HOT INTERVIEW
Sethu Meenakshisundaram
President -
SAP Mobile Services
Making complex things simple and simple things automatic
By Isabelle Paradis
President, HOT TELECOM
June 2015
SAP is at the center of today’s technology revolution. One of the market leaders in data and enterprise applications, it helps organizations fight the damaging effects of complexity, while generating new opportunities for innovation and growth. I met with Sethu Meenakshisundaram, President at SAP Mobile Services, and we spent some time discussing what makes SAP Mobile Services so successful, how it is planning to differentiate itself in an increasingly converging market and what the future holds for the telecom industry.
CREATIVE DISRUPTION
What products and solutions is SAP Mobile Services planning to launch in the next 18 months to differentiate itself from competition?
First of all, we are very excited about the opportunity that IPX brings and the innovation that it enables as we sit on the cross section of carriers, enterprise and services. The new opportunities and demand from enterprise and the technology expertise that we provide to connect ubiquitously B2B, B2C and B2E using modern software enabled communication will significantly enhance the experience of our customers. We are really excited about this new disruption and the opportunity it represents.
More specifically, in the coming year we will build on the success of supporting LTE roaming by enhancing our existing offering with services such as roaming steering and more advanced reporting to enable operators to get more out of LTE and build their roaming capabilities faster.
We also expect to see VoLTE and RCS interconnect taking off, and are ready to support this new wave of services.
Finally, we are aiming to bring all this to the enterprise side of the business, while supporting our customers with powerful analytics tools, which will make our offering unique compared with the competition
On the enterprise side, we foresee the incorporation of different corporate business processes through multiple telecommunication media such as voice, video, data and videoconferencing. Enterprises are screaming for new communication services that are integrated into their business processes and this is something that we see as a significant opportunity.
Through LTE’s transport over IPX we aim to support this evolution by providing enterprises with unified communication capabilities wherever they need it around the world, and by the same way, significantly improve enterprise agility. This is a huge value we can bring to enterprises.
We also see VoLTE as a big opportunity for us to disrupt the market. We have deployed VoLTE/RCS/IMS hubs and are planning to run these with live customers this year. We see this as a natural evolution of the IPX business for us. We are also planning to use the scale and quality capabilities we have over IPX to integrate all of these new services within enterprise applications.
We have the advantage of working from a blank sheet when it comes to the legacy business, especially in voice, so we will work closely with our customers to be as creative as the market will allow us to be.
SUCCEEDING THROUGHT SIMPLIFICATION
Our corporate strategy revolves around the notion of simplification. Our philosophy is the following: Make complex things simpler and simple things automatic. If we succeed in helping our customers integrate simple things in an automatic way into their business processes and show compelling propositions of business agility and business innovation, we will succeed in making their business thrive.
An example of this concept is our recent efforts to simplify enterprise and carrier connectivity and how we can rapidly connect them to the IPX platform and its services. We are therefore looking at how we bring both parties together as quickly as possible, and this is partly supported by the deeper analytics.
In addition, quality is becoming central to service providers’ business. We are therefore looking to support this simplification with KPIs, not only within the IPX, but also to the services that we run from our hosting centers. We are also working to establish KPIs with partners out to the far end operators, as many of the services that are being rolled out are only meaningful when they are supported by KPIs end-to-end.
The barrier to this up to now has been the lack of analytics to support it. Therefore, we believe that if we can bring that to the table, we will be ideally positioned to promote the concept of end-to-end KPIs as well as KPIs at the application layer.
Following on from there, KPIs from operators to IPX to service will be the next step and then ultimately device to device.
AIMING TO BECOME AND INNOVATION HUB
What are the key trends impacting the rapidly evolving telecom environment and how will SAP position itself to win?
I think one of the main trends is the consolidation of all voice and data services truly onto IP. That is only now starting to happen, but it has been a long time coming. But now with VoLTE, voice, LTE and signaling converging on IP we will see operators, wholesalers and hubs moving to simplify the way everybody connects and leveraging the fact that it is all on one technology. This enables much richer analytics and reporting to be built around it common to all of these services.
I think we will also see a consolidation of providers. There will be a few key global providers that operators use to interconnect and roam. The mobile groups will always have an important role to play but they struggle to be fast enough to be truly innovative and support operators outside of their group. There will therefore always be a need for key global players to connect everybody together and link the enterprise to this ecosystem.
Within this dynamic we will continue to sustain our leader position in the IPX, but will also leverage our unique advantage in the enterprise space to bring all of that together. But ultimately, our goal will be to become an innovation hub that makes high quality, integrated, enhanced communication simpler.
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About the Author:
Isabelle Paradis, President of HOT TELECOM is an international telecoms expert, with over 20 years working experience in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa.
HOT TELECOM has been serving global operators, governments, equipment vendors and telecom investors for over 13 years, providing leading edge market research and consulting services to industry leaders around the globe.
For more information on our HOT INTERVIEWS program, please contact Isabelle Paradis at: paradis@hottelecom.com or at +1 514 270 1636