I remember when Connectbase was still Connected2Fiber, known then as the industry cloud for connectivity. In early 2022, the company rebranded as Connectbase to better align with the entire spectrum of network connectivity options, including wireless, copper, coax and fibre, all of which the company serves.
Transforming the buying and selling of network infrastructure with its solutions and services, I caught up with the company’s chief commercial officer (CCO) Jezzibell Gilmore, during Capacity Europe 2023 on its latest news and plans for 2024.
Just ahead of the event, Connectbase bolstered planning and prospecting capabilities for network operators that wish to expand in the UK and Ireland, with the expansion of its The Connected World platform – a data-driven, configure price quote platform.
For those not familiar with configure price quote platforms, they are programmes that let you accurately configure products, apply pricing and quantity discounts, and have approvals already programmed into the system.
“We saw a need for the planning and the capability features that we had already launched in the United States and had been welcomed with open arms by many of the service providers, in the UK and Ireland,” says Gilmore.
“It’s a way of making decisions with data, something that the telecommunications industry has always wanted to play in but have not been able to get their hands on that data.”
With plans to bring to the platform to every corner of the world Gilmore says its one location at a time, the UK and Ireland just happened to be the next natural extension of that.
“There's a lot of network service providers that are smaller and midsize here [UK and Ireland], with Openreach there's a lot of access. So different service providers can look at the different developments. Also, there’s lots of infrastructure at various stages, across different areas with different concentrations,” she says.
At the same time, she reminds us of the newer requirements placed on the network with things like hybrid working, causing people to move further and further away from the metropolitan cities. Meaning that fibre-to-the-home or having remote co-working spaces are becoming more prevalent.
“As a service provider, you will be asking yourself where am I going to develop? Is it going to be continually in the metro cities? Where are the demands? What are the interfaces that I'm working with? And how much capacity is available in this area?”
“All of that must be taken into consideration with the right information. The tool is available, and we can provide insight from the data that we have,” adds Gilmore.
The UK more so than many other countries have a lot of legacy infrastructure and getting all the necessary data onto The Connected World platform, must have posed its fair set of challenges, being that it’s an automation-based system.
“One of the many reasons that drew me to Connectbase right is the fact that is has a data science team,” explains Gilmore.
“Their sole focus and responsibility is to curate that data and provide analysis - whether it's through machine learning, AI or algorithms - taking that data and making it into insight that that's digestible and useful for the service providers.”
As our conversation turns to the evolution of wholesale buying and selling, with organisations increasingly investing more into their enterprise business, Gilmore reminds us of the relationship between wholesale and enterprise and the fact that you can’t have one without the other.
“What most people don't understand is that wholesale is what feeds the capacity and the capabilities to the enterprise,” she says.
“If you don't have the right turnaround time or the optimisation, then your enterprise business suffers. What Connectbase is doing is to optimise the way that all of the organisations in the wholesale telecoms industry interact with each other, in a digital manner.”
Thinking about how the infrastructure industry is supporting digital transformation, essentially all the layers above, if you don't have a secure and scalable foundation. You can't build all the floors above.
“We are trying to make the foundation secure and easy to use. What we are doing is instead of thinking of API's, Connectbase becomes a translation layer,” says Gilmore.
“If you write an API, you can connect into our platform via your API and then we become the translation layer to all the other service providers that our API connects into our platform. Even if you don't have an API, which is the case for some of those smaller service providers. We have the capability of having them upload into the platform in a manual fashion and then we will turn that into an API, you can call it pseudo automation.”
It was during the Capacity Europe 2023 Conference that Gilmore sat on the panel harnessing the potential of fully automated networks, with representatives from Equinix, Uber, Talk Talk and Telekom Deutschland.
Post panel, Gilmore shared more thoughts on what this automation looks like across the telco landscape and its role in digital transformation.
“Even though we may compete, service providers have to collaborate with each other because nobody can have a ubiquitous network without working with someone else. No one has neither the resources nor the desire really to deploy services in every corner of the world,” she says.
Therefore, in order to reach the full spectrum of content and internet services, interconnections and collaborations with other providers are necessary. But how do that work more efficiently and smoothly, the answer is through digitisation.
“The manual process of emailing each other spreadsheets, rate cards and building lists is so last century,” says Gilmore.
“Lastly, everybody wants to talk about AI but what can you AI on? You can't AI on pieces of paper. You have to have it digitised. So, when it comes to AI, you have to become a digital organisation.”
But what about the general pace and industry response to digitisation? Its still not fast enough says Gilmore.
“Nothing ever moves fast enough,” she says. “We're the foundation for transformation in all other industries. So, if we don't move then everyone else's growth is hindered.”
To Gilmore, digital transformation and increasing automation should be seen as complementary to the people that work in our industry, not as a threat.
“It's about having the machines doing a lot of the really basic work, so that you can free up your talent to do the more challenging work, such as building relationships with your partners, enhancing and understanding the challenges and solving these problems,” she says.
With the acquisition of LastMileXchange (LMX) having been completed in May of this year and with it, bringing Connectbase’s US-based capabilities to the global stage, Gilmore shares a little on the integration plans for the business over the next 12 months.
“We're going to put focus on the integration of the [LMX] platforms, making the global platform robust, reliable and performant for our customer base,” she says.
“In that sense we're not going to be looking at fancy new features to bring to market, we have some great functionalities in the platform already. We're going to make those better for our customer base, because we know that we're bringing on scale.”
As for those aforementioned new features and capabilities, ‘those will come’ she says, “service provider customers will tell us so”.
