Network Services company SmartCIC has spun off its network test and technology business into a new brand, known as Xvolv, and hired a new leader as Chief Technology and Innovation Office.
Xvolv is the re-brand and launch of SmartCIC Technologies, which provides network and performance test data and analytics to mobile operators and their enterprise customers. The company is also integrating the use of AI and machine learning into its offering, which drove the hiring of Paula Valverde, who has a background in data and AI, as well as in fostering telco innovation, notably stints with Vodafone Spain and with Telefonica in the UK and Spain.
A new brand a new technology and innovation leader: Xvolv’s Paula Valverde
Xvolv (SmartCIC Technologies) is a 60 person business that carries our drive and walk testing, with its core team based in Barcelona.
Toby Forman, CEO at SmartCIC Group, said that the intention is to grow the business by providing field and AI-driven insights that enable operators and enterprises to take advantage of 5G network capabilities.
He said that MNOs are not currently accessing and making data available that will unlock new business for them in enterprise sectors.
“We started to get questions about 18 months to two years ago about how our customers and our customers’ customers canuse 5G. We said to our [carrier] customers, ‘You have MNOs as part of your business, go talk to the MNO side of your business and surely you’ll get more information than we can.’ And the response back was they don’t have any information and nobody knows.
“So what we discovered is that MNOs are really struggling to monetise their investment in 5G. We decided to go out and provide some empirical evidence as to the performance of these next generation networks.”
Forman said that with operators either unable or unwilling to provide it with the information it needed, it decided to discover it for itself. First it built an app, an approach it abandoned because it wasn’t delivering the insight it was looking for. By moving to drive and walk testing, with a bank of devices connected to different carriers, it was able to control the location and timing of testing, and build up comparative information. Its platform was able to stress -test a network, not simply running a speed test, in Forman’s words. Every half second the proprietary system collects geo-located upload and download data as well as latency and RF information and metrics.
“So we’re collecting huge volumes of information and then we’re matching that against a number of metadata sources, across multiple operators at the same time.”
One of the first use cases that it was able to provide information for was Fixed Wireless Access, and it was out of that success that the Group span the technology part of the business out as the new Xvolv unit.
Forman said that compared to other companies in the network monitoring and test business that are doing drive testing, “the value that we are adding is that we’re looking at this from an enterprise perspective as well as a network perspective.”
That creates a “through the line” proposition to customers, looking at their networks and their competitor’s networks and rating them from an enterprise viewpoint.
MNOs mainly haven’t captured that market because they don’t have think they have information that will allow them to present a case to their enterprise customers. And I think the enterprise customers don’t necessarily believe the information that’s being presented.
MNOs still not getting enterprise business
Forman said that although MNOs currently make about 30% of revenues from enterprise customers, they have left a lot of potential growth on the table so far.
“We believe that MNOs mainly haven’t captured that market because they don’t have think they have information that will allow them to present a case to their enterprise customers. And I think the enterprise customers don’t necessarily believe the information that’s being presented. There’s a value to an independent organisation that can actually test networks and provide some intelligence around the performance of those networks. There’s way too much data in this market but not enough intelligence.”
Forman said that the company is working towards a solution that can grade the performance of certain types of applications in mission critical environments.
“There’s some really exciting stuff we are working on which is beyond simply providing performance information, which is really the baseline. There’s some some information – like RF information – I would almost be prepared to give away for free, because it’s valueless, unless you really understand the end-to-end. What we’re interested in is looking at applications. How do applications run over those networks, over those different types of access technologies? That’s the piece that enterprises and MNOs are really interested in, and that’s really where, where we’re headed from an intelligence perspective.”
Forman said he is bullish anbout MNO prospects in the enterprise sector. One reason for that is in the view is that as more Standalone 5G networks are built out, and MNOs start looking at slicing, then there will be a real opportunity to build on the enterprise business model.
“Even for FWA, which doesn’t need 5G, we use it extensively in our professional services business, and it works very effectively. Ultimately, you need to understand what the performance of that network is, so that you can provide service assurance to your enterprise customers. And that’s what enterprise customers are looking for. What they want to know is, Will their mission critical applications work on this access technology?”
The inevitable AI bit
The business has also introduced AI methodologies (machine learning, neural networks and move into deep learning) to understand and make predictions that MNOs can act on.
“Using AI, I think there’s a race to provide a solution at the moment – I don’t think anybody has got there yet. Our long term vision really is to build up and to be able to build digital twins so that we can provide some very accurate modelling based on that information. So that’s the medium to long term objective. We’re really at the stage at the moment, where we’re collecting data and working with partners so that we can train our systems.”
Forman is aware that there are many business creating AI-enabled, zero touch planning and operational models, using network state data, OSS data and streaming metrics to build up pictures of performance.
Drive testing, he said, is just one way to build up a source of data – again the value is in understanding the intelligence, pattern matching and clustering to create useable insights.
Comments
0