TMCnet Feature

TMCnet recently asked some of the leading lights in the industry for their thoughts about 2011 and what’s in store for the year ahead.

Here’s what Juhani Hintikka, CEO of Comptel Corp., had to say.

What was your company's greatest achievement in 2011?

Hintikka: 2011 has been an eventful year for Comptel. We got a new CEO (me), we closed a number of significant deals (most notably with Australia’s NBN Co, beating 80 competitors), and we sold some of our fulfillment software assets (AXIOSS) to Cisco (News - Alert), which enables us to accelerate the development of our next-generation fulfillment platform – due out the first half of 2012. We also secured a few new policy control and charging deals, confirming our view that policy control is becoming more of a business, as opposed to a network-only, function.

What are your business's goals for 2012?

Hintikka: Comptel will continue to invest in solutions and services over the coming year. On the solution side, we are working on fulfillment for service aggregation and real-time business management, essentially building on our vision of turning events (in the network or relating to customer behavior) into action in real-time. We also expect that 2012 will be the year for a new breed of real-time customer experience management, merging it with general business processes and not only considering it as an offline, back-office analytics function.

How would you describe your outlook for business and the economy at large heading into 2012?

Hintikka: As a publicly quoted company, Comptel needs to be cautious about statements on business outlook. However, we are reasonably optimistic. We are also in a good position, having a large customer base across 85 countries, so Comptel’s business is not overly sensitive to regional or even global economic fluctuations. We expect that the ‘data rules’ attitude on the market will continue and deepen, service providers will stay focused on monetizing data services and giving their customers more options in data and content bundling. Also as mentioned before, true real-time capabilities will be sought more in business-enabling systems – helping operators run their businesses more intelligently. 

If there's one thing you'd like to see happen related to business in the year ahead, what is that one thing?

Hintikka: Clearly, we would like to service providers investing heavily in real-time and scalable OSS.

If 2011 was the year of cloud and/or the year of the tablet, 2012 will be the year of…

Hintikka: the application of real-time business analytics to enhance customer experience.