It's about a year and a half ago, June 5 2013 when a UK-based newspaper published the documents leaked by US whistle-blower Edward Snowden. Without going into the details of the actions of Mr. Snowden we'll just focus on how big the data would be that NSA was mining: petabyte, exabyte, or zettabyte. One of the most important aspects of big data analytics is volume. It allows an organization to gather a huge amount of information from multiple data sources, and then use it to discover trends and patterns. That was exactly what NSA was doing with telecommunication data coming from different countries of the world.

Considering how many different ways we can use a huge amount of telecommunication data, many businesses are looking to gain an edge over their competitors by providing important information about sales leads, customer profiles,s, and other valuable insights. It is also possible to combine a big volume of data such as job description, web browsing habits, and IT system use and discover personality/behavioral insights into how a customer or employee may behave in particular situations.

VoIP is quickly becoming the first choice medium for telecommunications so it should come as no surprise that VoIP brings the concept of Big Data naturally. VoIP technology provides a good very fundamental method for gathering call data for analysis. Every call that a customer makes can be analyzed to extract useful information for any purpose.

Cloud telephony and VoIP generate a huge amount of data that poses serious challenges to the existing systems to generate useful information in real-time. Even a single voice campaign from a customer dialing few thousand contacts can generate very large data. So analyzing this data demands big data analytics to help make insightful decisions on where to allocate resources and offer services to the particular target market.

Big data applications require file management OS such as Hadoop to help manage a huge amount of data into a useful form. It's the data-rich telecommunications field that will be the ultimate beneficiary with advancements in big data analytics.

It’s now up to the telecom businesses to show a serious concern to utilize data analytics tools in order to make sense of the data and learn how to best analyze it.