“NFV, SDN are Two Most Disruptive Forces in Telecoms Today”

Delivering unique value proposition for its customers, NetCracker, is engaged in enabling digital transformation for telecom operators and communication service providers, globally.

The company’s latest flagship offering, NetCracker 10 is a true next generation ready - cloud-based, big data & advanced analytics driven virtualized foundation on which operators and CSPs can build flexible services, preserve current offerings and most importantly open up new revenue streams.

Ari Banerjee, Senior Director of Strategy, NetCracker speaks with Zia Askari from TelecomDrive.com about the way industry is moving ahead and how NetCracker is positioning itself to provide its expertise to the telecoms world.

What are some of the key priorities for NetCracker today?

We’ve always been extremely focused on enabling global CSPs to deliver and manage very rich, convergent services, whether voice, video, data or anything that might come on the horizon over fixed and mobile networks.

With the recent release of NetCracker 10, our flagship product, that commitment has only deepened, as our priorities shift more toward giving our customers a cloud-based, big data & advanced analytics driven virtualized foundation on which they can build next-generation services, preserve current offerings and reap new revenue streams.

Our key priorities today are helping our customers preserve their current network investments and leverage those as much as possible, but also helping them – when they are ready – to move to the next generation of networks, that is virtualization. Through a strong partnership with our parent company, NEC, we are in a unique position to deliver complete, end-to-end, SDN and NFV solutions to the market. But creating that on-demand, cloud-based environment for virtualized services – including the all-important steps of creating, fulfilling and assuring those services – will not be easy and is therefore one of our key focus areas today.

Today's operators and CSPs are looking forward to mastering the art of digital experience for their subscribers. How can NetCracker help here?

It’s clear service providers are reinventing themselves as digital businesses and creating digital ecosystems to more quickly and efficiently develop and deliver new services to customers. Our job as their trusted partner is to give them the tools to get there, whether it’s through product and services or solutions tailored for a variety of verticals.

In addition, our Digital Business Platform helps our customers get the most revenue across all channels, and NetCracker 10 provides a pre-integrated, flexible platform to allow CSPs to monetize both traditional and digital services across both physical and virtual infrastructure.

When it comes to monetization of data - operators are finding it hard to monetize on their existing network investments. How can next gen BSS and OSS solutions derive more from less?

Monetization is definitely a major goal for operators of all sizes, and it makes sense that they’d want to achieve that without having to make further major investments in their network infrastructure. Next-generation BSS and OSS – specifically end-to-end solutions –such as what NetCracker offers, allow service providers to maximize the convergence of the network and IT, operationalize next-generation connectivity and monetize data and other content.

NetCracker’s industry leading single platform approach is unique and is key differentiator for us. This single platform approach is not new for us as from our very first release of NetCracker solution we have followed the single family approach. This creates fundamental economic benefits for operators as it provides them easier upgrade capability, minimized integration cost, help them lower time to market and provide them with better ROI.

More specifically, we help our customers leverage their existing complex and often-siloed environments to get the full value out of those systems. Then, when they are ready we are able to bring in next-gen offerings in the areas of customer management, revenue management, operations management and more. These components help providers transform those existing systems into extremely efficient ecosystems that can support LTE/VoLTE and cloud-based and virtualization services.

In addition, our next-gen solutions surrounding service, resource and network management work with brand new components to NetCracker 10, such as service orchestration and network orchestration, to bring in virtualized infrastructure and offerings when the time is right.

Can you please share some of the trends that are redefining the BSS/OSS space today's age of business transformation for operators? How is NetCracker positioning itself to enable this transformation?

The most disruptive force facing the telecommunications industry in years is the advent of network functions virtualization and software-defined networking. Both will fundamentally change the way service providers create, deploy. Also taming the tsunami of data which is coming from all angles and making it actionable via Big Data and advanced analytics is also becoming very crucial.

Any next-generation customer engagement solution must be based on advanced analytics to help operators meet customers’ needs in real time. Advanced analytics help deliver contextual insight for operators by navigating through copious amounts of data and looking at disparate incoming data sources such as customer care, product/service/device portfolios, cost and billing, and network service quality to segment customers. This allows for more targeted up- and cross-sell opportunities and also helps operators predict future behavior patterns. BSS/OSS systems need to have an underlying big data and advanced analytics which is a foundation pillar of NetCracker’s BSS/OSS solution.

What are some of the big innovations that are coming from NetCracker to help CSPs better engage with their customers?

Customer satisfaction has become job number one at many CSPs, and this focus around the customer in all aspects of the business is informing how providers architect their networks, create new services, deploy services and interact with end users.

Our highly innovative NetCracker 10 offering includes cutting-edge tools and functions to help CSPs improve touchpoints with customers. For example, our Customer & Partner Management offering integrates analytics and product catalog features to improve overall customer care, customer experience and loyalty across all channels. This is accomplished by enabling more personalized customer interactions, including across social media and mobile applications.

NetCracker’s vision is to provide an end-to-end CEM platform that synthesizes three critical domains: Customer data from the BSS domain, service data from the fulfillment and assurance domains and network data from fixed, mobile and converged networks. NetCracker 10 CEM offering is a single-platform-based solution that brings together NEC’s network big data and analytics assets, NetCracker assurance, analytics and decisioning, and customer portal.

The CEM solution architecture is underpinned by a recommendation engine, face recognition, biometric analysis, machine learning, pattern recognition, predictive analytics, social network analysis (SNA) and textual entailment technology to effectively correlate and utilize structured and unstructured data for actionable insight.

Today a lot of operators are looking at having a MVNO strategy to create more engagement points with their customers. What kind of solutions does NetCracker has towards this direction?

We agree that an MVNO/MVNE strategy makes perfect senses for established operators that want to broaden their reach with customers. It allows them to work closely with carefully chosen partners to extend their networks and services to areas where they might not have otherwise engaged.

To this end, NetCracker is committed to helping our customers that wish to go the MVNO route through our experience, knowledge and solutions. This powerful combination allows us to help MVNOs and incumbent operators develop the best business models for their organizations and bring it to market quickly and cost effectively. This benefits both sides and allows them to reach diverse subscriber bases.

What kind of growth does the company look at? and where is this growth going to come from?

NetCracker is a very profitable company growing in double digits year after year. NetCracker’s growth rate is more than three time of its competitors in the telecom software. As a leading vendor in the telecom software space growth comes from CSP market as well as from global enterprises.