Global Innovators | Sanjay Jain: Scripting Success with Innovations

Sanjay Jain, CEO of Sincera Technologies is regarded as a veteran and a unique leader in the global telecoms space. He has played critical role in term of leading part in introducing new technologies in the '90s and early 2000's and helped in planning and implementing systems transformations as carriers transitioned from copper-based services to fibre-based telecom services.

As part of our Global Innovators Series - Sanjay Jain speaks with Zia Askari from TelecomDrive.com about his career, journey so far and how Sincera is driving innovation today. 

What are some of the major milestones of Sincera Technologies?

Sincera is almost 20 years old this year. That, in itself, is a milestone. Our teams were part of the original Granite Network Inventory Management Software used by many customers worldwide. We have developed leading-edge automation and productivity tools for Network Management functions many different carriers use. One such tool is SASI – launched in 2008 and still widely in use; we then came out with bulk inventory data migration tools and some automated service configuration tools.

We recognize that the core challenge faced by all carriers is the reliability and accessibility of their data. Leveraging the know-how and learnings from our existing tools, in 2018, we started building a unified Data Management platform working closely with our telco and cable customers. We launched this platform called 1Data in 2021 - which enables our customers to access and use their enterprise data rapidly and efficiently and makes the data actionable and insightful, with minimal need for coding.

More recently, we added integrations with AWS, ServiceNow and OSS from Broadcomm, Ericsson and Netcracker, to name a few. We will continue to add integrations to other systems and, more importantly, related data rule libraries – all geared towards accelerating our customers' digital journey.

Please elaborate a bit about Sincera Technologies 1Data platform?

1Data is a low-code/no-code platform that allows users to Integrate, Analyze and Act on their data based on configurable data-driven rules and automated data workflows. The primary goal is to make it easy for businesses to access the data they need and enable actions on the data or based on the data. We provide a library of reusable data connectors, business rules, and workflows intending to accelerate time-to-value and reduce the risk for our customers by delivering automated, reusable solutions.

The 1Data Platform is based on a modern, microservices, distributed architecture framework that allows customers to rapidly and cost-effectively create data pipelines that integrate and analyze disparate data sources that could be on-prem, in the cloud or with your business partner. Based on the analysis, 1Data empowers you to define automated actions and outputs to support various, complex business use cases.

Please give us a brief about your journey to becoming an industry veteran?

After graduating from IIT Roorkee in 1986, I moved to the United States for advanced studies. I had the good fortune to collaborate with a few Telecom industry innovators early in my career.

Together we built a leading-edge platform to analyze telecom work orders, assign work to the operations team and automate the workflow for order fulfilment, including field operation functions – using the latest technologies of the late 1980s.

Since then, I have led large teams to design, build and deploy high-performance operations support systems.

Plan and help build an entire OSS stack for a start-up telecom company involving many global suppliers and have been intimately involved in analyzing and automating various parts of the telecom operations. I have worked with many large carriers in the US and abroad while also working with start-ups. I have developed a keen insight into the key challenges carriers face in different parts of their operations and strategies to address them. And these challenges don't go away – they take different shapes as carriers have to continually innovate and re-engineer themselves in the face of rapidly changing technologies and consumer expectations.

Please highlight some of your key achievements as an industry head-honcho?

I have been fortunate to have several achievements which I found exciting and rewarding during my career so far. Primary amongst them is playing a leading part as careers introduced new technologies or as the wave of telecom consolidation occurred in the '90s and early 2000's. Specifically – I played key roles in helping plan and implement systems transformations as carriers transitioned from copper-based services to fibre-based telecom services.

As the Regional Companies started together with the consolidation with what were Long Distance companies to the landscape we see today in the US, I was intimately involved in planning and supporting operations and systems consolidations and automation.

While involved in supporting these seismic changes in the US telecom industry, I successfully managed global organizations of over 1500 people, growing revenue and expanding markets across Europe and APAC.

Outside of the Telecom space, have led large, global organizations supporting customers worldwide, providing the full stack of technology services – from embedded software to product engineering to user experience design across multiple verticals – such as automotive, healthcare, industrials, and mobile devices.

The criticality of communication and connectedness and the impact of 5G is being felt across all these verticals. This journey, including multiple M&A's along the way, required me to work with investors, technologists, and business strategists in multiple industries, which has been an enriching and learning experience – and I see building these relationships as a personal achievement.

Can you mention some of the notable initiatives enabled by you?

It always starts with understanding how we can help our customers be successful and then creating teams to enable that success. In that context, I have played a key role in defining new architectures to operationalize new services such as Fiber to the Home (FTTH), Software-Defined Networks (SDN) and 5G.

Further, we delivered innovative value to our non-Telecom customers with new solutions for the Human Machine Interface and Over the Air services – which, as we are now seeing, will benefit from the rollout of 5G and Edge Compute services.

Similarly, with the burgeoning challenges and need to better manage data across all parts of an enterprise, at Sincera, we have successfully launched a new Enterprise Data Platform and started creating and delivering measurable value with platform enabled data solutions to customers.

According to you, will 5G be the dominant network in the year 2022?

It is very likely that 5G will be the dominant network for some segments of the user base. From a consumer point of view – the 5G transition will take longer, but from Industrial applications point of view – I think 5G and related technologies will become increasingly dominant.

You can see the rapid growth of Enterprise/Campus 5G/CBRS solutions which provide tremendous efficiencies, operational scalability, and security. These will continue to grow and evolve, led by the 5G carriers themselves as well as numerous start-ups. On the consumer side, FHW, gaming and VR type services will accelerate the adoption of 5G. So, these services have to scale and provide true value before this technology becomes dominant for this segment.

That being said, while it is very exciting to see carriers deploy more network nodes that comply with the 5G standards, we also have more devices that are 5G capable. It will be many years before enough devices, network, and network backhaul are deployed to support a fully 5G world.

We also still lack that "killer use-case" to REALLY drive 5G adoption. As per Gartner reports, it says we're barely over the Peak of Inflated Expectation and 2-5 years away from the Plateau of Productivity on their Hype Cycle.

What excites us at Sincera about 5G is that not only will those new 5G networks need to be integrated and reconciled with legacy networks, but they will be creating massive amounts of data, and Sincera is uniquely positioned to help integrate, manage and monetize that data with our background in both telecom and data. While Time to market will be key, our 1Data platform is rightly placed to help with that.