without worrying about scalability.

1. Data security and privacy concerns would need to be addressed – possibly through encryption, non- disclosure agreements etc.

2. Enterprises might need to adhere to the standard interfacing models provided by the cloud services

3. Organizations might have to implement basic services on their side – like the subscriber data module for the enrichment of the user responses to be used by the cloud services

The right strategy for implementing the platform for a particular organization depends on other factors such as type of functionality being implemented, the scale and scope of the solution etc. While the right approach will need to be evaluated for a particular organization, the cloud based option has some obvious advantages. The primary of them is to relieve the organizations from investing their resources on platform implementation and allow them to focus on their core business – for example selling ad slots. A cloud based approach will help the client to bring down their overall total cost of ownership (TCO) as they don’t have to invest in hardware, software or application development.

Having the Event Processing Platform on a cloud would open new opportunities for the client organizations and the System Integration (SI) partners alike. SI partners can also add a lot of value by offering cloud based services for such a platform. They can especially leverage their service offering capabilities for realizing an effective cloud platform for their clients.


Conclusion

The Event Processing Platform can provide an impetus to organizations in realizing their business objectives discussed earlier along with cost optimization. The solution provides a platform to address the key problem areas for business, at the same time be able to scale up for new products and services. This helps organizations to improve customer experience and reduce their Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) as well. Enterprises can get innovative in realizing the solution by adopting cloud implementation strategy and leverage their SI partners, like Infosys. Partners like Infosys, with their vast experience in this domain and ability to host cloud based solutions, can be an ideal choice for organizations looking to build the Event Processing Platform to address their key business objectives.


About the Author

Praveen Kumar

is a Principal Consultant with the Infosys Consulting & Systems Integration unit. He has led many client engagements for strategizing and implementing SOA/EAI solutions for large-scale IT programs and consults with various clients from across verticals. He can be contacted at [email protected]


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