The continued growth of fixed-mobile convergence and new 4G platforms like Long Term Evolution will spawn lucrative new markets for the Irish technology firm Arantech, which was bought in April by electronics giant Tektronix.
Speaking with Siliconrepublic.com, David Sharpe, product manager in charge of Arantech’s flagship product Touch Point, explained that the increasing complexity of smart phones has resulted in many operators potentially missing out on revenue-generation opportunities.
Sharpe said that despite Arantech being acquired in April for an undisclosed sum by Tektronix, the company is data-source agnostic and operates as a standalone company separate from Tektronix.
He pointed out that when Arantech’s customer experience management (CEM) software first debuted 10 years ago, problems centred on basic calls and text messages.
However, today, because of the complexity of managing everything from multimedia messaging to social-network updates, managing customer expectations is getting more difficult for operators.
“We took a new look at this. The traditional data source problem would have been network equipment. Often networks are working 100pc perfectly, but the customer experience is different. A mere technicality like the wrong APN (access point node) provisioned in handset, means a user won’t be able to send an MMS.
“We estimate that 40pc of all MMS messages aren’t being sent for this reason, resulting in a massive shortfall in potential revenue for operators.”
What Arantech’s technology does
Arantech’s technology helps operators to discover the root cause of such problems and ensure customer experiences are at an optimum level.
“This is a big step forward for operators. The amount of revenue that is hidden that they don’t realise what’s missing is vitally important.
Sharpe said that today more than 35 mobile operators worldwide – including four of the big six global operators – are using Arantech’s technology.
“Open platform are the key message for this year, both in terms of being able to access web services over SOA (service oriented architecture) and adding value – spotting errors, anti-spam, choosing the ideal time of day to send messages and allows the user to customise how actions are handled,” Sharpe said.
“Services are definitely the future – everyone has voice sorted but with the advent of devices like the iPhone or the Android, operators have to keep a measure of which domains people are accessing, data volumes, what is the Skype experience like, how are bit torrents performing on a per-phone or per-customer basis, per APN. Our technology allows them to break all of this down and show what services users are consuming.”
“Going forward, we see ourselves moving into the fixed-line world because of increasing fixed-mobile convergence. Now everyone’s putting in more services to home down fixed line; expect fixed operators to have same need for CEM.”
By John Kennedy
