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04 April, 2019
Openet, a global supplier of Digital Business Support Systems (BSS), has announced that Tony Regan has been appointed as VP Market Development for APAC, where he will drive the company’s continued expansion in the region. (more…)
21 February, 2019
Openet announced it has partnered with CloudSense to provide Digital Edge, a Digital Services Monetisation Solution. (more…)
23 January, 2019
Openet has partnered with Iridium on the launch of Iridium Certus, said to be “the world’s first truly global broadband service”. The Ireland-based vendor’s policy control system will provide Iridium Certus with real-time network and usage management controls. (more…)
24 August, 2018
VoltDB, the enterprise-class database that powers real-time intelligent decisions on streaming data, announced new platform updates (more…)
19 July, 2018
Operators face a series of challenges as they grapple to determine their role in the digital value chain and struggle with the continued need to invest in infrastructure in order to bring new services to market. At a recent Openet media event, George Malim caught up with chief executive Niall Norton to gauge his views on what the operators of the future will look like.
George Malim: As operators focus on how to compete in the digital services market is their insistence on providing carrier-grade services starting to shift? Could we see services come to market more rapidly in a beta testing mode?
Niall Norton: A service delivery environment will always have an obsession about carrier-grade reliability, it’s an easy metric so it’s easy to apportion blame when it goes wrong. If you’re partnering you can blame someone else so proof of fault will be required.
The tools are our there now but they are a lot less specialist and a lot less complex than carrier-grade tools. These will just keep getting better and better and we’ll see things like videoconferencing that doesn’t hit the internet so the quality can be assured.
Things will still go wrong but the internet is understood to be not carrier-grade so I think operators will learn to dry their tears of regret at not being carrier-grade.
GM: Will operators continue to be consumer brands? Can you envisage communications becoming just another bundled service offered by a bank or a utility service for example?
NN: There’s a segmentation of operators going, particularly among this big ones which can afford to buy media content and have real ambitions of getting into other services. You could see them selling electricity or security in partnership with others and it’s possible that communications services could be sold by other organisations.
New service areas for operators are all real and will all come to pass pretty quickly. Operators, particularly the big ones, have an unassailable advantage in the 5G space with the assets they have at the edge of the network. This means they can make decisions at the signalling layer and this capability can be exploited at the network edge.
GM: Which new services do you see being successful for operators?
NN: Security, tracking and virtual reality will be important – especially in factories –and they don’t need massive amounts of fibre. We see AT&T, Verizon, Orange and BT taking serious steps away from the traditional telco model but all sorts of new models, some of which are not known today, will emerge.
GM: Operators seem stuck with the old model, though, especially when you look at the 5G investment burden. How will they survive and thrive in the digital era when they’re encumbered with traditional infrastructure investment?
NN: If people look at 5G as being like 4G, they’re stuffed because they won’t be able to raise the money. Operators’ share prices are unbelievably sensitive to price wars and anything to do with margin constriction has a massive affect. In the US, for example, when T-Mobile dropped its price the others had to compete with it but to do so they had to shut down almost everything in order to maintain margins for the Street. If margin drops by 1%, an operator’s share price can drop by 10%.
This means announcing massive investment in 5G isn’t going to happen. However, the 5G business case is around services people want that require spectrum. That means high bandwidth interactive TV or super-high definition cameras on new devices.
We’ll therefore see 5G deployed in support of these types of services. We’re now getting purchase orders for the development of software tools to support 5G so it’s now a reality but these are targeted investments in the delivery of specific services and value propositions.
Operators aren’t changing because they want to. They have the choice of being a mammal and adapting to the market conditions or being a dinosaur just after the meteor hits.
12 July, 2018
Recent data scandals, such as the Facebook controversy, mean 53% of consumers are less likely to share their personal data with digital services companies and consumers now see their mobile operators as more trustworthy, with 92% happy to consider using MNO-delivered digital services, writes George Malim from an Openet press event in Dublin, Ireland.
30 April, 2018
Openet has appointed Jan Frykhammar to its board of directors. Having spent almost three decades at Ericsson, Jan Frykhammer has held a number of positions during his tenure, including interim Group CEO, CFO, and most recently, special advisor to the board and CEO. (more…)
11 April, 2018
Openet announced that its policy management solution has been successfully deployed by a tier one APAC operator, replacing Cisco’s PCRF. As part of the deployment process, the operator also underwent a gradual migration of its total signaling traffic – from a subscriber base of over nine million. (more…)
24 January, 2018
Openet has appointed Derek Hosty to lead its Actionable Data Solutions Business Unit. Joining from Telenor, Derek will manage the company’s solutions portfolio covering data management, analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). (more…)
13 December, 2017
In this interview Niall Norton, the chief executive of Openet, tells George Malim, the managing editor of VanillaPlus that, as 5G and virtualisation begin to emerge, communications service providers (CSPs) should already be approaching their vendor relationships in new ways. There’s no need to wait for these technologies to be widely deployed, a new relationship based on openness rather than the closed room of a super-sized deal can be fostered right now
George Malim: With all the attention either on 5G or virtualisation investment, how difficult is it for Openet to get attention from CSPs?
