AIO Systems is a leading provider of total site monitoring and management solutions. Although being leaders in the sector they have decided their sector has yet to fulfil its potential. Specialising in IOT, Intelligent security and surveillance, and hybrid energy RMS providers should be the perfect partner to towercos, yet they have failed to become the critical partners they should be. In this interview TowerXchange speaks with Asher Avissar about where RMS has fallen short and how AIO Systems plans to turn this around offering new technological and commercial solutions to the sector.
TowerXchange: Thank you for speaking with us Asher. You’ve analysed the performance of dozens of RMS systems and contracts over the last ten years, what has been holding them back from fulfilling their potential?
Asher Avissar, Co-founder and Chairman, AIO Systems: We have done some market research in order to understand the gap between the general market potential and the actual performance of the RMS companies in various areas: software only, total site solutions, and also companies that deal with alternative solutions as well. We need to understand where the gap is coming from because the gap is huge.
We have come to several conclusions about why RMS are under delivering for towercos.
The first is that because RMS for towercos is not a mature market, companies set market requirements which are not optimised for tower management and do not answer the pain points of the Tower Co.
Secondly, it is not cost effective. Standard Monitoring solutions are not accurate enough to produce the expected results, due to price sensitivity or lack of adaptation to the towerco model. There is no complete solution coming from RMS vendors for handling site acquisition, business processes, tenant contracting, working with subcontractors et cetera.
Deployments have been substandard. Some RMS systems have delivered the necessary accuracy to produce actionable insights.
If you look at the RMS sector, there are many companies which are small or medium size but none of them are reporting over US$100mn in revenue. Why? It is because they have not been successful in offering cost effective solutions, they have missed KPIs, and they have not added enough value for towercos to make them into trusted partners and large companies.
What RMS companies do isn’t seen as essential, but we will change that.
TowerXchange: What is AIO Systems new approach? How will you avoid the pitfalls of the past?
Asher Avissar, Co-founder and Chairman, AIO Systems: Looking at our results we decided a new way forward to provide a more attractive solution. We have mapped a towerco’s needs from acquisition to contract management, asset management and procurement and investment in renewables, near future needs and much more.
Using this map of technical areas and their challenges in terms of business model we then built a new typology and technology for towercos. Technology for components. Topology for site solution. We will provide an RMS umbrella to help manage the full process. Monitoring and alarms is not enough.
We help towercos manage margins, identify pain points automatically, manage O&M. But more than just answering the challenges of the last 10 years, we are also looking at how to meet the needs of the next five years. Towercos are increasingly offering value added services and our systems incorporate those.
Looking at the commercial model, we have taken a risk. We will be asking for only limited capex upfront, but the majority of our payments will accrue only after meeting KPIs and adding value. If we are not delivering benefits then you won’t be paying.
TowerXchange: Tell us about the new business model you are proposing and the benefits for you and your customers?
Asher Avissar, Co-founder and Chairman, AIO Systems: The business model we are proposing should make customers more confident. We will act as a partner not a vendor. We want to invest alongside the towerco. We have the technology and they have the needs.
We propose that towercos pay us for finding and delivering extra savings. Only pay me if I am meeting KPIs and solving your pain points. We will agree where we can create value before making the investment, then we will be paid accordance to the performance.
We are not offering an opex model to replace capex. We will still need to basic X of dollars you need to spend on an IoT gateway, but I will deploy much more and I will get paid in accordance with what I deliver for you.
We will find ways to add value, generate new revenues and reduce costs and we will share that value. We will be working more as a partner and taking more risk because we have lots of confidence in the technology we are providing.
TowerXchange: We should look at some examples. Tell me how the new approach would improve energy efficiency and energy management on a dual tenant site.
