Comptel’s New Sydney Office Honors 15 Successful Years in the Region

By Jussi Ware, Vice President, Australia and New Zealand, and Alliances APAC, Comptel

After 15 years of business in Australia and New Zealand, Comptel celebrated the opening of a new office in Sydney, Australia on 4th December.

Our business and customer base in Australia and New Zealand have grown steadily since we opened our original regional office in 1999. Today, eight of the leading telcos in the Australian and New Zealand market are Comptel customers. In recent years, Comptel has played an important role, in particular, in national broadband initiatives both in Australia, supporting NBN Co, and in New Zealand, supporting Chorus and Enable as part of that country’s Ultra-Fast Broadband programme.

The new office celebrates our continued commitment to support communications service providers and other telco industry players in Australia and New Zealand.

It was a pleasure to host a party to reinforce this and Comptel’s success in this market. Guests included local customers and partners such as NBNCo, Tech Mahindra, Alcatel-Lucent and Pactera. Representatives from Finpro, Team Finland and the Finland-Australia Chamber of Commerce also brought some Finnish flavor to the party.

Mr. Pasi Patokallio, Ambassador of Finland for Australia and New Zealand, gave the welcome address followed by comments from Comptel CEO Juhani Hintikka.

We are constantly looking for opportunities to add value and provide local support and relevant solutions to our customers around the globe. The new Sydney office will allow Comptel to further grow within the Australian and New Zealand telco markets, while strengthening our ability to serve customers in this part of the world.

Comptel Visits Australia and New Zealand with Finpro

Following our successful trips to India, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia, Comptel traveled with the Finpro delegation to visit Australia and New Zealand between 28 November and 3 December. The team was led by Minister for European Affairs and Foreign Trade Alexander Stubb and brought together representatives from Finnish companies such as Capricode, Doofor, Konecranes, Martin Bencher, Nuovo Nordic, Outotec and Snellman.

The purpose of the visit was to build strong relationships between Finland and these APAC countries, fostering business partnerships and working on international policies. Comptel has a strong customer base both in Australia and New Zealand, and the mobile market in both countries is growing rapidly. Research shows that the New Zealand telecoms market is set to grow to NZ$5.35 billion next year. In Australia, nearly half of Australians are now accessing the Internet by mobile phone.

We’ve played a key role in national broadband programmes with NBNCo in Australia and with Chorus in New Zealand. This recent trip has led to great opportunities, as Alexander Stubb joined Comptel’s Juhani Hintikka and Jussi Ware at customer meetings with NBNCo, Vodafone New Zealand and meetings with partners Alcaltel Lucent and IBM. As always, we were grateful for the chance to represent Finland on this latest Finpro trip, and we’re excited to see what opportunities await for us around the globe in the future.

Men at Work Down Under

We all know that during these uncertain economic times, life in business might not be always that easy, don’t we?  However, I’m a strong believer in positivism and its power of energizing people.  Therefore, I took the opportunity to write this small blog to share the joy and enthusiasm of my dear colleagues Down Under.

We in Comptel have worked hard to transform the company from a traditional, if I dare to say maybe a bit dull telco engineering company, to a faster moving and an agile Internet-age software  company.  After ten months in Comptel, I have experienced an amazing spirit of ”Make it Happen”, which is also one of our four core values. The recent recognition by Frost & Sullivan is only one example of the results of our dedication.

I was personally inspired by the pictures the team sent to me after the Awards Banquet on the 20th of November 2012 in Australia.  It is wonderful to see Men at Work Down Under with such big smiles while knowing that they really put their hearts into it and give their best  effort to bring the highest customer value in their respective markets.

The other reason to write this blog is to remind of our thought leadership in Contextual Intelligence For Telco (CIQ4T). The comment from Mr. Mark Dougan, managing director, Australia & New Zealand, Frost & Sullivan confirms that we have succeeded in differentiating with our approach:  “The company has proven its ability to not only effectively operate and grow in the competitive market, but also, with the debut of its CIQ4T, fuel OSS innovation and raise the bar for CSPs’ customer engagement practices.”

Simply put, Contextual Intelligence (CI) is the principle of understanding a uniqueness of a person and the circumstances, ( i.e. the context) and turning that understanding into an opportunity. This is a valid guideline for various business situations as well as for life in general.  If you happen to be around Orlando next week, visit us at Management World Americas, 2-6 December 2012 to hear more.

Q1 2011: An Update on Comptel’s Business and Strategy

Today we announced our Q1 2011 results. I have to admit they were disappointing on the financial side. Most notably, our net sales in Europe and the Middle East did not live up to expectations.

On the positive side, the APAC region continued to perform well. I was especially pleased about Australia’s NBN Co becoming a customer. NBN Co is doing very leading-edge things, bringing high-speed broadband to virtually every premise in the country. It’s a very high profile initiative, and I know many other countries are looking carefully at similar developments, so we are really excited about being part of this ground-breaking initiative.

From an organisational point of view, Q1 was a period of change. We continued to implement our initiative to get closer to customers and partners, chiefly by putting resources next to them. We also announced the split of our European operations into Europe West and Europe East, to take into account the very different features of the markets in terms of maturity, saturation and growth. We also got positive customer feedback about the new setup for the Inventory business.

