Gearing Up for AfricaCom in Cape Town

On 9 November, the 14^th annual AfricaCom event kicks off in Cape Town, with the organisers expecting a record attendance, which they are predicting to be 12.5% higher than last year.

While I’m sure that the scenery and activities of Cape Town draw attendees, it is also certainly a reflection of the silver lining that Africa is to the economic cloud that hangs over many developed markets. For anybody in the telecoms industry, relatively high subscriber growth and low mobile penetration create compelling reasons to be doing business in Africa.

But, of course, Africa also has its fair share of challenges, most of which boil down to one thing: how to ensure profitability in highly competitive, price sensitive and sparsely populated markets. Most of the focus so far has been on controlling costs to enable pricing competitiveness—lean operations being something that the Comptel Dynamic OSS portfolio supports very well.

But this is only half the equation against a backdrop of high churn in Africa. As is generally recognised, it is almost always more expensive to acquire new subscribers than to keep them. Ultimately, African telecoms are entering a new battle for the ‘hearts and minds’ of their subscribers in a quest to create a ‘stickiness’ for their hard won subscribers.

So it is encouraging to see that the tagline for AfricaCom this year, “Advancing Innovation & Profitability for a Digital Africa,” is recognising this key link between innovation and profitability.

Please do come and visit Comptel at Stand F5 at AfricaCom this week to discuss how we can help operators win the ‘hearts and minds’ of their customers through innovative OSS solutions.

Happy Birthday Comptel!

Today marks Comptel’s official 25^th birthday. This is quite an accomplishment in the OSS and broader telecoms market! As our head of corporate development, Simo Sääskilahti, said in a recent press release, it really is testament to Comptel’s close collaboration with customers and focus on developing long-term partnerships.

Yesterday, during his Comptel User Group welcome speech, CEO Juhani Hintikka highlighted some of the key milestones in our quarter-century history. Did you know that…?

• Comptel’s mediation solution supported the first GSM call in 1991.
• Today, we serve more than 280 communications service providers across 85 countries and reach more than one billion subscribers worldwide.
• The Comptel Dynamic OSS is behind 20 of the 30 largest mobile operators and processes approximately 20% of the world’s mobile CDRs.
• Comptel has delivered approximately 1300 projects since its start.
• About sixty percent of the company is located outside of our Helsinki, Finland headquarters. In fact, the office in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia is rapidly becoming one of our largest.
• Comptel User Group gold sponsor and partner IBM is also celebrating an important birthday today.

We’re proud to have helped so many operators empower their communications services, better serve their subscribers and drive their businesses forward. The customer case study presentations yesterday were great proof points of our collaborative efforts and successful deployments–the feedback and enthusiasm we’ve since had has been excellent. For those customers and partners in attendance at the Comptel User Group, we hoped you’ve enjoyed your time in Helsinki and celebrating our birthday with us.