Comptel’s Grand Finale for 2014

Posted: January 5th, 2015 | Author: Leila Heijola | Filed under: News | Tags: , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

The year 2014 ended very positively for Comptel. The team’s hard work was recognised in the form of several significant orders announced around the year’s end.

With the Telefonica de Chile deal, announced on 29 December, Comptel entered a new market in South America. Comptel’s fulfillment suite is a part of the Telefonica de Chile quad-play transformation project that will enable improved customer experience for integrated wireline, wireless, Internet and TV services.

On the same day, we also received a significant order from an existing customer in the Middle East region. The order value exceeded 1 million euros and comprises Comptel Convergent Mediation and Comptel Provisioning and Activation software licenses.

Ten days earlier, on December 19, we announced two other customer wins. One was a multi-year deal, with a value of 10.6 million euros, that involved a license upgrade and service extension for a mobile operator customer in India.

“Comptel has achieved a considerable degree of success in the Indian telecom market in recent years. The number of telecom subscribers served by Comptel’s operator customers in India has now exceeded 500 million, which is approximately 60% of the total size of the Indian telecom market,” said Juhani Hintikka, president and CEO, Comptel.

The second major order we received was from a German customer belonging to a major operator group. This multi-year deal also includes Comptel Convergent Mediation and Comptel Provisioning and Activation software licenses and related services. The deal value exceeded 1 million euros.


Season’s Greetings from Comptel

Posted: December 18th, 2014 | Author: Leila Heijola | Filed under: Behind the Scenes | Tags: , , | No Comments »

It’s hard to believe that 2014 is just about to come to a close! Like we’ve discussed in Decembers past, Comptel sends season’s greetings cards electronically and donates the money saved from the traditional, printed cards to a charitable fund.

Last year, Comptel selected UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, to support victims of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. In 2012, we started a project with Kiva, an organisation focused on connecting people through financial lending to empower entrepreneurs. Our contribution to this non-profit has since generated 38 loans in 24 countries.

In 2011, we donated to Plan International, one of the oldest and largest children’s development organisations in the world, which works to promote child rights and bring millions out of poverty. And, our donation for 2010 went to the Kileva Foundation, which helped pay for the building of a Kileva Eastfield Primary School classroom.

Drum roll for this year’s chosen charity…which is Right to Play! While food, water and shelter are essential, so is a childhood, complete with education and opportunities to actively engage with other children. There are areas of the world today where children are not able to experience the benefits of play – and Right to Play aims to tackle this problem.

Right to Play uses the power of play to educate and empower children to be guardians of their own health and active participants in their communities. The organisation’s programs create positive experiences and teach important life skills that help children adopt and maintain lifelong healthy behaviours and attitudes.

There is more to come in our work with Right to Play – stay tuned! But, in the meantime, we wish you, all of our customers, partners, investors and friends, a peaceful and happy holiday season and look forward to another fruitful and cooperative year in 2015.


A Recap of LOOP APAC14

Posted: November 21st, 2014 | Author: Leila Heijola | Filed under: Events | Tags: , , , , , , | No Comments »

Last week at LOOP APAC14,  communications service providers came together to discuss the future of the telecommunications industry and how new tools and developments can help spur innovation and disruption. The team at Comptel – along with representatives from Salesforce.com, Tech Mahindra and GE Smallworld, offered insights into what CSPs can expect next year and how new kinds of technologies will help revolutionise networks and customer experience.

We put together a collection of tweets to help show the highlights of the conference:


A New Era for Big Data: Accessibility, Integration and Analytics at IBM Business Connect

Posted: October 30th, 2014 | Author: Leila Heijola | Filed under: Events | Tags: , , | No Comments »

On October 15, Comptel’s team attended IBM Business Connect, an annual event held in Helsinki at the monumental Finlandia Hall. According to IBM, it’s one of the biggest ICT events in Finland, with 1,700 attendees from a diverse number of businesses and industries.

A year ago, many presentations at the conference emphasized the importance of Big Data. This year, the messaging shifted to focus on business models utilising predictive analytics. Here is a recap of the main things we took away from the event.

1. Analytics are valuable, but often inaccessible.

Even if analytics are everywhere, leveraging their full business value can still be a challenge. Organisations face obstacles around data integration and data preparation, in particular, and this seems to prohibit some companies from using Big Data analytics at all. Therefore, to leverage big data, an efficient data integration and refinery layer is required to be able to utilise every bit of crude data to fuel the business.

It’s also important not to forget that when analytics become a natural part of business processes and decision-making, there will be a growing need for intelligent and interactive reporting and dashboards. Analytics cannot be a privilege of data scientists only; the benefits of Big Data analysis should reach much further throughout organisations.

