In an exclusive interview during the 17th edition of the Telecom Review Leaders’ Summit, Mounir Ladki, President and CTO, MYCOM OSI, shared his perspectives on cultivating an environment of innovation, enhancing customer relations, and ensuring clarity in operational vision.
How is MYCOM OSI helping CSPs harness their network data to build new revenue streams?
Operators today own and operate massive amounts of data that they are not monetizing. The data they collect on the network covers areas such as location, traffic congestions, devices, quality of service and so on. This data can be monetized by sharing it with other parties, such as financial institutions, developers and governments, among others.
MYCOM OSI is gathering billions of diverse data points through our cloud platform, transforming them into curated normalized datasets, and making them accessible via open APIs, Kafka buses, etc. This empowers operators to either integrate them into their data lakes or share them with third parties through APIs for monetization. We have come across studies forecasting the network API, particularly the network performance and Quality of Service API, to have a value exceeding USD 20 billion in the next five years. It represents a substantial untapped opportunity that we are assisting our customers in harnessing.
What are the top two challenges that service providers need Artificial Intelligence for? How does your latest offering, AInsights, help service providers to overcome these challenges?
CSPs want to delight their customers with differentiated digital experiences, and at the same time, increase their revenue streams and build new revenue streams. Additionally, they want to become far more automated and operationally efficient and reduce their operational expenditures. These, I would say, are the two key challenges they are facing today.
Our cloud-native platform and new application, AInsights, harness the latest technologies in AI, ML and future generative capabilities, allowing it to predict network outages, network usage and traffic, Quality of Service and many other parameters that enable it to act in advance. By doing so, it is able to delight its customers efficiently and save on operational expenses. In the future, AInsights will evolve to become a full closed-loop automation solution for not only predicting and correlating data, but also automatically remediating the network. So, it becomes like a brain of the future autonomous network.
How can service providers benefit, operationally and commercially, from MYCOM OSI’s AInsights?
Operationally, they can benefit by becoming far more proactive and predictive in the way they operate, as opposed to the reactive way that prevails today. At the same time, they become far more automated because they harness the power of AI to replace a lot of the manual or semi-manual operations and processing that is happening in the network today.
Commercially, the potential is immense. We have measured up to a 90% reduction in the time taken to detect, identify, and address critical network and quality of service issues. We have recognized a 40% reduction in overall operational expenditure (OpEx) in specific areas of the Service Operation Center. In terms of deployment costs, when comparing the AInsights solution with internal development by some operators, we can observe a reduction of up to 70% in the time required for rollout and operation of these systems.
MYCOM OSI has established itself as an innovator in Operational Support Systems. Could you share your organizational and innovation strategies with us?
Innovation has always been in our DNA. As a company, we have always used innovation as a way to differentiate in the market, win market share and even replace some of the bigger players in the market, and that is how we are known in the market.
To achieve this position, some of the key ingredients involved creating an internal environment that fosters experimentation, allows for failure, encourages learning, and facilitates progress. We give them a lot of freedom to experiment and innovate. When you empower your people in this way, and you give them a safe environment, the results can be amazing.
Secondly, our relationship with customers is more of a partnership; characterized by co-innovation and co-development, and that co-creation fosters a lot of innovation and new ideas.
Finally, we need to have clarity regarding the vision and the areas of operation. For us, the focus has consistently been on cloud, SaaS, and AI, with an emphasis on delivering value on top of the 5G networks. When you have that clarity, an organizational environment that fosters innovation and a partnership with your customers, you can definitely do wonders.
