FROM THE INDUSTRY
the operators. Our role was really to help them navigate that, figure out how to monetise the growth on their networks. Lockdown must have accelerated that process. Mark: Absolutely. The way in which operators monetised changed drastically during COVID; we saw the eradication of usage-based billing, which is the ‘pay by the drink’ model. You’d be billed based on an agreed package and once you chew up your agreed amount anything over that you’d be charged for. During COVID operators were nervous of the bad publicity in charging people during a national emergency; by then the consumption of data had changed completely – it was essential for school and work. Operators relaxed the model, like cell phones, to the ‘all you can eat’ type plans. They’ll never look back now. It made us lean into some other areas of our business, which became more critical, more around quality of experience and the health of the network. An increasingly large focus of ours, it’s driven some of the acquisitions that we’ve made and the strategies behind those, looking at network health, proactive network maintenance, PMA (profile management applications). What have those areas done for your customers? They help expand capacity, optimise the available capacity, help you make sure your network is resilient and free of impairments. These networks are living, breathing things that require constant care and feeding and it’s really important for operators to make sure that they’re providing the best quality of experience to retain their customers and give the customers what they’re paying for. Lauren: Broadband became an essential, round-the-clock utility during COVID, and peak hours became all day long, because everybody was working and learning. Therefore, the operator networks became very clogged up. We pivoted quickly because it was such an essential and sudden need for the operators to provide that quality of experience. Mark: Because of the increase in demand, you have to give operators credit for futureproofing their networks. There are even more bandwidth-hogging
applications out there. They’ve done such a good job now they have future-proofed at least the speeds of their networks. Remember all these networks are still shared, so you can offer great speed to an individual customer but if part of the network is congested, that’s poor value for money. You really need a healthy, non-congested plant in order to be able to deliver that, and that is exactly what we help operators with. You’ve become invaluable to these guys now. Mark: I think so. In the past we were a nice-to-have type of solution. Because they were still going to run their network, they still get customers, subscribers paying them money. It’s a much more mission critical situation now, so for us, as a business this the most exciting time we’ve ever had. Exciting time for growth certainly. Are you up to the challenge? Mark: Scaling is a big challenge. We built our business on the Tier 2’s and Tier 3 operators, but now with these new technologies there’s a big need from the Tier 1’s for what we have, and they operate very differently. They are demanding but it’s making us a better company. We’re excited now to have our solutions deployed at some of the largest
operators in the world with a rapidly growing pipeline.
How are you planning on expanding?
Mark: We’ve expanded inorganically through our acquisitions, so we’ve brought on some technology that is Tier 1-ready and massively scalable. So that brought us into the Tier 1 game, and then we’ve continued to develop new products which are attracting new customers all the time. We are focusing our organic growth in three regions: North America, Latin American and Europe. We also have started to work with resellers and distributors of the products, that’s another way for us to try to scale without having to add a lot of people on our side. Very sensible, good to be cautious. Mark: We’ve tried to be conservative; we’ve never taken in a venture capital or private equity round of funding. We have some funding that has come to us from our customers who actually approached us, which I think was a huge validation of what we’re about. They approached us three years ago at the same time I was actually shopping for money to do an acquisition.
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Volume 46 No.3 September 2024
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