2. Data enhances the customer journey.

Analysing and modelling customers’ buying journeys will result in new competitive advantages. B2C and B2B companies alike should look to leverage the intelligence that predictive analytics and machine-learning capabilities offer. It can help businesses better understand individual customers and their context and preferred content and unique value, enabling the delivery of ‘moments of truth.’ This means taking the right approach or offering the right product at the right time, with the right content and in the right way to optimise their experience. Ideally, this should be done across and along a customer’s entire journey.

According to the presenters, more than half (54 percent) of CEOs in leading organisations want to focus on improving the customer experience by changing interactions from mass messaging to market segments to 1:1 relationships. Vanson Bourne research found that 90 percent of customers are interested in a more personal relationship with communications service providers. But to do this, there needs to be real structural changes within the business.

3. Proactive should replace reactive.

Before access to real-time, predictive analytics, business opportunities and strategies were largely based on reporting and business intelligence. Business units would comb through the results of previous campaigns and base future campaigns on those results.

Companies need to shift from this reactive, report-driven approach to a predictive, data-driven one, using a solution that can automatically make changes in the business depending on operational data or customer trends by matching customer’s context and content. Predictive analytics can empower every aspect of the business, from product manufacturing to infrastructure and operations to sales and marketing.

In order to create data that can be used to revolutionise a customer’s experience, the information first has to be cleansed and processed with analytics tools.

The Data of Being Human

Aside from the business presentations, we also enjoyed hearing the keynote speeches. The most inspiring speech was given by Pekka Hyysalo, founder of the Fight Back movement. Hyysalo had just graduated from the Ruka Alpine School, and he was ready to conquer the world of freestyle skiing. When filming a freestyle movie in Ylläs in challenging weather conditions, however, the last jump ended badly.

He spent almost three weeks in a coma and suffered a severe head injury. His medical evaluation gave very little hope for asuccessful recovery, but Hyysalo proved the doctors wrong. With a great attitude, unbeatable willpower and an incredible sense of humour, he learned to walk and talk again. Now, he’s sharing his story and fighting back step-by-step.

We hope to see him accomplish the ultimate feat: run a marathon. The marathon project started this autumn when the first Fight Back run was organised in Turku. The distance was 2.5 kilometres, and next year, the length will be doubled to five kilometres. Incrementally, Hyysalo plans to build up the distance and run a full marathon in 2018.

The day ended in a fireworks of minds (“Älytulitus”) with prominent public figures discussing their dreams and how they would like to see more intelligence in our everyday lives, from human-integrated identity chips (for convenience of shopping or travelling, for example) to intelligence in the kitchen (to reduce the amount of food wasted) to interesting thoughts of how to generate real-time awareness of our health.

While some of these may never come true, the future is ours to make, and we invite all to share in the spirit of open collaboration to accomplish our dreams and making the future brighter together, one step at a time.

Want to learn more about how Big Data can be integrated and accessible? Learn about Comptel EventLink 7.0 below:

Download


What Exactly Happened at Mobile World Congress Last Week?

Posted: March 4th, 2014 | Author: Leila Heijola | Filed under: Events | Tags: , , , | 1 Comment »

Mobile World Congress 2014 broke all the records of the previous year. With more than 85,000 visitors and 1,800 exhibiting companies in Barcelona, the event saw quite a bit of fanfare. Comptel was at MWC all week and we enjoyed being right in the middle of the action.

From Big Data to smartphones, connected cars to connected refrigerators, Mobile World Congress 2014 showed us a glimpse of what we can expect this year… and next year and the year after that. As a final recap, we decided to comb Twitter and see what topics had caused the most excitement.


Want to learn more about telco in 2014? Download our new eBook, “What Telco CMOs and CTOs/CIOs Are Thinking in 2014.”

In this eBook, we share exclusive, global executive research that highlights:

- Executive strategies for 2014

- Barriers to integration

- Technology priorities

- Attitudes toward data & planning

Download


How Telcos Can Benefit From Big Data Analytics

Posted: January 17th, 2014 | Author: Leila Heijola | Filed under: Telecom Trends | Tags: , , , , | No Comments »

Big Data has been, and continues to be, one of the buzziest terms in the tech world. Big Data analytics are essential for separating important customer and business information from the rest of the data. The contextual intelligence gleaned from Big Data analytics can, and should be, an important consideration for any business decision CSPs may make.

