A new player in the service assurance space emerged this week as the former Telecom Protocol Products Group of Sunrise Telecom, spun off last year, merged with Scandanavian professional service group, LTE Innovations, and became Accanto Systems.
Now a service assurance provider, rather than part of a test and measurement company, Accanto Systems will focus on the next generation customer service assurance solutions for converged wireless and wireline operators. The sweet spot, said Michele Campriani, CEO of Accanto, is mobile data.
“We see the opportunity to help service providers through a major challenge, which is coping with the incredible increase in data services traffic,” Campriani said, citing data from its customers who say data traffic has increased four to five times in the last four months.
Despite merging with a professional services company, Campriani said Accanto will remain an OSS software solutions company focused on service assurance rather than network management. LTE, he said, will be fully integrated into the business and support the sales and integration of the company’s products.
The company grew revenue by 25 percent last year as part of Sunrise, with services accounting for about 10 percent of overall revenue. Campriani said he expects professional service to grow at the same rate as products but he does not plan to try to grow that side of the business except in relation to its support of product sales.
“It is imperative that OSS systems smoothly integrate into the operators’ existing practices and enable a customer-centric focus. And LTE really brings a lot of value-add to our offering,” Campriani said. “They have great expertise in OSS in general and they see the needs and the gaps that will help us make integrations as strong as possible.”
Sunrise Telecom's PPG division was founded in 1996 with solutions deployed to 175 customers in over 60 countries with its 3GMaster and NeTracker protocol analyzer product lines. Recently the company introduced and deployed its Traffic Analysis and Monitoring System (TAMS) and Mobile X-Ray mobile data services platform for customer service assurance.
LTE Innovations’ consulting group is comprised of engineers, analysts and system architects from Ericsson, Nokia, Hewlett Packard, Telia Sonera and other companies.
Karl Whitelock, senior consulting analyst at Stratecast, a division of Frost and Sullivan, said as wireless and wireline operators strive to introduce voice and data services to increase competitiveness and differentiation, there has been a mass underestimation of the complexity of maintaining quality and availability of these IP-based services in converged environments. “A key requirement lies in the operators’ ability to see the services through the eye of the customer, rather than the network. A customer-focused solution approach should find favor with operators who are serious about maintaining quality and control while introducing these services,” Whitelock said.
Accanto’s newly introduced “Intelligent Customer Service Assurance” platform leverages both the TAMS and Mobile X-Ray products.
