As telecoms prepare their networks to embrace transformation in order to cater to the ever growing user needs for data and better experience – operators need to reinvent the way they look at OSS and BSS functionalities. Comptel believes that the future lies in enabling Digital Services Lifecycle Managament.
Juhani Hintikka, CEO, Comptel, speaks with Zia Askari from TelecomDrive.com about the way Comptel is looking at future opportunities including the way towards 5G.
What are the priorities for Comptel today?
Our top priority is growth. We want to continue adding new solutions and entering new markets. We’ve been steadily adding to our portfolio through development, while exploring ways that we can better serve telco and even non-telco customers. Global scale is also important – we want to establish deeper roots in the Americas.
What will be the core focus after the proposed merger with Nokia?
Our core focus will be to continue to drive for growth. The planned deal provides several key resources to help Comptel maintain momentum and continue on our growth path. Some of those resources include an expanded customer base, Nokia’s global scale and a complementary product portfolio that will benefit customers of both companies.
Digital transformation is attracting a lot eyeballs today. How do you look at this, especially from a monetization standpoint?
Digital transformation means software in concrete terms. Comptel is in a pole position to drive monetization and broaden our presence across new verticals as well. Our technology can support the core elements around digital transformation, both from the perspective of the customer journey and also from the aspects of the telco network that drive and deliver customer experience.
Where is the future growth of Comptel going to come from?
Connecting digital demand and supply. Telco customers today are more demanding than ever. Operators need a better, more contextual understanding of what customers want, then build new, more dynamic services, and then finally deliver those services faster and through the right channels. The machinery that supports all of this needs to either be built or evolved.
That’s where our growth lies, and a major driving force will be our efforts in virtualization, particularly with our FlowOne V solution. We will also move closer to the end user and develop usage-based SaaS business models.
What kind of innovations can we expect from Comptel in the coming months?
Comptel has established a strong, three-decade long heritage in the telco industry. While this will always be our sweet spot, in the coming months, we’re looking to make our innovations differentiated and disruptive, and that means taking steps outside of the telco world.
We’ve explored this already with our Are You Well solution, an IoT capability which applies advanced analytics to mobile device data, in order to uncover anomalies in consumers’ daily health and wellbeing. Next, we’re looking to explore how we can bring similar capabilities into new verticals like insurance.
How do you look at the future evolution of networks towards embracing 5G?
The 5G networks will be very different from 3G and 4G. To achieve the unseen speeds it will bring to the network, operators will need to move business and consumer content closer to the point of download and be prepared to have technology in place that can intelligently predict what type of content the user will need. This is where 5G’s dependency on virtualization will come in, with NFV and SDN underpinning these predictive capabilities.
What kinds of changes and transformation will be needed at the OSS/ BSS level to maximize profitability in a 5G scenario?
The OSS/BSS as we know it will cease to exist – all there will be is a new software layer that connects production with consumption. Of course, this will introduce plenty of complexity, since legacy technology must be abstracted.
To resolve this complexity, we see the emergence of a new operational layer that will bridge services across the hybrid virtualized and legacy network. This new automation-driven operational layer will connect cloud and physical resources (compute, storage, network) and business processes and systems (such as customer care, billing, and order management).
We have coined this the Digital Services Lifecycle Management layer (DSLM), and believe it is fundamental to carving out communications service providers’ role in the future digital economy, including its ability to capitalize on 5G.