Asher Avissar, Co-founder and Chairman, AIO Systems: We have found many cases where a tenant and a towerco have a disagreement about the power consumption of the tenant versus what has been agreed. We can use very accurate technology to measure the energy use of each tenant, including the load per technology per tenant, and we can compare it with the contract and declared power from the tenant, this can be done in real time after making comparison between nominal consumption and actual consumption and also create automatic billing.
This will settle any disagreement and it may enable the towerco to charge for extra power consumption, or it may be used to convince the MNO to search for asset problems.
Similarly, we are also able to monitor grid stability. Fluctuations and spikes in grid power can mean that it cannot be used, and we can sue this data to resolve disagreements between towercos and grid operators.
Renewable energy is a very hot topic and we can help here too. There are many new energy technologies being introduced: lithium, solar, wind and more. We know how to make exact measurements of those components to help towercos understand in real time how their equipment is performing, what is its IRR and the ROI of the new assets.
We can then also do comparisons between sites so that towercos can work out what is causing opex at one site to be higher than at another. Technical and finance performance is key.
TowerXchange: Site security is a vital concern, especially as more valuable equipment is stored on site – how can your system add value here?
Asher Avissar, Co-founder and Chairman, AIO Systems Only yesterday I saw in the news that a major company had been hacked and was being held ransom for US$3.5mn to release their systems and their data. The danger is very present. At the moment cybersecurity may not be the key technical requirement for all towercos today, but it will be tomorrow morning.
There are two areas of security, physical and cyber.
In terms of physical security, we are able to connect all site aspects to enhance the security of the whole site. Access control cannot be standalone, it should be integrated into the RMS system, alongside CCTV and other elements to prevent vandalism and intrusion to the site.
When a person accesses the site we can capture images and understand if it is a technician, if they are an employee or a contractor and if they’re responding to an open ticket. We can then automatically close the circle and if there is an anomaly we generate an alert. We operate a security portal which presents all the events related to security and connects to data on payments to subcontractors et cetera so that we can send alerts intelligently.
The other part is anti-cyber. How do you protect your systems? AIO Systems focuses on cyber security for passive infrastructure. We have to protect the data and controllers on the site, encrypt data as it leaves the site for the centre and protect it from third parties.
TowerXchange: Towercos are adopting new value added services for their customers, are you prepared to integrate new assets and unexpected changes as might be required for fibre, edge data centres or NaaS?
Asher Avissar, Co-founder and Chairman, AIO Systems We are ready to integrate new technologies. We can see that there are new requirements coming. Towercos will become responsible for more last mile services like the monitoring of fibre. We have already created the sensors to add to the AIOT Controller to manage fibre. We are also able to monitor radio transmission on the assumption that towercos will acquire have more responsibilities on the last mile.
On top of that is added value services to MNOs or communities or B2B partners locally. For example, through our image processing we can identify if people are wearing masks or not, which in the context of COVID-19 can be very useful.
We can also fit towers with tilt sensors to give readings on the stability of the tower, the strength of wind et cetera to help with risk management.
You could also turn to AIO Systems for a full outsourcing of your NOC. Perhaps a newer towerco does not want to establish its own NOC capabilities, in that case they can be out sourced to us.
We are ready to adapt RMS to the changing needs of towercos.
TowerXchange: Please summarise, how could the next five years for RMS systems differ from the last ten?
Asher Avissar, Co-founder and Chairman, AIO Systems First of all, the gap between the potential of RMS systems and their actual performance will shrink, step by step.
The technology deployed by RMS companies will become much better and closer adapted to the ways of working of the industry it serves. And you will see more standardisation to bring in new technologies like IoT. Prices will also decrease and performance will improve.
You will also see towercos begin to consider RMS systems as necessities. It will become mandatory to guarantee performance at a level only an RMS system can provide.
The other trend will be for towercos to ask for full scale solutions from one vendor. Towercos will move away from using different solutions for asset management, NOC, ticketing, billing et cetera – they will want one solution similar to how MNOs centralised things 15 years ago.
In short, solutions will become more advance and will add more value to the towerco.
