Azerbaijan
Azercell is Azerbaijan’s leading mobile telecommunications operator with over 5 million customers, and the country’s largest by market share, mobile network and population coverage.
Connecting Azerbaijan’s people and entrepreneurs
The telecommunications industry is the second biggest contributor to Azerbaijan’s economy after oil. The government is now investing in information and communication technologies and the growth of the national telecom infrastructure.
As the country’s leading mobile network and telecommunications provider, Azercell is instrumental in helping businesses and communities connect and share information. In Azerbaijan, most of the population access the internet through mobile phones and 97% of entrepreneurs provide half the country with jobs. As such, Azercell’s services and networks are an integral part of business and social life, and the main stimulus for the development of bottom-up entrepreneurship.
To align with the national telecom infrastructure expansion, Azercell began increasing the speed, capacity, and coverage of its 4G LTE network, with completion set for 2023. To support the launch of the large-scale project, Azercell required greater insight into its customers and their data use to improve operational efficiency and create new data stream services to stay competitive.
To accomplish this and better serve Azerbaijan’s people and businesses, Azercell looked to Cloudera to help it overcome challenges with processing and analysing increasing volumes of incoming data.
Understanding customer needs
In 2019, Azercell partnered with Cloudera to help deploy the new architecture needed to harness vast amounts of data and create new data sources for analytics. The first step was to create a data lake to unify all valuable data sources in near real-time for business analysis and to better serve customers.
The data lakehouse was built around the Cloudera platform as a private cloud service on-premises. This allowed Azercell to classify user data traffic and make it readily accessible across its commercial, business intelligence, and analytics teams.
Integrated with the platform is an artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) environment built on open-source technologies. In addition to enriching analytical capabilities, the application of these platforms enables faster development of predictive and statistical data models. This has helped Azercell prevent customer churn, optimize sales, analyze customer segmentation, and identify dual SIM users.
“An open data lakehouse powered by Cloudera means we have a reliable data provider and platform for distributed data processing and machine learning models,” says Azad Huseynov, Azercell Telecom’s Director of Big Data and Analytics.
Delivering customer products and services in real-time
The Cloudera platform allows Azercell to create models for developing products and services and determine subscribers’ needs in real-time to send them relevant offers immediately.
Access to precise customer segmentation, churn prediction, and other data models has increased the development process of products and services such as company’s first fintech solution and data upsell campaigns that are more in line with customer realities.
“From a data perspective, Cloudera ccelerated the speed at which Azercell brings new products to market by providing immediate analytical capabilities, changing how the company handled analytical processes before,” comments Rahim Ahmedov, Azercell Telecom’s Big Data and Analytics/Data Engineering Section Head.
Data anomalies are now corrected as they arise, ensuring calculations are reliable and eliminating errors in payment and other processes. With data available across the organization in near real-time to improve decision-making and the customer experience, Azercell’s customer attrition rate has decreased by 25%.
As Azerbaijan invests in its telco infrastructure and more people migrate from 3G to 4G, Azercell is migrating to Cloudera for the expansion and modernization of its data infrastructure to meet the increasing demand for high-speed data and fast broadband.
“Enhanced hybrid capabilities provided by Cloudera will enable Azercell to introduce next-generation technologies in the Azerbaijani telecommunications market and trial 5G for commercial services in the future,” according to Ahmedov.