By examining customers’ social behaviours, such as call detail records (CDRs), how frequently they place calls outside of their networks, etc. CSPs can develop targeted, relevant marketing campaigns that simultaneously reduce the likelihood of churn and create new business opportunities. Of course, this is only one example of how Big Data is reshaping the way CSPs, and other companies for that matter, do business. Just take a look at what people in the Twittersphere are saying about Big Data’s future.

Comptel has pulled together some recent developments for Big Data analytics below. Enjoy!


Season’s Greetings from Comptel!

Posted: December 16th, 2013 | Author: Leila Heijola | Filed under: Events | Tags: , , , | No Comments »

As 2013 comes to a close, it’s always good to take some time to reflect on everything that has happened this year. At Comptel, we’ve been very busy. During the first six months of 2013, we attended Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and Management World in Nice. We hosted our first regional Focus Group meeting in Bangkok for our customers in the Asia-Pacific region, and travelled with Finpro around the world to locations such as Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand.

For the past few years, Comptel has been sending season’s greetings cards electronically and donating the money saved from the traditional, printed cards to a charitable fund. This year, Comptel has selected UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, to support victims of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines.

Last year, we started a project with Kiva, a non-profit organisation with a mission to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty. Our contribution to date has generated 23 loans in 17 countries. In 2011, our focus was on Plan International, one of the oldest and largest children’s development organisations in the world, which works to promote child rights and bring millions out of poverty. And, our donation for 2010 went to the Kileva Foundation. Since being established, the Kileva Foundation has seeded a plantation, and constructed a school and a medical dispensary. Our donation went toward the Kileva Eastfield Primary School to assist the building of a fifth classroom.

Now is also the time to look ahead for 2014! We’re already hitting full speed for Mobile World Congress, and during the first quarter, we’ll host a Focus Group event for Comptel’s customers in EMEA and CALA in Finland. It’s bound to be another action-packed year, and we’re excited to get things going.

From all of us at Comptel, we wish you a happy holiday!


Comptel Visits Australia and New Zealand with Finpro

Posted: December 9th, 2013 | Author: Leila Heijola | Filed under: Events, News | Tags: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

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.

View from IBM Sydney office towards the Harbour Bridge

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.


5 Mobile Trends for Telcos to Watch in 2014

Posted: November 27th, 2013 | Author: Leila Heijola | Filed under: Around the World | Tags: , , , , , | No Comments »

The changes for the telco industry will continue into 2014.

It’s the time of year when businesses in every industry are starting to think about what lies ahead. For the telecommunications industry, the past few years have been rocked by change in both consumer habits and technology… and 2014 looks like it won’t be any different.

From debates about national regulations to the increasing influence of OTT providers on the mobile landscape, next year is sure to be a decisive one for many communications service providers. That’s why Comptel decided to take a look at some of the most important developments for telcos and put them together on one page.

Here are five mobile trends for telcos to watch in 2014:

Want to learn more about what’s on the minds of telecommunications providers? Download our full Comptel User Group APAC Survey findings about Big Data, fulfillment and more.
Download the Full Survey


Comptel Travels to Saudi Arabia on Latest Finpro Visit

Posted: November 14th, 2013 | Author: Leila Heijola | Filed under: Around the World, Events | Tags: , , , , | No Comments »

Last week, Comptel accompanied Finpro on a trip to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. CEO Juhani Hintikka and country director Teo-Tuomas Hirvonen took part in the delegation, which was again led by Minister of Economic Affairs Jan Vapaavuori and consisted of executives and employees from 17 other Finnish companies. The trip included meetings with government officials and business sessions related to not just information and communications technology (ICT) but also education, energy efficiency and medical care.

Comptel has joined a number of Finpro trips in recent months; most recently, our team travelled to Indonesia. We welcomed the opportunity to participate in this particular delegation, as we already have a strong presence in Saudi Arabia. Comptel has built long-term business relationships with several communications service providers (CSPs) – including market leader Saudi Telecom Company (STC).

Comptel had many interesting discussions about the future of the industry during our business meetings. The country’s population of nearly 30 million has an extremely high mobile penetration of 176 percent, and about 60 to 70 percent are under the age of 30. That’s opened up significant service innovation and revenue opportunities for Saudi CSPs – but it’s come with its fair share of challenges, too. As the mobile market continues to mature, and as demand for connectivity continues to increase, operators must look to improve its approaches to customer experience and service quality management in order to effectively differentiate from competitors and grow their businesses. According the Saudi Arabian Communications and Information Technology Commission, the substantial growth potential is in the increased demand for broadband services, especially for the fibre-optic network (FTTx) services.

Comptel was glad to have the opportunity to visit Saudi Arabia with Finpro – and looks forward to embarking on future trips to further build our relationships with CSPs and their local economies.