Letter from the Editor: September 2013

By: Tim Young

“Cherish that which is within you, and shut off that which is without; for much knowledge is a curse.”
—Zhuangzi (Chuang-Tze), On Tolerance 

When “Master Zhuang” wrote those words some 23 centuries ago, he was emphasizing the virtue of the human race’s natural, innate potential and undergirding a holistic philosophy of life. Seeking too much knowledge at the expense of exploring our inner strengths, he taught, robs us of a simple, natural, fulfilling life.

“That’s great, Tim,” you say. “But what’s it got to do with business intelligence or running a more efficient telecom?”

That’s a fair question, to be sure. I bring it up because Zhuangzi was getting at a point that applies to people but can also be extended to a communications service provider (CSP) or any other organization or system: Too much knowledge is a curse if it stacks up and stacks up and we have no way to process it, absorb it or otherwise put it to use. Every living thing or complex organization has a finite capacity for analysis, and once a saturation point is reached, the rest is just clutter.

If only Zhuangzi could see the glut of information available in the current age. I think back to the Intel infographic that made the rounds over the past year or so, highlighting what happens in one minute on the internet: Around the world, nearly 640,000 gigabytes (GB) of IP data are transferred. Facebook sees 277,000 logins and six million new page views. Thirty new hours of YouTube content are uploaded as the site’s users watch 1.3 million videos. And 204 million emails are sent.

According to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index (VNI), more and more of that traffic is mobile. Global mobile-data traffic grew to 885 petabytes (PB) per month in 2012, up from 520 PB per month just a year earlier. That’s almost 12 times the amount of total worldwide internet traffic in 2000.

With these massive influxes of data, what’s a CSP to do? The conversation surrounding Big Data is fascinating from a number of angles, from how to use that data to enhance customer experience and establish a competitive edge to the legal implications of data storage and analysis for purposes of governmental monitoring. In this issue of Pipeline we examine how CSPs can tackle the glut of data their networks are handling and use it to better serve their customers. We discuss efficient Big Data solutions and explore why not all data-management solutions are created equal. We also get into the current conversation about governmental data collection and storage and talk about the tightrope that CSPs must walk between security and compliance, as well as ask broader questions about the tension between customer privacy and customer experience.

Enjoy the issue.

Best,

Tim Young
Editor-in-Chief