Technotree - Driving Innovation, Enabling Digital Transformation

At a time when operators look for digitally transforming their networks - Technotree is working on creating platforms which give flexibility to operators to enable them to decide which business models they wish to use.

On the sidelines of CommunicAsia 2016, Biswajit Deva Sharma, Regional Marketing Manager EMEA & APA, Tecnotree Corporation speaks with Zia Askari from TelecomDrive.com about the company’s current focus and how it is looking at the digital transformation space.

Tell us about some of the key priorities that Tecnotree has today?

Tecnotree’s focus is on enabling our customers, primarily telecom operators, to implement digital transformation in order to innovate products and services. We firmly believe this will allow operators to, launch products and services to market rapidly and make products and services more relevant to the customer needs.

When you say digital transformation, what part of digital transformation are you actually looking at?

That's an interesting question because if you look at the definitions of digital transformation, they are quite different for everyone. What we work on is creating platforms which give flexibility to operators to enable them to decide which business models they wish to use. By offering new generation of product catalogue, customer management solutions and multi-domain orchestration layers we offer the opportunity for operators to play around with multiple service domains and innovate new business models.

When operators today look for better engagement with their customers, they look for digital enablement and innovative ways to do that. How can Tecnotree help in this direction?

I think there are two very important ways we work to that purpose. The first is to enable operators to quickly alter their products, test how these products are performing and create a business plan accordingly. Our product catalogue enables operators to create products and services as quickly as possible. The way this is done is such that you can have traditional telco products as well as non-traditional digital products bundled together and offered to the market much more quickly. We enable the business users to do this in a much quicker fashion than in traditional back-end offices that configure the product - so the time to market is much lower.

The second aspect is being relevant to the customers. We are working on a next generation customer experience platform called ‘Actionable Analytics’ which understands the behaviour of the customer and accordingly recommends products, services and actions which will enable the operator to engage with said customers better. Today, the market is more about personalised one-to-one engagement than about standardised products and services which you launch to the entire industry.

Can you tell us some more about the latest platforms that you are developing?

We have recently launched the first version of the Tecnotree Agility™ Unified Product Catalogue and Service Order Management platform which work together. In essence, the solution is already being deployed right now and our customers are benefitting from it. We are hoping the platform will keep evolving to bring more and more innovations to the industry.

When is this likely to be rolled out? 

The platform has recently been deployed to a leading telecommunications operator in Africa. I am happy to say that the platform is managing more than 20 million transactions on certain days, and has had significant impact on the adoption of services rolled out through the platform.

Has the platform only been deployed in Africa or are you also looking at Asia?

The previous generation of the platform is already working in various tier 1 and 2 operators in Africa and the new platform has also been deployed to two large operators in the region. We are definitely also looking at deploying the new solution in Asia and to other markets.

Is this a recent upgrade to your earlier version?

Yes, it is an upgrade. But at the same time, it’s a complete reinvention and ‘re-architecting’ of what we have been doing. We felt that in today's digital transformation arena, if you try to bring the legacy systems along with you, it just doesn't work and you need an agile architecture to support the business cases.

What are some of the additional features that you are providing to this platform?

We are providing the Tecnotree Agility™ Suite, which is a combination of all of our different products and services. It brings the entire end-to-end convergence, contextual customer management solution, end-to-end product management solutions and a multi-domain orchestration layer. We also have a subscription-based convergent billing application bundle included as part of this. The whole platform comes together for the purpose of digital transformation.

How do you look at the Indian market? Do you have any deployments in India?

We have had a few deployments in India from the previous generation offering, but are now in engagement with some operators in the region for the upgraded platform and are really exploring the market. India can be considered an evolved market because of various innovations which are happening and we believe our platform will be very useful for them.
What kind of opportunities do you see coming from the completely next-generation/greenfield operators like for instance Reliance Jio?

I think greenfield operators or MVNOs are working at two different levels. Firstly, these operators are focused on an innate community or innate market. Secondly, we are seeing examples of some operators being focused on data products only. An example of this would be the Finnish operator Ukkoverkot, which offers data-only packages targeted at the digital savvy, next-generation of users who use data as their primary platform. Like, Ukkoverkot, we are seeing a lot of these types of packages being offered in the market and because of which, I think the new platforms that you refer to are much more relevant for the digital aspects of those packages.

What kind of growth are you looking at in the coming year as an organisation? 

In the last few years we have seen significant growth in Africa. But globally, we are still exploring some of the newer emerging digital markets and at this point in time we are more focused on taking our solutions to the customers and helping them understand why this would be beneficial to them, rather than focusing on growth. Having said that, we see the entire BSS market growing significantly in these markets and we expect a lot of growth on the digital innovation side of our business.