[1]CEO Matteo Gatta discusses how BICS is building on its heritage and developing new growth areas with a focus on the digital enterprise.
Matteo Gatta was appointed chief executive (CEO) at BICS in January 2021, when much of the world was still reeling from the multiple and varied effects of the coronavirus pandemic.
Indeed, an international company like BICS, which has its headquarters in Brussels but is present throughout the Americas, Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, has been forced to contend with repeated lockdowns and other restrictions in several countries around the world.
At the same time, Gatta took over the helm of a group that is going through a period of profound change, while also managing industry-wide challenges with regard to a decline in traditional carrier services and a drop in human roaming traffic during the pandemic.
On the positive side, BICS has gained a CEO with a wealth of experience in carrier services following a number of years at its parent company, Proximus. What’s more, Proximus has recently taken full ownership of the company in a move that is set to simplify and speed up decision-making processes in a rapidly changing business environment. The Belgian telco agreed to buy the 20% and 22.4% stakes held by South Africa-based operator MTN and Swisscom respectively for a total of €217 million.
In addition, BICS has already initiated a diversification strategy that builds on its heritage as a traditional wholesale and inter-carrier service provider and embraces new growth areas with a focus on the digital enterprise. New service offerings include application-to-person (A2P) messaging, fraud prevention, the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud communications — with more layers of innovation to come.
“My first months at BICS have been all about ensuring continuity, rebuilding the growth strategy and accelerating the execution, while readying the business for value capture following recovery from the pandemic,” Gatta explains. “My vision for BICS is to become an integrated communication platform company. By leveraging our global reach and integrated platforms with strong, front-end software that aids integration processes, we can deliver a powerful proposition for our customers’ success.”
This strategy is already showing visible signs of success. Gatta notes that BICS is now capturing a 15% share of net revenue from its digital enterprise business. “This is a relatively large number and is a growing part of our business, both in absolute and percentage terms,” he says.
Looking to the cloud
Cloud communications is one of the main pillars of BICS’ evolving strategy as a Communications Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) provider.
“Cloud communications is massively important for two reasons,” says Gatta. “On the one hand, it’s a growth story, while on the other hand it represents a dramatic shift from more traditional operator-to-operator and user-to-user voice and messaging services to the cloud.”
BICS’ proposition is to reduce the complexity of traditional telephone connections in multiple markets by consolidating communications in the cloud. It explains that cloud communications enables mobility, flexibility and a local presence — and is much less expensive than traditional telecommunications.
As things stand, BICS provides cloud numbers in more than 120 countries as well as SIP trunking, application programming interface (API) technologies, and high-quality voice coverage worldwide.
The operator has adopted the term “bring your own carrier” (BYOC), which essentially means that enterprises can choose BICS as their carrier for all their digital telephony needs. The promise is to provide dynamic, reliable global voice and messaging capabilities for an enterprise’s chosen cloud communications platform. It also assures a guaranteed quality of service even when an enterprise changes communications platforms or applications, or increases scale.
Numbers as a service, meanwhile, are positioned to reduce operating expenses as well as cost of ownership even when an enterprise expands to new markets, with a local presence at country or city level. Mobile and fixed numbers are provided in more than 200 countries with high-quality voice connectivity.
SIP trunking offers the ability to connect a cloud communications platform to fixed and mobile networks around the world through a unified single infrastructure. Enterprises are able to integrate voice and data communications on a single global platform via a single interconnection — achieving significant savings on telecoms costs.
A further area relates to what BICS describes as “easy-to-integrate APIs”. It currently provides APIs to make it easy to check for number availability, find the price of a number, and order numbers — and provide the information in near-real time. BICS customers such as conference service or unified communications providers are also able to brand and offer the APIs as part of their own offerings.
Amping up voice
More recently, BICS introduced a major innovation by adding voice APIs to its portfolio of programmable communications solutions. This new feature is designed to allow companies to easily customise communications services to suit their individual requirements, giving them greater flexibility to scale and optimise their business.
Gatta described this new capability as a big leap forward for BICS, although he cautioned that it is just a step forward in the roadmap and not the end of its development. He also noted that because BICS carries billions of minutes, it has been able to identify fraud patterns in the traditional inter-carrier telecoms market. “We also leverage that to ensure safe communications between users and the cloud,” he says.
Indeed, BICS says that voice is becoming increasingly integral to services like two-factor authentication (2FA), to enable secure communication (via number masking) within sharing economy platforms, and within customer service centres. Its toolbox of programmable communications solutions already includes SMS over 350 direct messaging routes and numbers-as-a-service in over 120 countries.
By adding voice APIs to this offering, brands can benefit from a holistic and fully flexible range of ways to tailor their communications services to customers, BICS says. It further notes that digital communications has traditionally been a static environment, with enterprises purchasing specific tools requiring integration support. It sees the utilisation of APIs as a more flexible approach that provides enterprises with more options to tailor their communications for their end customers.
In concrete terms, BICS says it is giving brands more control over customer communications, whether through voice, messaging or cloud numbers services. This in turn enables businesses to enhance the customer experience, while simultaneously growing their business.
“We will continue to build on these features,” adds Gatta. “We do have a formidable network that can reach five billion users worldwide through dedicated direct routes. We’re building a layer of software on that, and we integrate into the various cloud ecosystems. We see that more and more workloads and applications are going towards the cloud. So we are transforming our traditional infrastructure to integrate into the cloud, to deliver a strong experience to deliver quality experience for both enterprises and telcos.”
Becoming agile
As is the case in the wider telecoms industry, BICS has also been adopting an agile working environment to enable it to achieve its objectives in the cloud and software space. That has involved a certain amount of re-skilling and hiring of new talent.
“With re-skilling comes a strong, powerful change management programme linked to our growth strategy,” Gatta says. “A growth mindset is crucial, as we want to enter new markets in a decisive way.”
“We are not a greenfield,” he adds. “We are also leveraging partners that bring us additional skillsets, but as we do already in the telco space, we intend to own part of our intellectual property. For instance, in IoT we actually own intellectual property.”
Gatta also said that BICS will be open to further acquisitions to capture additional skillsets and technology to complete its portfolio and achieve its transformation journey, although he was unable to disclose any details at present.
In conclusion, Gatta said the overall ambition is to be integrated from the network up, and continue to provide robust and trusted network services with integrated services on top. “That is really critical,” he adds.
Looking ahead to a (hopefully) post-pandemic world, Gatta is confident that enterprises and telcos will continue to benefit from the acceleration in digital strategies and the general move towards the cloud. Indeed, enterprises in all parts of the world, and of all sizes, have adopted digital tools and applications that they discovered purely out of a need to stay operational during lockdown. Now that the benefits of digital workplaces and a cloud-based environment have been embraced, there is no going back.
“What we need to do right now as we emerge from the pandemic is make those improvements structural,” he says. “We know the world of communication is not going to be the same again. This acceleration in the digitisation process will benefit us all — as users, as customers and as service providers.”
[1] https://www.mobileworldlive.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Matteo-Gatta-BICS-300px.png
![\"IT電腦補習](\"http://itteacheritfreelance.hk/test/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/logo2-2.png\"){kind=logo}
www.itsec.hk
www.itsec.vip
www.itseceu.uk
Leave a Reply