Mounir Ladki, CTO of MYCOM shares with Telecom Review the company's focus for 2014.

First, what can you tell us about MYCOM's focus for 2014?

We will continue to build on the strong momentum we enjoyed in 2013, and will be aiming for double digit growth of the business as we did last year. In terms of product and solution innovation, we will continue to focus 100 percent on service and network performance management of converged (fixed/mobile/IP) networks, the only company to do so, and target massive scalability with the management of heterogeneous networks of more than one million cells in a single NIMS-PrOptima system. We will also continue our transition to big data architecture on commoditized hardware, and using our REST APIs to expose valuable network intelligence to application developers, customer care and various business partners of the communication service providers.

In addition, we will be launching further initiatives around intelligent automation of network operations and optimization, machine-to-machine (M2M) and network function virtualization (NFV). All these innovations aim to support our major focus of supporting our customers as they strive to increase their operational efficiency and to differentiate through superior quality of experience.

Today, CEM is key for operators. How can MYCOM assist operators get a clear view of performance and quality of service in their network in near real time?

The best way of managing customer experience is to avoid the customer impacting problems from happening in the first place. This means moving from reactive consumer/VIP monitoring and customer care handling, to a proactive and predictive approach that also identifies service and network performance degradations and trends so as to avoid customer impacting issues. In addition, our solution enables direct drill-down from the customer experience impacting problems to the underlying offending network domain and provides advanced telco-specific root cause analysis capabilities to rapidly fix the issue and minimize the impact on the end customer.

In 2013, MYCOM was active in the LTE field. What about your activities in this area?

Over the last year, we have helped many of our customers rollout LTE technology on their networks such as T-Mobile that we announced last year. One activity was to help customers with the end-to-end management of LTE quality of service through our cross domain analysis capabilities that enable instantaneous navigation from the radio domain to the IP backhaul and into the core to rapidly identify issues. Also, given the high CAPEX required for LTE rollout, many of our customers entered into network sharing agreements and used our solution to govern and manage the performance and QoS of the shared network.

Finally, LTE adds another layer on 3G that many operators are complementing with WiFi and small cells. This is creating more complex multi-layered heterogeneous networks, or HetNets, and we are providing expert capabilities to help optimize these HetNets in areas such as traffic off-load and balancing.

In Q4, 2013 MYCOM released its NIMS-PrOptima 4.1 version. What are the added values of this new version?

The latest version of NIMS-PrOptima enhanced cross-domain capabilities for delivering unified network performance management across heterogeneous networks. NIMS-PrOptima 4.1 builds on the major NIMS-PrOptima 4.0 release announced in May 2013 which delivered high performance and scalability for big network data analytics with over 10 billion data records processed per hour, near real-time visibility down to five minute intervals and 400,000 network elements managed on a single system instance.

NIMS-PrOptima 4.1 added network-wide composite KPIs, reports and dashboards across multiple domains and also custom-defined virtual multi-domain network areas all so that CSPs have improved capabilities to support customer- and service-oriented initiatives, proactively identify network quality degradation, perform faster root cause analysis (RCA) and reduce mean time to repair (MTTR).

What makes MYCOM the leading in customer experience enabling solutions?

I think it is summed up by the reasons why we won this award category at the Telecom Review Summit last December: our NIMS-PrOptima platform enables CSPs to deliver a better customer experience by providing unified access, intelligence and analysis of the CSP's entire network end-to-end.

This was proven in successful projects including: providing near real-time, network-wide performance intelligence within one of the world's largest service operations centers at Vodafone India supporting 150M subscribers; creating one of the first methods of quantifying customer experience metrics to connect customer- and service-centric processes directly to the network in TM Forum's Catalyst proof of concept sponsored by Telefonica; and reducing network degradation impacts and costs via intelligent automation of NOC processes such as automatic cell outage alleviation within a major MSP.

Finally, NIMS-PrOptima was ranked the leading position in a unified network performance management vendor comparison by industry analyst, Analysys Mason.

What are your future plans?

I would mention two strategic areas where we want to further help our customers to create value and generate additional revenue streams. First, we believe that quality of service remains a strategic asset that CSPs should monetize by offering different QoS levels with tiered pricing to enterprise customers and subscribers and also content provider partners, and we are evolving our solutions to enable CSPs to commit to certain QoS levels and monetize it.

Second, we believe that our industry will profoundly change with the advent of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications and provide fantastic opportunities for CSPs to offer new value added services and generate incremental revenue streams. In this context, we want to be the partner of choice that helps CSPs not only optimize their networks for M2M traffic and service level requirements, but also empower them with advanced service assurance, automation and analytics solutions to maximize opportunities, returns and competitive positioning in M2M.

© Telecom Review 2014