FROM THE INDUSTRY
What do you find challenging and what do you find rewarding running your own business? Mark: You can’t get too high and you can’t get too low; that just comes with experience over the years. I can remember the way I felt at times that were extra challenging, but when you look back you realise you made it through, you’re still here. I think my management of stress has changed a lot. That’s based on experience and realising that the sky is not actually falling! Likewise, closing a big deal is super exciting but the key is executing for our customers. Sometimes it can feel like “be careful what you ask for…”, but in all seriousness we feel strongly that we’re up to the challenge. It is difficult to plan ahead as a business owner in today’s uncertain world, but you seem to take it all in your stride. What’s your secret? Lauren: Operators’ willingness or ability to spend money ebbs and flows, and managing that rollercoaster is critical to our success. Our saving grace is the essential nature of broadband - you can’t live without it. Operators have no choice but to maintain their networks and expand the capacity. We might have some down times where operators aren’t spending
resilient network, where PNM can identify those impairments, prioritise them with a whole suite of tools to make the operator more efficient. Two, generative AI, which we are investing in heavily. There’s an unskilled workforce out there these days and training has become critical. An AI chatbot providing training will become critical. Finally, number three: fibre. We’ve already got a lot of data collection capabilities in fibre. There’s a lot of interest in proactive network maintenance for fibre operators. They all have issues. We are looking at an access network and vendor agnostic suite of solutions from OpenVault down the line, where it doesn’t matter whether you’re DOCSIS or fibre; we’ve got solutions regardless of the access network. Lauren: There will also be increasing focus on the quality of experience for the end customer; since COVID in particular we’ve seen they are very savvy and careful how they spend their money. Consumers won’t put up with a video that takes a really long time to spool, they won’t put up with a Zoom call that keeps getting knocked down. So, the providers have a much more educated subscriber base that is much more demanding on the quality of the product. They don’t need these tremendous speeds yet, but they need and want what they are paying for. Mark: But they will need more speed down the line. It’s inevitable that there will be more killer applications that chew up tremendous bandwidth. We’re good for the foreseeable future, but the work continues behind the scenes to continue offering higher bandwidth. As a company you project a great image. Mark: It has been a conscious decision to create a culture that isn’t a stodgy analytics company. My vision was always to create a great culture in the company. As an ‘outgoing’ company, we’re perceived to be much bigger than we are which has helped us grow. We’ll throw social events at industry conferences, we do things for the industry like our OVBI Report that we do on our dime, we don’t get any money out of it, but we know that it presents us as thought leaders in the space and that’s where we want to be as a business.
money, but they have to come back around.
Mark: Worth remembering too that during COVID, nobody wanted people coming into their homes; another reason why I think our products are in such demand, is nobody wants a field technician to come into their home to fix the internet if they don’t have to, nor does the operator want to spend a lot of operating expense in an inefficient manner by sending technicians out searching high and low for the issue. We help those operators diagnose and pinpoint the problem and then prioritise it. Remote diagnostics is also a big element. Maybe it’s just a loose connection in the customer’s home and they can fix it themselves without a technician coming over. That network maintenance side of things has become much more important. How’s the industry going to evolve for the next two to four years? Mark: Operators will continue to build as much capacity as they can into their networks. Many are leveraging fibre, particularly in Europe fibre is much more prominent, where in the States there will be a long life ahead for DOCSIS; 10-20 years at least. Our road map is focused on three main areas I would say. One is integrating our proactive network maintenance (PNM) and our profile management application (PMA). PMA can compensate for impairments and ensure a
SEPTEMBER 2024 Volume 46 No.3
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