Infozech: Applied Analytics

Infozech combine cloud-based analytics with a managed services approach, applying intelligence to improve the efficiency of telecom operations and energy management. Infozech is a proven solution, managing over 150,000 sites in India, including all of the Indus Towers.

TowerXchange: Where does Infozech fit in the telecoms infrastructure ecosystem?

Infozech is a 15 year old company which initially focused on BSS but which pivoted to focus on towers five years ago when the first shared passive infrastructure companies were started up in India. We manage over 150,000 sites, including all of Indus Towers, and have worked with most of the towercos in India. Like TowerXchange, Infozech is focused on passive infrastructure, and we’re making a significant push into Africa, Southeast Asia and the Americas.

Infozech provides data aggregation and intelligence. We don’t provide hardware - Infozech is a cloud-based applied analytics company, also offering consulting and managed services to plug the gap between data insights and alarms, and ground-level O&M. In terms of operational data, we are the glue between the towerco or operator and the field maintenance team.

For our BSS business, we manage around two billion transactions daily.

We started by capturing diesel data and communicating that via SMS, through a mobile app or automated sensors. Over time, we developed a substantial data farm, providing a comprehensive energy database, enabling us to move beyond monitoring and analysis, to prediction and control. With data on electricity, battery, and renewable power consumption too, our farm has all the data to derive the insights necessary to drive predictive maintenance and cost efficiency, and to minimise carbon emissions and optimise energy opex. We integrate with RM sensors from multiple vendors and provide a hardware independent converged view to the towerco for their central control and monitoring.

TowerXchange: How does Infozech’s managed services approach improve control and visibility of the O&M field force?

We are a lean company; we don’t employ field O&M teams, but we have regional partners where we work with their field O&M teams. We take charge and take on responsibility to meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

We also use field behavior / human behavior analysis to improve people, process and automation. This helped us win a recent prestigious Economic Times Global Telecom Award for Managed Services!

For one of our customers, we operate 40,000 sites across 20 states, working with 20 different operational units in the field. For that customer we have 20 staff on our helpdesk, plus in-location business consultants and developers. On a 24/7 basis we collect, analyse and report data. The impact of providing the larger, integrated view of cell sites has been to dramatically reduce the mean time to respond to alarms and job tickets.

TowerXchange: How does Infozech adapt its service as tower portfolios change and expand?

Managing passive infrastructure, especially when you’re acquiring assets from different companies, often results in lots of silos and data islands, which we’re able to integrate - we can upload all your existing Excel spreadsheets and data stored in different islands including databases.

To quote one of our customers, the “Infozech team has made tremendous effort in closing costs on-time and streamlining the entire process. Key data is easily accessible online on the Infozech ETS portal. We can now say goodbye to spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations and utilise our time on analysing business critical data.”

Passive infrastructure providers need easy to use, nimble tools to help them adapt and change A cloud-based analytics platform like ours, designed for the tower industry, does not have the same rigidity as a large ERP platform; we’re much more open, we understand and can swiftly accommodate changes. For example, we can easily integrate new towerco acquisitions, new people and processes, supporting change management as everyone adjusts to a common terminology and new ways of working. Our integrated analytics platform provides the language to talk to different RMS and communicate that to various acquired cultures. And we can accommodate the range of different KPIs and SLAs that come from having built portfolios through acquisitions, adapting to changes in grid-power availability, and the changing requirements that come with the addition of new tenancies.

Passive infrastructure providers need easy to use, nimble tools to help them adapt and change.

TowerXchange: There’s a case study of a passive infrastructure provider using your Energy Tracking Service on your website - tell us a bit more about that.

Towercos and operators have invested a lot in hardware and remote monitoring vendor solutions which provide data from their cell sites - meters, fuel gauges, RMS - when they receive data it’s not coherent, there is no set frequency, so it’s tough to take forward and analyse to predict and minimise breakages and outages.

We take over the operation of data for our customers. Step one, collection, involves us interfacing with any sensors the customer has onsite, whether delivered in a data feed, SMS or Excel. In step two, we analyse the data - validation and sanitisation; essentially we look for what looks right and what looks incorrect and evaluate performance against benchmarks and targets aligned with the customer’s KPIs and SLA. In step three, we preset filters that expose the data to the customer the way they want, so we configure reports and alarms to the needs of different users.

