Paywizard, the pay-TV subscription, billing, customer relationship management (CRM) and insight specialist, today announced that it is building the next-generation version of its subscriber intelligence platform, Paywizard Singula™ on the cutting-edgeMicrosoft Azure AI platform. Harnessing Azure’s analytics environment ‘Databricks’, the move enables Paywizard to more quickly, easily and comprehensively extend its machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) capability. The result being that Paywizard’s clients are better positioned to action data insight to strengthen customer loyalty, grow revenues and win new subscribers.
Paywizard Singula™, which will debut at IBC 2018 in Amsterdam is a standalone platform that empowers pay-TV operators and over-the-top (OTT) providers to utilise subscriber insights and artificial intelligence (AI) to recommend the ‘next best action’ an operator can take for each and every subscriber at the critical ‘decision moments’ in the customer journey. The Microsoft Azure AI platform is an open, flexible, enterprise-grade cloud computing platform that will empower Paywizard to add AI and machine learning capability to Decision Moments.
Bhavesh Vaghela, Paywizard’s Chief Executive, says: “Building Singula™ on the Microsoft Azure AI platform is a strategic move that empowers Paywizard to massively bolster our analytics power and incorporate AI going forward. Azure AI is perfect for that and provides the infrastructure no other platform can, while offering flexibility, scalability and security.”
Paywizard will utilise the Azure Databricks analytics environment for its subscriber intelligence platform, providing a fast and efficient means of linking the work done by data scientists to the needs of business users. Microsoft Azure AI offers an effective platform for Paywizard to create a single customer view from multiple and diverse sources of data and, in turn, leverage the speed of development within the Azure AI platform to collaborate with partners such as the University of Edinburgh to deploy advanced predictive models to create valuable, actionable insight. The new data science capabilities and expertise will also be available for pay-TV and OTT operators to access via Paywizard’s managed services.
Mark Smith, Senior Director of Azure and Artificial Intelligence at Microsoft, notes: “Paywizard is demonstrating the real-world impact that AI, combined with intelligent data analytics, can have on an established industry. While the pay-TV market has enjoyed substantial success over the past three decades, advances in other technologies has given rise to innovative organisations that are disrupting this model. By utilising AI, Paywizard can help pay-TV firms address this threat by enhancing customer engagement and deliver communications and marketing campaigns that are better suited to their needs. Having companies that understand what the Azure AI platform can deliver and take full advantage of its capabilities demonstrates that we continue to develop tools and functions that modern, forward-looking businesses need.”
Vaghela adds: “Azure provides a great fit for data scientists, developers and business users, allowing them to do things more quickly and efficiently. In particular for us, it allows us an environment to collaborate more effectively with our partners, speeding up the development of new features and in turn, allows us to add value for our clients, using Singula™ to improve customer engagement in order to stem churn, boost revenues and win new subscribers. Alongside our use of the machine learning and Databricks capabilities of the Azure AI platform, we are also keen to explore how expanding into cognitive services and bot tools could improve the offering to our customers even further.”