Niall Norton: Getting the attention isn’t too bad. You’ve just got to focus on delivering value and fixing short, and medium term, problems and that’s what we do. 5G is all well and good, and it’s an area that we’re investing in, but it’s not top of the list when we talk to CSPs. We talk about fixing current problems – such as maximising the return on the investment that CSPs have made on 4G. We talk about how CSPs can be more relevant to their customers, how they can quickly and cost effectively roll out new offers and adopt new business models. As for virtualisation, we were the first vendor to fully virtualise policy and real-time charging. It’s pretty much table stakes now, providing virtualised solutions is expected of all vendors.
GM: Do you think the arrival of these technologies presents an opportunity for the traditional vendor/CSP relationship to be broken, especially as commodity hardware becomes the norm?
NN: If the telecoms industry needs to wait till 5G is here to fix the traditional vendor/CSP relationship, then that is a sad state of affairs. The rate of change enabled by 4G is staggering. In the last year, we’ve seen CSPs becoming entertainment companies, banks and much more. A few years ago we supported about 30 use cases – now that figure is above 100. The change, and the speed of that change, that CSPs are going through can’t be supported by the old change request fixated, long and hugely expensive BSS transformation projects. Vendors need to more web scale – not just in their technology but their business processes and attitudes when dealing with CSPs and enabling them to change their businesses. Change is needed now. The CSPs cannot afford to wait for 5G to force the vendors to change.
GM: Is there a risk that the old model – and even its operational siloes – will be replicated in the new telecoms arena?
NN: That is the very risk we are trying to warn against. For far too long, the larger IT vendors have effectively locked CSPs into a system of super-sized deals. These deals are delivered over a number of years and see constant upgrades, and patches on a legacy systems regardless of historic faults, or suitability for the changing network environment. This is a circle of despair for the CSPs, their customers and those innovative companies that are trying to revolutionise service provision and CSP return on investment.
GM: How can CSPs get better value from their software vendors, especially as software is where the value now lies?
NN: By looking to change the dynamic and put the needs of the customer ahead of the ease of the vendor relationship. Instead of long running service contracts, operators should look for agile business partnerships that use internet-style pricing models and service provisioning. They must encourage a fast-moving culture, rather than settle for transformation projects that move at glacial speed. The internet market operates at a far greater pace than telecoms – so embrace that and don’t settle for second best in terms of speed, or quality of service delivery.
GM: Do you see new entrants with new models serving the new needs of the telecoms market or are there already too many players chasing too few opportunities?
NN: There is always room for new agile players to break into a market. But the hard truth of the BSS market is that the current vendors, and I include Openet in here, have failed to fully address the changing business needs of the CSPs, and have been slow to adopt new technologies that will allow them to offer better solutions.
We’ve committed to changing that. We’ve committed to a five-point plan to change the game. We’ve committed to being the change we believe the market needs, and to issuing a rallying call to CSPs and vendors alike to embrace the new reality, and make the leap to a new way of doing business.
GM: Do you think telecoms has become unattractive to innovators? Is R&D effort that might once have been directed at the telecoms industry being soaked up elsewhere?
NN: The telecoms market remains attractive to innovators and remains open to innovation on a grand scale. However, vendors and CSPs need to fully embrace innovation throughout their business model. This is about more than simply adopting new technology – it is about innovation in service delivery, relationship management, business practices and operational processes. It’s about embracing a change of thinking, not just a change of technology.
GM: How is Openet transforming to meet the needs of your customers as they adopt different modes of operation for the new era of telecoms?
NN: We’ve taken a fresh look at our business and how we interact with our customers. We are embracing a cultural, commercial and deployment model change. We changed our suite of services to offer greater degree of flexibility – a modular approach that allows operators to tailor solutions to their specific needs, and embrace an open source or open architecture environment, and integrate with legacy proprietary systems via open API (application programme interface) exposure. We say “no thanks” to vendor lock-ins and “yes please” to CSP choice. We’re looking to enable simplicity and provide agnostic expertise that can drive business insight. We want to change the game – and we want to help CSPs to move from a closed room to an open environment.
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