We'll cut you a deal on

Hello everyone,

From the book Thank You for Being Late by Thomas Friedman.

What happened to AT&T was that the supernova transformed its business overnight. Its decision to virtualize networks to expand its capacity made it more of a software/networking company, and then it really struck gold with the rise of big data, which meant that the data and voice traffic AT&T was carrying over its wires could be aggregated and anonymized and then mined for trends. So suddenly, as noted earlier, AT&T, using wireless cell phone data, could tell a signage company how many people who drove by their sign on the freeway ended up shopping in the store advertised on that sign—and if the sign became digital, and changed every hour, they could tell them which message was most effective. AT&T started telling some customers, heck, we’ll cut you a deal on the transmission costs if we can mine the data and use it to solve customer problems or puzzles. In the blink of an eye your friendly phone company became an all-around business solutions company, also competing with IBM or Accenture.

Supernova is a term Mr. Friedman uses to mean the cloud technologies.

Does “we’ll cut you a deal on the transmission costs if we can mine the data and use it to solve customer problems or puzzles” imply as follows: we (AT&T) offer you (signage company) a deal. You entrust us with mining/analysing data for you and we offer you a discount on the price/costs of transmission the analysed data to you?

Thank you.

I think you have added a bit more than is suggested. It means - We will come to an arrangement with you on the understanding that we can utilise the acquired data to help other companies with their problems and difficulties.

Alan

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Thank you, Alan. I understand the sentence better now.

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