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Exclusive interview
with
Christopher Grahn, Chief Executive Officer, Ascade
 
1. Carriers across the world are under increasing pressure to increase profitability and grow revenues. In your opinion, how can they become more efficient and achieve this?
In comparison with many other industries, the carrier industry is clearly behind in terms of efficiency and operational excellence. To be able to compete effectively, carriers must focus on optimizing and automating business decisions and operations. This includes market segmentation, product differentiation and innovation as well as continuously driving down the cost of delivery and network management.
Looking at successful carriers, they have managed to make their organizations very customer orientated. They carefully develop products and services based on market segmentation and customer characteristics. Consequently, routing and network strategies are defined as a result of market and customer requirements instead of the other way around.
In addition to growing revenues organically, carriers will have to look at partnerships and consolidation options to build synergies, gain economies of scale and tackle the current over-supply.
Ascade’s software, the Carrier Cockpit™, has been designed to address all the above mentioned points, which is unique on today’s market place according to our customers. Hence, we currently see a huge interest in our market offering.
2. How do you think the new VoIP carriers will affect the incumbent carriers?
VoIP-carriers will probably very much act as forerunners, with incumbent carriers closely following the development. VoIP-traffic is growing in volumes by the day, but the main affect has so far been limited to increased price pressure and as an alternative transmission method to either reduce termination or network cost.
However, the convergence of voice and data could potentially have a huge impact on the carrier market if the actual business model would change from the well-established minute-based rate model. This would fundamentally change the carrier market as we know it today and potentially remove much of the current carrier revenues.
3. How do you see the Central and Eastern European market developing? Is it as lucrative as some people think?
The development in Central and Eastern Europe is very interesting. In most countries, the conditions for growth are favorable with stable democracies, nascent demands and underdeveloped infrastructures. Competition has been introduced on a number of markets and more are likely to follow suite. However, in many cases, the introduction of competition has not yet lived up to the expectations, but hopefully accession to the EU will speed up the development of more competitive market places. The growth potential for established products such as mobile voice and internet services is larger than in Western Europe and North America, where these markets are saturated. This growth potential is attracting much interest and will probably lead to fierce battles for market share once the markets are fully open for competition. Long-term success will depend on good knowledge of the market and to early on establish a strong market position and commitment to the region.
4. What has been your main business priority in the last year?
As the market leader for carrier Business Operations Systems, our main business priority has been to finalize a number of successful system implementations worldwide as well as to strength our market-leadership through market entries in primarily Americas and Asia-Pacific, where we recently opened up a regional office in Singapore.
5. What sort of value-added services will make a difference to the world of carriers in 2005?
For a long time, the carrier industry has been very network orientated. What we see now is a shift towards customer orientation meaning that market segmentation and product packaging is becoming much more important. As a result, value-added services will be driven from a customer demand perspective instead of a network / technology perspective, which often has been the case up to now.
Mobile operators are becoming increasingly dominant in setting requirements for carrier services with high demands on guaranteed service levels, CLI-termination and network availability. Service providers are constantly looking at introducing value-added services to retail and corporate customers and as a result, carriers must follow suite and offer support for a large number of additional services. On the wholesale market, value-added services will be introduced as a step to differentiate on more than price alone.
Christopher Grahn, Chief Executive Officer, Ascade will be presenting at Carriers World on Tuesday 14th September at 2.00pm view conference programme
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