Being part of a wider Analytics team in Adapt IT Telecoms Australia, what does your role entail? What drives you?
I work in the Telecom Division’s Advanced Analytics team as the Technology and Business Development Manager for the CDRlive solution. This entails ensuring that the product evolves in line with the business intelligence and analytics market, while also meeting the needs of our clients. There are numerous processes involved in accomplishing this. We observe the Analytic space and how it’s advancing. Then, we look for innovative or creative ways to extract information from large volumes of data processed by the system. In the same run, we look for new ways to convey the data or new paradigms and strategies to operate efficiently. All of this is done to maintain the product current and relevant.
Here in Australia, we work with one of the world’s leading telecommunications companies. And as one of the best, they’re always quite driven to get the greatest solutions and cutting-edge technology from us. This motivates us to keep on top of our game, ensuring that CDRlive competes with other solutions in the same industry while also providing value to our clients. Indeed, fuels our desire as a company and personally to keep improving.
Being a part of Adapt IT Australia and the Advanced Analytics team allows me to pursue my passions for IT Technology and Software Development while working in the Telecoms sector. That’s what drives me.
What’s the most challenging aspect of being a Technology & Business Development Manager?
I’ll respond based on our product line and the fact that we work in the Advanced Analytics space, namely in the Telecoms sector. Our solutions tend to have a large infrastructure footprint. This means that our customers have to install a large amount of hardware and big databases in order to perform analytics. This forces them to spend large amounts of money on purchasing or leasing infrastructures, without a guarantee that these infrastructures will actually deliver the expected results or generate a return on investment.Â
Therefore, the most challenging part is convincing new clients to invest in a product because it is a huge capital expenditure for them. Whenever a management or executive signs off on a significant budget project, they always want to know how long it will take for the system to return that money. Fortunately, with one of our clients at Adapt IT Telecoms, we were able to provide them with a 300% return on investment in the first year of production and going live. This was a great outcome for them and for us as a software provider because it allowed us to present that reference case to other clients.Â
As proof of our expertise and the effectiveness of our solutions, we always provide our potential customers with additional use cases of other clients who have been able to gain the kind of insights that enable them to minimize expenses or increase income.
How is Adapt IT Telecoms Australia empowering the Australian Telecom market?
We have products and modules in the advanced analytics category that are truly unique, and you will not find a similar solution that gives the same outcome anywhere in the market. We are very niche in our product suite. When Telcos want analytics done, they usually go out there to well-known software vendors and hunt for software vendors-that can provide adequate solutions. But they typically end up with a very basic suite producing basic output. In our case, we produce advanced reports or analytics, and our differentiation when compared to competitors is that we can produce output that other players are unable to produce since we are highly specialised in the Telco industry. Our products have been built and architected from the ground up for the Telecom market.
When our client acquired the solution approximately 20 years ago, they searched the market and discovered that only CDRlive could meet their requirements. Recently, our client decided to look for alternatives to CDRlive because they had been using it for far too long. But they still couldn’t find anything to replace CDRlive. So, yes, we offer a specialized and telco-specific solution, and our existing clients like it.
Much has changed in the Telecommunication industry over the years. How do you keep CDRlive relevant in this ever-changing industry?
That is correct. I mean, Telecommunications has seen a significant transformation over time. I’ve worked in the IT industry for almost 30 years, including 22 years in Telecommunications. I believe I have experienced most of the changes since the landline. Hence, I believe the only thing that is constant in this sector is change, and the best way to stay on top of it is to keep an eye on how things are developing, and to listen to other technology experts or industry leaders who have a variety of strategies to stay up to date on all these changes.
Our strategy has been to keep an eye on the Analytic space, then the Telco space, and finally the IT space because all three of them kind of come into play when we talk about Advanced Analytics. We take note of anything that impacts the product from all of these different domains and proactively implement it as part of our road map. In other words, for CDRlive and broadly in the Advanced Analytics products, we’ve had a long-running road map that takes into account all of the different innovations happening in the market and guarantees that we incorporate them into our products.
For example, between 2003 and 2023, the Mobile sector inside Telecom progressed from analogue phones to digital 1G, and now to 5G. If you look at it that way, it’s like there is a massive shift every two to three years, and we’ve kept the product relevant by making upgrades before 4G or 5G hit the market. Even before 5G went global, we ensured that our system could process, report, and analyse 5G data.We are extremely cautious, and we ensure that our solutions can accommodate all of the upcoming changes. Thus, by the time the standards are released, we’re already working through it, ensuring that the new processes are already in our product.
Without giving away too much. What does the future of analytics look like? Where is CDRlive going?
We are working on a number of initiatives, which we refer to as long-term road plan initiatives. One of the things we are working on right now is creating analytics that are cloud native. In other words, we want to create a cloud-based solution that can be implemented using the most recent cloud technologies as a serverless hardware-less native implementation. Many people have discussed cloud implementation in the past, but what they usually mean is that they take the program and place it on a server in the cloud. The customer’s advantage when discussing native implementation is that they can activate or modify the analytics they want without any issues. And while executing those analytics, they can take advantage of the vast resources that the cloud has to offer, giving them almost infinite power in terms of analytics that is not available when it is implemented in a data centre on a set footprint.
Moving forward, we are looking towards integrating cloud-based AI technologies into CDRlive, which is a natural extension of the native cloud implementation. In fact, the potential for AI-based analytics is huge; it will be a game changer, and we want to be ready for it when our consumers are. We’re doing some trials right now, and it’s looking great. One advantage is that Telcos, with their analytics platforms, have access to a massive amount of data, which can be difficult for human analytics resources to understand because there are so many attributes. And AI can actually help them come up with new queries and different ways to look at data and analyse it.
What role will humans play in the expanding world of Automation and AI?
It’s a promising future, especially given how humans and AI have interacted thus far. Researchers and those who have studied it have shown that combining humans and AI produces far superior results than either AI or humans working separately. By using games like Chess or Go for the study, they discovered that the sum of AI and humans is better than humans or AI alone. Which, in my opinion, is how the future analysts will be working alongside AI.
The future of analytics, in my opinion, lies in analysts’ ability to respond to issues that were once intractable. And there will be technologies and solutions that can give insights that were previously thought to be too difficult or impossible to provide.
AI and future analysts will be able to gain insights that are much more valuable than insights from AI or analytics individually. Humans and AI working together are actually complementary. They each have their own advantages, and when they work together, the results are superior than when they work alone.
Do you think Humans, especially Analysts, will still have their job in the expanding world of Automation and AI?
Yes, they will. If you look at the way analysts work today, they spend a lot of time doing repetitive work, and then devote a significant amount of time to their insight, knowledge, and invention. It can be draining and difficult. Consequently, I believe that in the future, the repetitive or drudgery work or mundane tasks will be automated, and what will be left is that they will be doing more research and innovation. In conclusion, Analysts won’t lose their jobs, but their roles may alter considerably in the future, and I believe the output they will create will be far more valuable.
