FROM THE INDUSTRY
What was your lightbulb moment, and what were those early days like? Mark: I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. After T-Mobile I leveraged my experience in pricing analytics to build a software company that could help operators with competitive pricing analysis. I sold that business, started another business, and before you know it, I had become a serial entrepreneur. The cable broadband space was just starting to feel the pains of streaming video, but nobody was analysing the data around subscriber usage behaviour. That data was available inside the networks, but operators were letting it pretty much fall on the floor and not using it. It was still early days though. True; up to that point not much traffic flowed through the broadband pipe, but around 2012 in the States, Netflix started growing and it put strain on these operator networks, at which point I saw an opportunity. I acquired a company with some data collection capabilities, raising money from friends and family. The company had built the system for one operator and licensed it to them, but it was applicable across the industry.
You obviously capitalised on that great timing. Lauren: It’s only in the last five years that there are now careers in data science and people actually realise that if you look at the data provided by your customers, you really can drive your business that way. Mark: But back then, data science was in its infancy. Being in early, bringing information to the market that nobody had ever seen before positioned OpenVault as real thought leaders in the space. We’ve continued to try to leverage that over the years with initiatives like our OVBI Report, which we put out to the industry each quarter. We do a lot of evangelising; we educate operators about the value of the data that resides in their network, and they get curious. It must have generated some competition. They start to say, “Well, how do we stack up versus our peers and other operators?” And once we got to that point the business took off; there was huge growth in streaming, driving traffic onto these networks. Operators had to pay attention to it because they weren’t driving revenues, Netflix was making all the money, and it was putting strain on
Mark and Lauren Trudeau are the faces of OpenVault, based in New Jersey and will be a familiar sight at trade shows on both sides of the Atlantic. Mark is the founder and CEO and Lauren is VP of Operations. We caught up with them to discuss their backgrounds, their plans for expansion, working together as a husband-and-wife team and how their lightbulb moment has become such an integral part of the broadband landscape. How did you get started in this industry? Mark: Lauren and I met in the early days of wireless; we both worked for a company called NYNEX Mobile Communications, which is now Verizon. We became two of the early people at a new wireless operator out of the New York area called Omnipoint which eventually became T-Mobile. I started out in sales, but my true passion was analytics and analysing data, and so I quickly moved into that arena and have been here ever since. Lauren: I wasn’t always in marketing, I started out on the operations side, in customer care; I moved into a revenue assurance fraud role, because there was a lot of fraud in the wireless industry at the time. When I went over to T-Mobile, or Omnipoint at the time, I ran their customer service division.
SEPTEMBER 2024 Volume 46 No.3
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