insights from astellia's successful middle east customer convention

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stellia’s commitmentTo further strengthen its partnerships with mobile operators in the Middle East, Astellia recently

held its fifth annual Customer Convention in Dubai. French-based Astellia has an international presence as one of the leading providers of network and subscriber intelligence, enabling mobile operators to drive customer experience and business performance.

Abdelkrim Benamar, CEO at Astellia, spoke about Astellia’s commitment to its partners in the Middle East: “We value our long-standing relationships. This market is very dynamic, innovative and important to Astellia. Our ambition is to help you monetize your data goldmine by providing a 360° view of the customer through service & network analytics.”

Mr. Benamar continued: “We will leverage our unique expertise in radio optimization to help you deliver high-quality services to your

subscribers and support the launch of new network technologies like 4G and 5G.” He concluded by underlining the importance of Astellia’s values of customer satisfaction, excellence and innovation as the guiding principles of their daily actions.

Surge in data trafficMr. Ali Wansa, managing director of Astellia Middle East, highlighted the importance of the Middle East telecom market and shared how the MENA economy is driven by smartphone and mobile broadband

Under the main theme of ‘Driving the mobile transformation’ Astellia recently shared its ambitions and developments for the Middle East market with key executives from Alfa, Etisalat, Korek, MTN, Orange, STC, Touch, Umniah, Vodafone and Zain.

Insights from Astellia’s successful 2016 Middle East Customer Convention

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adoption. Smartphone adoption in the region no less than doubled over the last 5 years and mobile broadband is following this same trend thanks to the strong uptake of video streaming and social media.

Subscribers’ appetite for data hungry applications and services is further being amplified by the move from 3G to 4G. This creates challenges for mobile operators in terms of absorbing the exponential surge in data traffic, figuring out who the heaviest data drivers are, and understanding service usage in order to better segment their customer base.

As a response to operators’ needs for more flexible, scalable and future-proof monitoring solutions, Astellia launched Flex in March, an intelligent traffic-load balancer for flexible user plane monitoring and troubleshooting.

Mr. Thierry Jacq, Global Solution Marketing director, confirmed: “Today’s changing networks must support ever-increasing traffic volumes, higher speeds and more mobile apps. This massive data growth is outpacing operator’s ability to cost-effectively monitor it. Operators therefore need to adapt their data capture and processing strategies, all while controlling their monitoring CAPEX. ”

He added: “Astellia’s Flex intelligently balances traffic across different COTS probes to ensure monitoring scalability. In order to reduce UP monitoring costs and improve scalability, Flex can also filter UP traffic based on criteria like IMSI, APName, QCI, geographical areas, device and IP address while keeping full visibility on the entire data traffic.”

Subscriber and service insight based on Big Data“To improve the customer experience, you need to understand which factors have an impact on it. You therefore need to analyze and correlate an extensive amount of data coming from the network, CRM, billing, customer care, etc.” explained Mr. Wansa. “Astellia’s data scientists

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help operators develop value added use cases by leveraging unique information such as geo-location and service usage based on call data records from probes and call traces.”

To take full benefit of the data goldmine, Astellia’s solutions are migrating towards big data. Astellia is already feeding customers’ big data lake through injectors and developing big data use cases together with some customers.

Virtualization, the next big thingFor the last two years, Astellia has been working in the Network Architecture lab of the Institute of Research and Technology to address

current and future challenges of NFV/SDN, explained Mr. Jacq. “Through this cooperation, Astellia ensures the good integration of monitoring solutions in NFV/SDN networks,” he said. “In this context, Astellia has developed its first virtualized probe (vProbe) to feed an orchestrator which adjusts network according to SLA.”

Today, more than 80 percent of Astellia’s solutions are already provided as Virtual Machines. Probe processing, mediation and applications are now completely virtualized. Following the dynamic network evolution of NFV/SDN enabled networks, Mr. Jacq explained

that probes will have to go virtual as well as ensure E2E visibility of their hybrid network; probes will be deployed and instantiated as virtual resources.

In order to do so, Astellia has defined a phased approach to virtualization: this year, Astellia’s probes are evolving to software probes, able to run on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware or as a virtual appliance. As of next year, Astellia will propose a fully virtualized probe (vProbe) that can be dynamically instantiated in an OpenStack orchestrated environment. Gradually, Astellia’s vProbe will evolve and enable closed-loop orchestration. Mr. Jacq confirmed that as long as the entire network isn’t completely virtualized, a combination of both physical and vProbes will coexist to provide a true end-to-end network visibility.

Automated RAN optimizationAstellia’s DNA lies in RAN optimization. Mr Jacq explained during his presentation how networks are evolving into very complex multi-technology, heterogeneous environments (2G, 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi, etc.). He stressed that the automation of repetitive RAN optimization tasks is needed.

He stated: “It saves time and money, and it allows radio engineers to focus their optimization activities on more complex issues, on high-value customers and high-value locations like tourist attractions, shopping malls, business centres, roads, airports and high-speed railways. It helps operators move from network-centric to customer-centric optimization.”

Customer perspectivePamela Birungi, strategy & performance senior manager, Zain Group, opened up about the relationship between Zain and Astellia, which she defined as a “long and beneficial partnership.”

“We’ve gone from the tool being used just for network performance KPIs, to currently where we’re trying to understand and utilize the richness

within the data that Astellia extracts from the network to understand our customers better in terms of managing the customer experience and data usage,” she said.

“We’ve been working with Astellia for quite some time now, and they are clearly bringing value to our operations across the region,” Birungi added. “We are using Astellia data to understand our customers, how they use applications, when and in which areas. This is very useful information for us and allows us to provide the best possible customer experience to our markets.”

During the event, Telecom Review also caught up with Ali Darwish Ghuloom, network performance expert at Zain Bahrain, who shared his insights about the relationship between Astellia and Zain Bahrain, and how the company has benefitted from Astellia’s solutions.

“Our relationship started in 2009. It started with troubleshooting and network performance,” said Mr. Ghuloom, discussing Zain’s history with Astellia in the Kingdom. “At that time we were working with another provider. It was a major challenge to get internal support and decide to go with a new solution provider. Today we are very pleased that we bonded with Astellia. From Zain Bahrain’s side, I can confirm that Astellia is playing a key role in helping us enhance the customer experience. It’s a real partnership where we have both shared our experiences which helped us reach the level we are at now.”

Telecom Review gathered another customer perspective at Astellia’s Customer Convention from touch, one of the leading mobile operators in Lebanon. Haitham Shibli, service quality manager at touch, shared his insights: “Astellia is our partner for collecting network data. They deliver crucial information on the quality of experience of every subscriber and their data usage. This information is very valuable to us to identify if customers are encountering bad network quality, so that we can find out why this is happening, and

find a way to provide them a better experience.”

“Because customers are our livelihood, we are putting them at the center of every operation, be it technical, commercial, marketing or IT,” Mr. Shibli added. “Due to tough competition from other operators and OTTs, our main focus is on retaining customers and stimulating them to use our network. Astellia is our partner in this area and is helping us capture all aspects of the market to address customer issues.”

Speaking about why Astellia is valuable to touch’s operations, Mr. Shibli said: “Data is currently

the main area of usage for our customers. Data is increasing in our network, so without Astellia, we wouldn’t know what our customers are using. Astellia’s solution is helping us understand our customers’ usage, behavior and experience. We are modifying our network parameters to cope with customer needs based on Astellia’s measurements.”

Mr. Shibli concluded that he is closely working with Astellia to be able to respond to the rapid changes in the industry: “We need to ensure that we can provide the right intelligence and indicators to technical and non-technical teams in a timely manner.”