Accanto systems has come a long way from its roots as a provider of protocol analysers. its focus is now on helping service providers to overcome the challenges of offering mobile data and Voip services while also managing legacy technologies   

 EC: Can you provide some background on Accanto for our readers?Michele Campriani: Sure. Accanto as a business was formed in 1996, as a spin-off from Ascom Italy. Ascom had built some software dedicated to protocol analysis, and this was eventually turned into a stand-alone business and sold to Sunrise Telecom in 2000. I joined Sunrise in 2007 from Hewlett-Packard, where I headed up the OSS business. Having been involved with TM Forum and OSS for the longest time, I had a vision, also supported by Sunrise, that instead of having different, stand-alone protocol analysers sold to a customer, we would try to centralise the data collected by the analysers into a system that could be used for continuous monitoring. So from 2007, I started to transform this business from a low-level test and measurement business into a solution OSS/service assurance business. And I must say that it all worked very well. In mid-2008, Sunrise Telecom decided that they needed to focus on their core business around test and measurement, so at the end of 2008 we decided to spin off that division, and that is how Accanto was born, following the merger with an OSS consulting company in Finland in early 2009. We accelerated the plan of moving this technology into what we now call customer service assurance. And I must say that, again, we experienced an incredible growth in 2009 and we see that in 2010. That is, around 50%, 60% growth in terms of our service assurance business.
EC: So where is your business now mostly focused?

Michele Campriani: Mostly, our business nowadays is in Europe, and it is moving very rapidly also in Tier One companies. But of course we are expanding and internationalising our business. We are opening offices in the U.S., the Middle East and in Asia, and we’re already starting to experience some success there too. A lot of the success that we experienced recently is in the mobile space, and is due to the challenges that mobile operators are facing in managing mobile data services. And that, of course, has produced some success in Europe before anywhere else, but it is happening on a worldwide basis right now.

EC: So how much of your business is based on looking after the needs of mobile data services, and how much of it is other kinds of services?

Michele Campriani: It’s good that you asked me that, because we did an analysis of our business recently, trying to decide if mobile should be the only market that we should focus on. Monitoring mobile data and voice-over IP/IMS are the two biggest trends we are noticing right now, whereby VoIP is not necessarily always just offered by traditional fixed-line operators, but by the mobile guys that are trying to get into fixed line. So the key areas influencing our business and driving our growth are the mobile data explosion and the fact that VoIP is becoming a mainstream service, so the quality is becoming paramount and is definitely not necessarily there.

EC: So the traditional boundaries between fixed and mobile have long broken down and for some time now operators have been trying to get into new business areas and upgrade to IP and NGN, but at the same time they have to keep an eye on their legacy business. So how do you help them manage this transition?

Michele Campriani: I think that’s our clear differentiator. We started with the traditional SS7 technology, and since 1996 we have evolved along with our customers towards NGN. And now we have the capability to help them out in managing both worlds. Nobody has a complete all-over IP infrastructure yet, and yes, most of the issues nowadays are the handovers or the interaction of the old and the new.

EC: So how has your customer assurance model evolved to deal with these growing network challenges as operators move into the IP world and take on new services?

Michele Campriani: To me, the starting point was saying that traditional OSS systems have a very good capability to understand if the infrastructure is performing thanks to network elements that are telling you if there are issues in the network. But one thing that was always missing was the association of the infrastructure issues with the problems and the issues of the end user. That got even more de-coupled moving into IP. So you can say, I know everything about the network, but I don’t know if my customers are happy. Are they experiencing the services with the expected quality? So, the idea at the beginning for Accanto was to bring that visibility to the table, and complement the traditional OSS approach. Since we are collecting traffic information both from the signalling and the user plane side, we are able to give information on what kind of quality end users are experiencing when they are using the services. So the starting point was getting the actual user traffic and not necessarily looking at nodes or network elements, and then having the capability to transform the traffic data into quality monitoring information.

EC: You label your service as adaptive customer service assurance. Can you explain how that works?

Michele Campriani: We started to call it adaptive customer service assurance because we realised that you actually need to associate the customer perspective to the service and the resource perspective. So while at the beginning we were doing probably the other extreme of just looking at subscribers, we realised that we needed to add visibility of services and resources. At the end, the idea of being adaptive is to collect the raw data and give the ability to our customers to look at this data in so many different ways, depending on their needs. For example, a customer might need to know if a specific cell is having a problem, which is a resource issue. Or an operator’s most important enterprise business might be having problems, or there might be a specific service that has just launched and is having quality issues. So you can gain very different perspectives using the same data. Adaptiveness, if you will, is being able to collect the data from different sources, where it is fixed and mobile IP, legacy, or all the above and transform it in relevant quality information from different perspectives like end users, services or network resources.

EC: Given this broad overview of resource and customer issues that your platform provides, what are the key challenges and problems that operators are facing at present?

Michele Campriani: It’s that ongoing problem of trying to launch services based on new technologies in a competitive market and not being able to get enough revenue (or profit) from these services (being forced to offer flat-rate tariffs for example). Operators no longer have the luxury of being able to throw network capacity at a problem. So the major issue now is how can an operator deliver service at a good enough quality to ensure adoption, while not killing the business case by simply throwing hardware and network capacity at it? First of all, we help them to understand if they are delivering services with the right quality. And if they’re not, to understand what are the bottlenecks in their infrastructure, so that they can really optimise the network to deliver the biggest bandwidth that they can, without necessarily investing tons of money into it.

EC: Do you think you are providing a service that’s unique in the market, or do you see a lot of competition?

Michele Campriani: I think a lot of companies right now have realised what we are experiencing, and there is a lot of talk about customer experience management, and a customer-centric service assurance. Everybody is saying how it’s important to have this perspective of customers and their experience of quality of service on top of the traditional OSS approach. Where I think we are differentiating ourselves is that we already have quite a few proof points from customers that are really using our technology in that way.

And on the other side, our technology has been fit for this since day one. It’s a challenge to collect the amount of data that you need and achieve the performance and scalability that you need to get the information you want in a reasonable time frame. There are competitors of ours that are trying to transform their old approach into trying to do this, and I think they are facing some technology challenges there. So I think we are leading edge on this specific market niche, due to our technology and early focus.

EC: So what’s next then for Accanto?

Michele Campriani: For Accanto right now, we are just heads down, trying to make sure we deliver on the expectations as we are acquiring new customers quite rapidly, and we want to make sure that we don’t trip up. We have around 20 customers for our customer service assurance platform, and a total of 180 customers on a worldwide basis: we’re still selling protocol analysers all over the world. And that also has helped in getting our foot in the door at some operators. Our most successful markets are Germany, Austria, UK, Finland and Italy. We also have a good reference in Saudi Arabia, and we see room for growth in Asia and the U.S.

EC: In the longer term you must be hoping that the number of customer assurance references will outnumber your other customers?

Michele Campriani: Absolutely, I would love that. The amount of revenue that you get out of a CSA solution is ten times or 100 times sometimes what you get out of the protocol analyser. It’s going to take some time to get that number of customers for CSA, but that will make our business so much bigger than what we have today.