This will be in many ways a year of building a new foundation for growth.

Around the World

Cellular News…
Mobile Network Operators Need New Approaches to Make Data Profitable
Editor Ian Mansfield covered a recent Ovum report, Making a Profit from Mobile Broadband Data, which looks at why mobile network operators (MNOs) need to find a smarter approach for managing their networks and charging for data usage.  The report explains that MNOs need to use customer data held in the BSS with policy management and controls in order to manage soaring traffic loads, drive profits, personalise the customer experience and increase their agility and response times.  Clare McCarthy, the author of the report, noted that, “some MNOs have already adopted plans with options such as discounted evening and weekend use or monthly data caps.  However, this approach doesn’t go far enough and only addresses one part of the equation.  It doesn’t maximise revenue potential with high-value customers.”

This is a similar point Bob Machin raised after attending Informa’s Broadband Traffic Management event back in November—the industry has been steadily moving from Policy Control 1.0 to Policy Control 2.0, with the first wave dominated by the need to control (and indeed deter) the use of data services, and the second taking a much more liberal approach which encourages data usage, but aims to flatten out peaks and troughs in demand, spreading usage more evenly across networks, geographies and time spans to allow a much better return.

TM Forum: Revenue Management Community…
Minutes, Seconds – Who’s Counting?
Tony Poulos, BSS strategist and evangelist for TM Forum, blogged on Telstra’s recent move from 30-second billing blocks to one-minute billing blocks.  While the communications service provider (CSP) says this move will bring the company in line with industry standards (and analysts have noted that Telstra will reap tens of millions in revenue from the change), consumer groups are unsurprisingly opposed. They are saying that it will make phone calls more expensive, and that the industry could easily charge in smaller time blocks.  As Tony points out, CSPs generally aspire to one-second billing, and this was pretty much the world standard. From a BSS/OSS perspective, this move is certainly a surprise, as more CSPs are looking to charge in real time and offer more advanced and flexible pricing models to optimise subscribers’ experiences.  What are your thoughts on Telstra’s move?

Light Reading…
Many India Lines Inactive, Finds Regulator
India editor Gagandeep Kaur reported on recent data from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India and Visitor Location Register, which found that 222.52 million lines (nearly 29%) of the total mobile phone lines (771.18 million) are inactive.  There are a lot of pre-paid numbers that have been activated but used only for a certain amount of time; users likely activate new numbers either with the same CSP or a rival.  In January 2011, Bharti Airtel added 3.3 million new mobile lines to reach a total of 155.8 million—giving the CSP a 20.2 percent share of the mobile market; while Reliance added 3.2 million to reach a total of 128.9 million—giving it a 16.7 percent market share.  The only operator that recorded a reduction from its subscriber base was Videocon Telecommunications; this is believed to be the result of subscriber churn following the introduction of mobile number portability, which was introduced earlier this year.  It will be interesting to see how these figures shape out throughout 2011, particularly because SIM management will play a larger role in CSPs’ OSSs and as India’s wireless subscriber base continues to grow.

Around the World

TM Forum Online Community…
Caps Off To Aussie ‘App Cap’ Initiative
A TM Forum online community member contributed a blog post on a recent interview with Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association (AMTA) chief executive Chris Althaus. Althaus believes that Australian mobile users need to step back, monitor their data usage on smartphones and manage their spending to avoid ‘bill shock’. A recent paper from the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) found that 57% of mobile cap users did not monitor their expenditure between bills; 33% of users said they “cannot be bothered” in monitoring their spending, 19% said they did not exceed their cap, and 26% had “low usage”. Communications service providers (CSPs) need to step in and provide its end-users with services to better manage their plans. Check out our last “Around the World” post for Tony Poulos’ thoughts on this topic. The AMTA also put together some helpful tips for Australian mobile users to ensure that they follow the actions Althaus mentioned.

Connected Planet…
How To Meet Massive Demand For Mobile Data
Dan Warren, director of technology at the GSMA, contributed an interesting article to Connected Planet. Looking at the demand for mobile services and how service providers need to handle this influx, Warren offers readers two suggestions—update old configurations and make apps more frugal. While the demand for data services certainly presents mobile networks with challenges, he suggests that operators “can and will adapt”. He also leaves us with some food for thought—“rather than being seen as a harbinger of doom, the rapidly rising demand for mobile multimedia should be celebrated as the dawn of an exciting new age for the cellular industry”—which we couldn’t agree anymore with.

Voice and Data…
What Enterprises Want from 3G, WiMAX and TD-LTE
Beryl M. of Voice and Data reports that, in the next twelve to eighteen months, enterprises in India will have the option to pick up 3G, WiMAX and TD-LTE (4G)-driven broadband connectivity and other enterprise mobility solutions. This is the first time that three competing and complimenting technologies will land in the Indian telecom market at about the same time. The article continues by examining the opportunities and challenges each of these technologies will present and explaining enterprises concerns about them. Are there any other opportunities and challenges that were not discussed in this article? Share them with us.