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.

Analytics Everywhere: A Recap of IBM’s Smarter Business 2013

This post was written by Malla Poikela, senior product marketing manager and Leila Heijola, channel marketing manager

We recently went to IBM’s Smarter Business event, which took place on 10 October at Finlandia Hall. We learned more about the increasingly important role Big Data and analytics will play in the coming years for businesses. That’s a topic dear to our own hearts, too, as Comptel works hard to help communications service providers (CSPs) leverage all of the information at their fingertips, turn it into contextual intelligence, and improve their business decision-making and performance.

What did we learn at the IBM event? The highlights of the key notes included:

• 90% of data was created in the last two years
• 86% of leading organisations say customer experience is the top priority
• 81% of customers depend on social sites in their purchasing decisions
• 72% of business leaders say that cloud is important

In particular, Big Data driven by smartphones, devices/sensors and social media, and insights, predictive analytics, mobility, cloud and the customer experience played a central role in the event. We would like to share the key takeaways from the variety of customer, partner and IBM presentations and live product demos.

Analytics for All

The central theme of IBM’s Smarter Business 2013 was how Big Data offers a totally new spectrum of innovative ideas and opportunities. Analytics is at the core of every data effort, a pervasive answer for almost “all” business problems. The three major trends we identified at the event were:

1. Big Data will make a “segment of one” a reality. Part of optimising Big Data analytics is about achieving a new level of personalised marketing. Let’s call it “segment of one.” As the number of customer touch points continues to increase, the intelligence from each touch point can help master customer interactions across different channels.

In turn, this will allow marketers an extremely granular view of customer needs, allowing for true individualisation and customisation of solutions and interactions/engagement.

2. Visualisation. Advanced visualisation tools and dashboards for business intelligence and predictive analytics, also known as the “face” of analysis and insights, will help democratise data across an organisation. Where reams of numbers and solid data only legible to IT were once the norm, newer tools offer easy and intuitive interfaces that make data accessible to more stakeholders than before.

This will usher in new perspectives on how to leverage data accordingly, because everyone from the CMO and CIO/CTO to the sales team will be able to get involved.

3. Process Optimisation. With powerful analytics tools that can span different departments, businesses will be able to better gauge efficiencies and effectiveness. That will allow for a deeper understanding of essential business parameters, challenges and anomalies. By providing a comprehensive and holistic view of customers, business and technologies, an analytics dashboard will allow companies to create a clearer picture of what should be done in development, marketing, system optimisation and more.

The Needs of the Future

Maybe the best way to demystify predictive analytics is by presenting the business results that have been achieved with it. At IBM’s Smarter Business 2013, those results were described as “astronomical,” as the proper application of predictive analytics can significantly reduce churn and improve campaign success rates by exponential degrees. As the democratisation of data and devices continues, we can only expect to hear more of the same.

This was a very insightful and well organized event. We gained plenty of valuable information and are looking forward to visit IBM Smarter Business again next year.

Comptel Wins IBM Beacon Award for Best Communications Industry Solution

This week has truly been one to remember in Comptel’s history. We not only launched a new brand in time for Mobile World Congress 2012 but also won an IBM Beacon Award!

Comptel’s convergent mediation solution was honoured as the Best Communications Industry Solution yesterday at a ceremony held during the IBM PartnerWorld Leadership Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. Comptel’s vice president of North America, Brad Niven, picked up the crystal trophy for us, and we are eagerly awaiting its arrival to our Helsinki headquarters. Along with the IBM Beacon Awards, the IBM PartnerWorld Leadership Conference offers insights on business analytics and growth markets to help our customers, communications service providers, succeed.

IBM and Comptel have a long-standing partnership—we have won several customers together where Comptel Convergent Mediation has played an important role. One good example is Movistar Argentina, which was announced last year; Comptel and IBM jointly helped the operator to not only collect and transform more than 400 million network transactions daily into billable records, but also efficiently and effectively deliver and charge for advanced mobile services. This proof point and others were evaluated by leading industry influencers and IBM executives to win us this award.

We are delighted to have stood out among the hundreds of nominations for the IBM Beacon Awards and hope to continue our fruitful cooperation with IBM in 2012 and beyond.

Reflections from the IBM Business Partner Forum

IBM is a long-standing partner of Comptel, and last week, I attended the IBM Business Partner Forum in sunny Cote d’Azur (while my peers were attending Management World 2011 in not-so-sunny Dublin).

There was still plenty of evidence of the film festival from the week before, e.g. tents, other temporary buildings, billboards, etc. Unfortunately, the red carpets had been rolled up, and the film stars had already left town, so I had to instead spend my time in Cannes with IBM and its partners. That said, I had numerous fruitful discussions with IT professionals from various industries (including finance, pharmaceutical, etc.).

During the first day, there were a number of really interesting presentations about IBM’s future visions and views on  industry trends. Most of the presentations touched on the subject of business analytics and how companies should anticipate customer needs by analysing data in real time instead of looking back to reports, thus ensuring a great customer experience.

Having said that, the event also looked back to IBM’s 100 years; the history was really inspiring and put many things into a new perspective. IBM has been a pioneer in many fields, and it shared some proof points on the following day.

More surprises were to come on day 2 when we visited the IBM Innovation Center in La Gaude. The first was being introduced to “Watson”, a recent star of U.S. TV-show “Jeopardy”. “Watson” is actually a computing system designed and built by IBM, and it rivals a human’s ability to answer questions posed in natural language with speed, accuracy and confidence. The same technology that powers Watson could soon power many useful solutions in healthcare, finance and telecoms.

After more talks about the importance of business intelligence, smart metering and smart cities, we got a hint of what really intelligent retailing might look like. In La Gaude, IBM staff demonstrated a display screen for shops that can detect which market segment you belong to and fit the marketing messaging according to it!

We look forward to having IBM as the gold sponsor of the Comptel User Group, which will be held in Espoo, Finland from 14 – 16 June.