Redknee CEO Lucas Skoczkowski explains how the cloud allows service providers to address the full spectrum of the long tail of customers
Tony Poulos: The recent acquisition of NSN's BSS business has brought you into the spotlight in a lot of areas. How is it going and how is the acquisition being phased out now?
Skoczkowski: We are off to a great start. The senior leadership team is in place, we’ve got the key indicators for performance in place, the initial integration of our product is complete, and we are doing demonstrations of the Redknee CRM integrated with unified charge@once product.
I would say the feedback from customers has been excellent -- quite a few large customers have voted with their purchase orders, which is a great vote of confidence. And all our new customers have really engaged us now that we are larger to see how we can work with them on a broader portfolio and meet their business needs. So I am actually very happy and very proud of the team and what they were able to accomplish so far.
I’m hearing also that you are moving into cloud-based solutions. How is that going to work out and what do you have in mind?
I think cloud is critical for customer success. My belief is that telecoms is already a provider of cloud services. They need to start leveraging their own cloud capabilities for their own business. So I believe that this can accomplish a couple things. For tier 1s, where they don't necessarily want to do a complete overhaul of existing systems but maybe bring in a system just for LTE, they can leverage a cloud-based solution. I think that reduces risk and allows the business to experiment to get it right and to really have access to best-of-breed technologies.
For small operators, I think it is the most economical way to go to leverage multi-tenant systems, to leverage innovation, and drive speed to market. I also believe what you really see underpinning the cloud is productization of the offering. And BSS has been the big path toward productization. We're definitely in the camp that configurable products is a way to go. I know there are a lot of service organizations that prefer that path; my view is that we want to create a leverage for our customers for the product, and cloud offers that in the most economical way.