Abdelkrim Benamar is chief executive of Astellia, the provider of monitoring, troubleshooting, network optimisation and, more recently, analytics solutions. A long term telecoms industry executive, Benamar has been putting a transformation plan in place at the company to position it for virtualisation, 5G and the business intelligence capabilities enabled by data analytics. Here, he tells VanillaPlus that Astellia’s mission is to help its communications service provider (CSP) customers to refine their operations and processes so they can extract the proper value from their networks, services and subscribers.
VanillaPlus: You’ve recently moved up from chief operating officer to chief executive of Astellia, what is your vision for the future of the company?
Abdelkrim Benamar: I joined Astellia about 17 months ago to help initially drive improvement of the company’s operational and commercial performance. I came up with a transformation plan that has now been adopted. Essentially I was told that my ideas were good and I’ve been given the opportunity to implement them as chief executive.
I believe Astellia has unique assets, talents and the right attitude and culture to be successful in the market place. When I look at the company, I see that we have the means to deliver unique intelligence to help CSPs, specifically mobile operators, to properly manage the value generated throughout their networks, services and subscribers. That, in essence, is my vision for Astellia in the future.
There are three main domains within the company that enable this. One is our historical activity around monitoring and troubleshooting. This was the foundation of Astellia and it has grown over time by adding intelligence, monitoring new network technologies and expanding our customer base. Another domain is network optimisation. A key component of this capability came with our acquisition of Ingenia Telecom in Spain two years ago which brought in unique expertise in radio network optimisation. We now have optimisation capability from end to end, from the radio to the core. The third domain is analytics. Here, we’re enabling CSPs to monetise the diversity of their data with algorithms to develop very powerful analytics.
Our plan is to continue with all three complementary activities and support these with our professional services to make the best of our solutions. All of these capabilities come together to help our customers by optimising their investments to make sure they have the right network quality and capacity at the right places. Technologies that enhance quality of service and quality of experience have become vital because they reduce churn and develop new revenues. It’s the old pitch of save money, make money.
Beyond that, there’s a massive trend towards having a Service Operations Centre (SOC) in addition to a Network Operations Centre (NOC). It is a centralised structure which allows divisions such as Marketing, Customer Care and Network Operations to work more closely together and get a holistic picture of the customer experience in order to drive it efficiently. We’re well positioned to help with that transition. Furthermore, Astellia’s analytics can be used by these different teams to drive service quality, reduce churn and develop new revenues.
VP: Please can you tell us more about how you are developing your analytics capability?
AB: When it comes to Astellia’s solutions the first thing to say is that we’ve built them on a future-proof big data architecture. We provide analytics based on various sources of information: Astellia probes, other vendor probes, call traces and systems such as billing and CRM. Another important benefit is that we can monitor 100% of the traffic so we have a real-time, holistic view of the network, service, handset and customer. We have such breadth and depth of data available to us on top of which we can apply advanced algorithms for geolocation. Our predictive analytics capability opens up use cases for churn prediction, congestion prediction and assists capacity planning.
Last but not least, we’re preparing the ground for the future by getting ready to perform analytics in network functions virtualisation (NFV) and software defined networks (SDN) environments.
VP: Astellia has a substantial CSP customer base for its assurance systems and has increasingly been focusing on providing analytics. How important is this analytics capability for Astellia and your customers?
AB: It’s extremely important because there are so many opportunities. For instance, with mobile video consumption exploding it is crucial for CSPs to understand video QoE. Astellia provides analytics which can, for instance, detect video freeze and geolocate the area where this happened. We can then perform deep root cause analysis and prioritise areas for optimisation. There are also some promising activities in IoT (Internet of Things), especially with geolocation use cases, which we are engaged in.
Benefit for our customers is that we can use analytics to improve fraud prevention capabilities. For example, we can establish whether the owner is present when their credit card is used by determining whether their mobile phone is in the same location. That’s just one example, there are many others. Added to that we have deep and recognised expertise in generating insights from telecoms data. Our team of telecoms data scientists have profound business and telecoms experience and expertise. This allows them to create an extensive big data use case factory.
VP: Do you have any examples of how Astellia has helped its customers with analytics solutions?
AB: I can think of three examples that represent our capabilities. One is with Orange in Spain and demonstrates how using intelligence and analytics can drive optimisation. When the CSP acquired Euskatel, a mobile operator in the Basque region of Spain, it had to migrate the customer base to Orange Spain. We supported Orange Spain with analytics insights into where customers were located and identified the problems such as bottlenecks in network capacity. This meant Orange Spain was able to improve coverage in weak areas and make the migrated customers feel they were immediately receiving a better experience. The proof of the success is that net promoter score (NPS) increased by 9%.
Another great example is our project with Zain Bahrain. The CSP has 80% prepaid subscribers and evolves in an extremely competitive market with more than 180% mobile penetration so we helped Zain improve customer segmentation so it could build better targeted offers. Through the analysis of customers’ current application usage by looking into the number of sessions, session duration, bandwidth usage, geolocation and others, Astellia could distinguish different types of behaviour. For instance, subscribers using a lot of Facebook and other social media, others using their phone mainly to watch and share videos and so on. This allowed Zain to revise its current, socio-economic-based segmentation and offer new data plans after having implemented a new, usage-based segmentation. The results speak for themselves; offer prices increased by 30%, sales increased by 17%, 26% of current broadband subscribers adopted the new offer and ARPU of these subscribers increased by 34%.
A final example is related to the creation of a service operations centre at Smart, a CSP in the Philippines. It is the country’s leading mobile operator and has 67 million customers, 97% of which are prepaid. The challenge was to improve quality of experience and have an end-to-end visibility in service quality of its major services like voice, SMS and data. Smart required this holistic view per region, sub-region and cluster and per network technology, either 2G, 3G or 4G. At the same time, the CSP wanted to identify high value customers impacted by service quality degradation. We designed a service quality management platform to monitor the end-to-end service quality from a user point-of-view with serviceoriented real-time dashboards. That solution is now being used 24/7 by more than 50 employees at Smart. It enables proactive network management and early warning of service quality degradation.
VP: How do you see Astellia developing its business over the next 24 months? Which areas do you see as the next logical targets for Astellia?
AB: We have high ambitions across the four pillars of our business – the three domains plus the services part. What we want to do is strengthen and consolidate our customer base, especially in monitoring and troubleshooting. We also want to support our existing customers as technology moves to SDN/NFV and 5G.
Our ambition is to significantly develop our ability to serve larger deals so we can be out-tasked to optimise a complete network. We want to grow our business by double digits in analytics.
To achieve this, our main focus geographically will be to strengthen our base in EMEA, to grow our base in Central and Latin America and to win more customers in North America. We will focus on analytics and network optimisation using the developments in virtualisation and 5G as a springboard. We’re already investing in NFV and SDN by virtualising our applications and introducing virtual probes for monitoring NFV networks.
Astellia has very appealing assets and I believe the company is a jewel. I didn’t come here for a title and I’m hopeful the transformation we’re putting in place will mean that in two years Astellia will be even more successful.
