Orga CEO Ramez Younan explains to group editor Joseph Waring how telcos can address their biggest pain points and the need to serve customers through innovation
Telecom Asia: What do you see as the biggest pain point for telcos?
Younan: Operators face a lot of pain because the reality is hitting that they've been working on the pipe trying to provide more traffic, but all of a sudden they get hit with all the data and video load where the real beneficiary is the over-the-top players.
Some commentators point to Google's and Apple's share prices, meanwhile, Google is investing $500 million, Apple is investing $1.5 billion in R&D while others are investing $5.5 billion. What's wrong with this picture? It's obvious that operators are starting to feel the heat of the demand, but they are not actually able to monetize it.
To be able to monetize it they need to lower the cost of the networks. And when they do so, inevitably they will end up differentiating the type and speed of service from one customer to another, from one tariff to another. You cannot do this unless you have a real-time policy management and rating and charging. So it goes back to how you are able to control the network bandwidth, and at the same time how to monetize it appropriately in time.
What are the obstacles in moving to a converged billing platform?
For years we have believed that postpaid was dead. But many operators continued putting their architecture on postpaid, because the urgency was to deal with postpaid customers. These guys are now kind of stuck because when it comes to convergence, where everybody is going, you have to choose one or the other platform ?prepaid or postpaid. But postpaid, architecture-wise, cannot handle the volume of subscribers which is generally about 85% prepaid of the total.
What impact is the move to data having on billing systems?
Many vendors are trying to react by acquiring other engines. While on the face of it you can integrate any engine that you want, the reality is you add complexity with each addition. This is okay if you're talking about voice and SMS, but the minute you start dealing with data charging and rating you face the complexity of how to ensure low latency on an application that is spread over several engines. And if you want to be able to add a new tariff, how long will it take you to set up on this engine and test it and so on? So the time to market can become much more important.
How are these factors affecting operators?
They are putting a lot of stress on billing vendors, which have to figure out how they can provide performance, functionality, low latency and, with convergence, quick time to market.
Has your focus on convergence made a difference with customers?
We've seen strong demand for our application based on a real-time platform with one engine, which is providing those benefits to the customer. In just one year interest from customers has quadru
pled.
What's the biggest challenge for the industry now?
With the challenges I've mentioned, there needs to be new thinking. People are thinking, "do I go to the big boys and just see what they have?" Unfortunately many of these big organizations don't have the agility. You grow so big, and you spend so much time on red tape rather than on innovation. Some of them have been letting down their customers in terms of innovation. By talking to so many people, it takes much longer to make a creative decision.
What's the latest on the transformation Orga is going through?
When I came in, we had a world-class product. So that first thing we wanted to do was continue the investment in the product, particularly in terms of proving that it is as scalable as we think it is. We went through rigorous benchmarking with IBM, and when we announced it, there were 145 million convergence subscribers on one platform with 20% more in voice than any other competitor per hour with 33% less hardware.
We are also looking at how we can leverage our platform into the other industries because we can see the traction is needed there. These include the utility and energy sectors, and mobile payments.
What we didn't do very well in the past was be close to the customer. We have quadrupled our sales force, so we are present in 18 more territories, and now in a total of 40 countries. Also before I joined, one of the handicaps we had was we did not cooperate very well with channels. We have opened up to more alliances and we have 12 channels, including the big boys like IBM, Accenture and so on.
We have decentralized the organization to make it more global and be closer to the customer in terms of management. We have spread out delivery and support. We opened two centers ?one in Buenos Aires and other in Kolkatta. Together with our centers in Europe, we provide 24/7 support.
We have started to see the benefits of the changes. Last year we sold about 25% more than we ever did, that's in terms of orders. In terms of revenue, we've grown 10% and we are projecting at least 20% revenue growth this year. With what's going on in the world economy you never know. We're starting to see some dipping again.
Are you looking at diversifying away from high-tech industries?
I would be very cautious to say "diversify." I think all the other industries are in need of this because everything is going out to mobile.
With the next generation that is very digital-aware, we are looking at industries like healthcare, where 200 million people in the developed world could be using this. And you can imagine what this means to government spending, taxpayers' money. For the developing world, there is about one bed per 1,000 population compared to 10 beds per 1,000 in the developed world. It's not actually about the number of beds but the number of nurses and doctors and the facility that you provided for them.
So if you are able to, with mobile communication, get the data ?instead of nurses and doctors going to the beds ?and alert them if something goes wrong, then you are able to scale that service. This is something that we are looking to this year.