To again quote one of our customers: “Infozech is going to change the way for us. Thank you for bringing the transparency in power and fuel billing and helping us in achieving our power and fuel KPIs and targets.”

TowerXchange: Talk to us about your strategy to enable the field force with mobile applications to ensure comprehensive data is collected in real time from the actual sites.

We live in an era when technology exists to automate every part of the site management process, but many of these sites are located in areas where the technology hasn’t caught up. Automation doesn’t always work as prescribed, so you need a contingency plan. At remote sites where the asset register and the raw RMS data doesn’t give you the whole picture, a field worker’s mobile app can collect a photo, with an accurate longitude, latitude and meter readings and send that information back to the analytics platform.

Equipping field engineers with mobile apps is very cost effective in developing countries. The mobile app is intuitive and very visual. Mobility allows management to get closer to field data, incorporating front-line insights into reports, which in turn can be accessed through smart phones or tablets.

TowerXchange: How do you translate insights from your analytics into actionable strategy plans that reduce opex?

When we collect data, it comes to us in a raw form. The real insights come from benchmarking that data against another source, that’s when the learning starts happening. For example it might be a simple case of comparing data from the same site last week or to the same week last year, or comparing with another similar site. We slice and dice data to benchmark against all sites with similar gensets, similar tenants or which are serviced by the same maintenance teams.

It’s our experience that the people who collect data are not necessarily comfortable slicing and dicing that data. The data slicers are often based in the corporate headquarters and can be somewhat separated from the reality in the field. Infozech’s managed services enable data analysts to slice and dice as they want, to store and reconfigure analyses for future actions.

To give you a couple of real life examples. One customer was withdrawing diesel through state owned gas stations, where fuel was charged through a prepaid card. In the words of that customer: “Earlier we were able to reconcile 90,000 litres for every 100,000 litres of IOCL withdrawal. Today we are able to reconcile 95,000 litres. Leading to an improvement of 5% on reconciliation.”

Customers spend a lot of energy on reconciliation; one customer told us their analysts spent 27 days of every month consolidating data, and just 3 days planning and taking corrective actions! We flipped that Customers spend a lot of resources on reconciliation; one customer told us their analysts spent 27 days of every month consolidating data, and just 3 days planning and taking corrective actions! We flipped that so they spent the majority of their time planning and improving the network, which has resulted in 10% year on year savings over the last three years - and we think we can keep that up for another two years to achieve total savings of over 50%!

TowerXchange: Who are your target customers, tower operators or their O&M subcontractors?

We are talking to the O&M contractors, as they are responsible for RMS and for day to day operations. We can strengthen the value proposition of O&M subcontractors, providing transparency into what the O&M team is doing, and a mechanism to determine performance against SLAs.

Towercos are excited by these insights, but their field force is often subcontracted, so we maintain a three way relationship - we stretch the performance of O&M subcontractors, and we interface with towercos and large power equipment providers, who also generate intelligence which is seldom integrated into analyses and responded to.

TowerXchange: How would you compare how customers’ analytics requirements vary between India and Africa.

The diversity of different cell site scenarios in Africa is far greater than in India, but the scale of operations is not as large. So it makes economic sense for customers to choose cloud based analytics.

The need for trained manpower is also much greater in Africa than in India, so a solution like ours helps training by reducing cost of knowledge transfer through centralisation, and by localising and adapting to the customer’s specific needs.

The rollout of LTE in Africa is ahead of India, which makes accessing the cloud easier. India also has a legacy of non-cloud based infrastructure, so there is more inertia. Customers need to get more comfortable with software, intelligence and analytics; they’re very centred on hardware. As much of this infrastructure and analysis is new in Africa, we get less resistance to the concept of using the cloud.

TowerXchange: Please sum up how you would differentiate Infozech from other cloud based analytics platforms.

How customers use our platform is how we are differentiated from competitors. The keyword is applied - Infozech leverage applied analytics to deliver a definit