How Incognito is Driving Innovation in the OSS/BSS Space

At a time when telecom operators look for software driven efficient management of their network assets – Vancouver, Canada based Incognito is bringing a lot of innovation to its customers, with the help of its software portfolio.

Pete Koat, Chief Technology Officer, Incognito interacts with Zia Askari from TelecomDrive.com about the company’s current focus and its future plans.

Please introduce Incognito software to us - what are your key focus areas of operations and priorities in the market today?

Incognito is an independent software development company, which creates end-to-end OSS, BSS solutions for our global customers. With digital transformation a key driver for global CSPs, Incognito is focused on home broadband management device and service provisioning and monetization. With our solutions, CSPs can leverage automation and analytics to reduce operational costs around device and service provisioning and deliver a great customer experience.

Keeping in mind our unique capabilities, globally renowned broadband operators of all sizes — including over half of the top ten operators in the United States — trust Incognito to eliminate segregated work silos and streamline provisioning, activation, and subscriber service management processes with the utmost quality and reliability.

Pete Koat from Incognito Software

We offer innovative solutions around digital home experience, fiber service activation, DOCSIS provisioning, network monetization and firmware management, IP address management — all with a focus on residential broadband services. Our priority is to help our customers scale while keeping operational costs in check and delivering greater customer experiences and quality.

How can operators and CSPs future proof their OSS / BSS strategy? What are your key offerings in this direction?

When it comes to future proofing the OSS/BSS strategy, it is going to be all about open architectures and virtualized services. With the help of our solutions, we are implementing standards, open APIs, and we are uniquely vendor and device agnostic. We continually invest in our solutions, delivering the latest advancements that incorporate virtualization, automation, analytics, and orchestration.

Incognito is part of the new ETSI working group on zero touch network and service management group, exemplifying our focus on closed loop automation processes to help our customers maximize operational excellence in the future.

How do you look at the growing importance of SDN and NFV for the telecoms today - what role is being played by Incognito here?

Incognito is playing a very critical role here. Here is an example: as global operators and CSPs look for greater level of efficiency and innovation from SDN and NFV, software defined networking at its core is meant to automate core and edge router functions by abstracting the physical elements from the functional platforms.

Incognito bridges into SDN by automating scope deployments to PE routers within its IPAM solution, part of our DDI portfolio, where configuration changes will automatically be pushed out to the routing elements, abstracting the physical component from the intent. This will use the normal interface API whether it is CLI, SOAP, or a modern API like netconf.

Ultimately the big driver here for both SDN and NFV is virtualizing the solutions from big-iron vendors so that as the demand/load grows the platform can scale, benefiting from the lowering costs afforded by Moore's law. Adjacent to this is a driver to leverage decades of advancements in automation and machine learning to improve the reliability while reducing operating expenses.

Incognito is a pure software vendor, and is growing its portfolio with NFV offerings; many Tier 1 operators have had our virtualized offerings deployed for years. Moving forward, as more and more telecom operators and deploying SDN and NFV infrastructure and orchestration inside their networks, we see potential for our portfolio to drive greater levels of synergy with our customers. With open source projects like ONAP, CORD, and TIP, we will start to see a greater level of interoperability between vendors and ideally some standardization or consolidation around platforms and projects. We are already starting to see this with the Linux Foundation’s new Networking Fund that brings together multiple open source projects.

Please share details on your key global geographies and how are you targeting these geographies. What is your go to market strategy?

As of now, more than 160 million subscribers are being provisioned by solutions from Incognito. Global providers are already using Incognito software to realize new revenue streams from multi-play services.

When it comes to our go to market strategy, we work very closely with our channel partners — who can design and deliver our solutions for our customers.

In a constantly shifting technological landscape of high data-services penetration, Incognito helps customers develop an actionable vision for the future. We provide deep broadband services experience and technical expertise to optimize infrastructures, streamline operations, and improve the customer experience. Incognito R&D and professional services lead the industry in standards-based and customer-requested solutions that ensure performance quality for everyday operations while scaling to accommodate future demands.

How do you look at the future growth of the company - from a technology and a business standpoint? Where is this growth going to come from?

Future growth will come from multiple areas:
• NFV
• Fiber
• IoT

These are broad topics but they represent a general trend in the marketplace around digital transformation of back end operations. These themes tie back to enriching and personalizing the service offerings for the customers; improving automation so that the operator can truly deliver the experience the customer wants today, while having the capacity to be agile and adapt to the changing marketplace.

More and more Telecom operators and CSPs look forward to doing more with less in terms of investing in technologies - what are some of your innovations that can help operators do more with less?

SmartCSR is a great example of our innovation within the home broadband experience domain, with a focus on customer call centers. We use machine learning, AI, and automation to determine root cause analysis for troubleshooting when customers are calling in with an issue. This greatly reduces the amount of time required during an interaction, improves first-call resolution rates, as well as reduces the volume of costly truck rolls. Automation is key to reducing OPEX as operators grow.

Another area for doing more with less can be seen in the benefits that software can provide. Lets take, for example, WiFi within the home. There are many advanced mesh-based WiFi routers on the marketplace, but much of the optimization techniques employed could be done in software remotely using existing deployed gateways; gateways that might not even support TR-069 protocol -- all of which could be fully autonomous. This is exactly what we do with our Customer Experience platform.

Please share your plans and vision for your Indian operations?

Incognito has been in India for over 10 years; predominantly in the cable space. As our offerings have grown beyond the HFC plant we plan on introducing Incognito solutions to operators in South East Asia, and deploying and growing in-country expertise on our solutions. Each operator is unique, and so our flexible solutions deployed at hundreds of operators around the world will be able to map to the unique workflows and access network topologies required by service providers. This ensures that our software deployments are non-disruptive and are completed quickly.