Revolutionising the current vendor model

Revolutionising the current vendor model

Andreas Hipp, chairman and CEO of Cataleya, details the company’s refocused vision as service enablement plays an increasingly important role in wholesale telecoms

Q. What have been your key developments so far in 2017?

As you know, earlier on this year our new management team acquired Cataleya. This has meant that 2017, so far, has been about conducting in depth analyses of the past progress and involved refocusing the business’s vision for the service provider market and new markets we are planning to enter. Our new vision can only be achieved by revolutionising the current vendor model, and creating new and exciting solutions that really address customer pain points, or support our customers’ growth. Everything in between or besides has no significance. 

One of our biggest recent developments, includes the launch of our network function virtualisation (NFV)-based version of Orchid One. To date limits remain on delivering real time IP communication network performance in the cloud, and we believe that there should be nothing standing in the way of this. For this reason, we created a virtualised version of our award-winning session border controller (SBC) Orchid One. 

The aim of this development was to make sure that all the benefits of the hardware version remained the same, while combining its functionalities with new innovations in the market. These include big data, real-time network analytics and machine learning (ML) – all of which are in large demand at the moment and will be the key focus area of Cataleya’s future R&D efforts.

Q. What are your strategic priorities this year?

This year we really want to disrupt the network infrastructure market on a global scale, and position Cataleya as a technology craft workshop, built on innovation, agility, reliability and trust. To do this, we have adopted a long-term NFV strategy. This will include innovations in unified communications, mobile network technology, fraud detection and prevention based on big data analytics and applied artificial intelligence (AI) and ML algorithms. Equally important will be the launch of our disruptive business models around the deployment of our technology. We want to break down barriers to adoption, and accelerate the use of intelligent networking applications around the world, by removing the upfront capex burden common amongst vendors. 

Q. What are your expansion and development plans over the next year?

Every day we are seeing new applications of our hardware/software solution Orchid One, across the industry. What we have observed is an increasing amount of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) providers, helping voice customers to manage their back-ends. Customers want robust OSS/BSS solutions that require little effort and investment, and providers are being pushed to expand their capabilities to offer this.

Docklands Data Centre Limited and RedVoip for example, came to us to assist in building out its platform’s switching capabilities. Both are now using our Orchid One SBC to provide customers with new network functions and critical visibility into network performance. Both are now able to offer a complete switching solution to their particular market segments, that is built with service enablement at its core.

In addition to continuously expand and improve the Orchid Product family, we have our eyes firmly set on utilising AI and ML algorithms. These will address, firstly fraud which is a massive plague for the service providers, and secondly exploit all the data we are able to analyse. This will allow all types of communication providers to tap into indirect revenue streams, as many OTTs have already successfully done. 

Q. What new opportunities do you predict for the wholesale sector over the next few years?

We are in an exciting time in telecoms, where anything is possible. As I just mentioned, we are definitely seeing service enablement as the future playground for wholesale. There will always be a component play but it will remain a commodity, and competition will be fierce as usual.

Business ecosystems can be very difficult to manage and without proper direction and support face breaking down, therefore service enablement solutions will be a mandatory requirement made by service providers over the next few years. PaaS providers, consequently, must change to accommodate to this need, or face being left behind. If they accept and facilitate this transformation, then the global channel will grow and become more dynamic than ever before. 

Q. What are you hoping to achieve at ITW 2017?

I have been attending ITW for many years, and see it as the perfect platform to meet and network with both existing and potential customers. At Cataleya, we are excited to see what opportunities come our way at ITW 2017, while reuniting with some familiar faces.

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