Nexign Talks to SAMENA Trends Magazine
Interview with Natalia Komleva, Chief Executive Officer of Nexign
Your core business is providing BSS solutions, including billing, charging and policy management to telecom operators. Can you share with us the latest developments in this sector? What are the main challenges you or your clients are currently facing?
It is fair to say that most of our clients have already gone through considerable digital transformation, but new challenges are coming ahead. In the race towards 5G, the pace of change required from businesses is accelerating rapidly. As a result, telecom operators continue to rethink and expand their role in value chains, try innovative business models, and explore novel business areas to open new revenue opportunities and offer advanced services to their digital-first clients. Of course, all of these changes impact BSS systems and require focusing on improving operational efficiency and maintaining a high rate of innovation.
In your view, what currently poses the greatest challenge to Operators’ revenues?
As you know, the traditional telecom business has limited opportunities for growth, and CSPs are shifting beyond traditional communication services and exploring new revenue sources, including cloud, security, finance, and digital entertainment. We firmly believe our role is to offer solutions that facilitate monetization of the CSPs’ development correctly and promote quick and efficient revenue growth.
For instance, we often see that CSPs are still using inefficient siloed billing systems. These separate legacy billing systems negatively affect customer satisfaction and loyalty. Our products and expertise allow us to help CSPs adopt a unified billing platform for structured and flexible revenue management and ensure a convergent user experience across applications. As a result, the company gets the opportunity to capitalize on emerging services effectively, and customer loyalty increases.
How do you adapt your portfolio to these trends? What are your new offerings for the industry?
Our portfolio has always been designed to enable the CSPs’ digital journey through systems consolidation and aimed to monetize multidimensional convergence, harmonize revenue streams, and establish strong partnerships with content and application service providers. Currently, our most popular products encompass BSS and Network Monetization solutions. They primarily help operators manage revenue streams coming from the growing complexity of telecom systems and provide them with solutions tailored for various transformation paths. Furthermore, all of them contribute to increasing revenues and creating a sound digital ecosystem.
Some time ago, we also decided to move towards a more diversified suite of services and look into developing solutions beyond BSS systems. We started by responding to the ever-growing demand in flexibility and transformation among wider IT companies and introduced the Microservices Framework solution that empowered telcos to develop, launch, and control fast innovations based on flexible microservices architecture.
Later, to support in-depth cultural transformation, where digital and IT are taking a stronger role in any organization, we decided to share our own experience in this space to a broader audience. Our team introduced Neon Intranet Platform, a unified digital platform to enhance digital employee experience. The timing of the launch is especially opportune if you consider all the challenges the companies face amidst hybrid or remote work management today.
How is Nexign's Neon Intranet Platform different from your competitors’?
Initially, we developed Neon Intranet Platform for ourselves. It was an internal corporate portal for Nexign employees created to replace a large number of fragmented systems. At some point, we realized that the platform might be appealing to other companies valuing employee comfort and job satisfaction, so we decided to bring it to the market. It is designed with an employee-centric approach and has the potential to become a pillar of the adaptive corporate culture, driving engagement and contribution to business growth.
Besides, the platform is built on the cutting-edge open-source tech stack and microservices architecture that allows for developing each of Neon’s components as an individual IT product. Therefore, it could be easily deployed and rapidly scaled in accordance with new requirements and experiences. For example, if the HR team wants to include employee bonuses and incentive programs or add an internal corporate market with virtual currency to its Intranet Platform, the company no longer faces the need to add changes to its core system. Instead, new microservices are easily created to adapt to new tasks. In addition, if an error occurs in one module, the rest of the platform continues to work correctly. This factor is vitally important for large systems with high-reliability requirements.
How has Nexign positioned itself for the Telecom Operators of the Middle East, and what is an ideal partner-of-choice profile that you always seek?
We support end-to-end digital transformation by closely partnering with customers to solve their specific needs. Our solutions and approaches are tailor-made to address the requirements and goals of our clients, ranging from a quick launch of a mobile business to large-scale business transformation. For instance, our target customer could be a CSP embarked on the journey to becoming a digital service provider and aiming to launch up-and-coming services quickly. Alternatively, our client could be a CSP wanting to replace its legacy BSS system to remove the restrictions on service capacity, expand its customer base, and support business growth.
Who are the key clients that Nexign collaborates with in the region? How are your solutions benefiting them?
We have recently implemented the Marketing Campaign Management System for Zain Kuwait. This system represents a BI-integrated solution for diversified campaign management during the customer lifecycle and allows its users to define target segments and schedule, execute, and track the performance of marketing campaigns. It also enables the company to increase response rates and the effectiveness of sales and marketing initiatives. Now Zain Kuwait has an excellent tool to make targeted offerings to diverse groups of its clients and boost customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.
What are you eyeing for the year 2022-2023 and anticipating as a member of SAMENA Council?
In our opinion, trends for digital innovations, advanced employee experience, and 5G monetization will continue in the upcoming years. The importance of agility will also grow, and more CSPs will continue to transform towards the IT direction to effectively respond to new market and user requirements. Additionally, telecom providers will continue to focus on creating ecosystems and developing partner networks, as it will help them optimize the value chain and find new revenue sources. As a member of the SAMENA Council, Nexign receives a lot of support in the issues of promotion, consultation, and interaction with partners, and we would like to thank the Association for its assistance. We are certainly looking forward to expanding our collaboration and working on new projects together.