Juhani Hintikka on trends in the telecoms industry | Comptel | Video

Transcript

The telecommunication industry has evolved massively over the past few years. Juhani Hintikka from Comptel talks about what key trends and challenges lie ahead for companies operating in the market, and how his company intends to capitalise on the current trend for big data

From 4G to mobile device management, the telecommunication industry has seen major advancements over the past few years. Joining me now is Juhani Hintikka from Comptel, a leading international software company specialising in telecommunications.

World Finance: Well Juhani, 2013 was a huge year for telecommunications, so what were the major trends do you think that came out of that year?

Juhani Hintikka: First of all, of course the network evolution continued so there was an investment into LT networks, investment into fibre, and also we started to see the first forays into what would be the future of software defined networking, and last but not least from our perspective, we started talking about the big data in the networks, how can we actually make use of the vast amount of data that’s being transported in the networks?

We seek to revolutionise, if you like, the way the OS’s/BS’s business is being carried out in teleco networks

World Finance: Well what are the major challenges now facing the industry?

Juhani Hintikka: In terms of the telecom carriers, clearly of course there is the ever increasing pressure on cost, and also the competition that they are seeing by other players in the industry, which leads into consolidation, pressures on cost and harmonising their infrastructure. At the same time, taking good care of their customers and differentiating from the competition.

World Finance: Well Comptel, your company, processes 20 percent of global mobile data. Now that’s very impressive, how do you manage this?

Juhani Hintikka: Well we’ve been in the business since 1986, it is one of the things that we do, we started focusing on a large scale data processing in the operator environment, a particular example being India where we process on a daily basis over 20bn transactions. So that’s given us a good basis for understanding what to with the data, how to reliably process the data.

World Finance: So how is Comptel structured to turn intelligence into opportunity in real time?

Juhani Hintikka: The key point in our differentiation, in our industry and for us as a company, comes from a couple of things. First of all, we operate in the teleco/IT environment. At the same time, it is very essential for us that we are able to differentiate through the way we look at this industry, and we do that by actually harnessing the intelligence and the data in the networks, so we seek to revolutionise, if you like, the way the OS’s/BS’s business is being carried out in teleco networks.

World Finance: You’re an international company, operating in 87 countries with the last addition being Viet Nam. Does this pose any additional challenges?

Juhani Hintikka: Well, we’ve been a global company for a long time, and that’s represented both in terms of our customer base but also in terms of the people we employ. We are listed in the Helsinki Stock Exchange, it’s part of the OMX Nordic Nasdaq. Finland has about one third of our employees, but two thirds are outside of Finland, so actually our largest site is in KL, Malaysia. So yes, we’re very used to dealing with culture differences, but also difference between different markets.

We’re very used to dealing with culture differences, but also difference between different markets

World Finance: So looking to the future now, what do you see to be the major trend then in this industry for 2014?

Juhani Hintikka: For us, clearly, it will be about bringing big data forward in telecoms, it will be about contextual intelligence, it will be about operational intelligence, so we really our looking at bringing analytics into all of the teleco processes rather than seeing only as a disparate part in a business intelligence system. That is truly driving us forward as a company. We will be also integrating analytics into different parts of our offering, and also beyond that to our partners’ offering.

World Finance: So finally, how do you plan to capitalise on these changes then?

Juhani Hintikka: Well let me use Asia as an example. We’ve been operating there since the 90s, we have a fairly good footprint across the region, and clearly there’s tremendous development ongoing in Asia. At the same time, it’s been very mobile driven, but now we start seeing certain markets maturing, so the operators are looking for ways to differentiate, provide the user experience, the customer experience that clearly is an opportunity for us. We’re Asia based, we have large footprint there, a large customer base, and we can actually bring solutions around big data, but also other solutions related to the automated service delivery like service fulfilment or charging payments related solutions like policy control and charging. So that is very much one of our growth regions going forward.

World Finance: Juhani, thank you.

Juhani Hintikka: Thank you very much.