Infozech’s footprint in India and Myanmar

Infozech currently serves the Indian and Myanmar tower industry with game-changing solutions to enable its clients to monitor their assets and efficiently manage their sites. Thanks to its varied portfolio of products, Infozech has become a leading supplier to the main towercos in India and, more recently, of MNOs and tower companies in Myanmar.

In this interview, Infozech’s CEO, Mr Ankur Lal, offers his perspectives on how telecom players can successfully manage their assets, reduce their opex and achieve operational excellence.

TowerXchange: Please tell us about Infozech’s footprint in Asia.

Infozech is one of the leading providers of energy management, remote monitoring and analytical solutions to passive infrastructure providers in Asia. Currently, we are providing solutions to leading tower operators in India who account for more than 50% of market share in towers.

Through Infozech’s iTower Tower Product Suite, we have been able to provide an end to end tower operations management solution to two of the leading tower companies of the world, who are currently deploying towers in Myanmar. Infozech has a unique expertise which will contribute to the overall tower sector growth in Myanmar by providing various solutions to tower companies.

TowerXchange: Which of your capabilities are most in demand in the region?

Our solutions are focused to help customers improve profitability through increased operational efficiency and providing actionability on the data captured through different systems.

Poor grid supply is one of the major issues in Asia. Energy constitutes approximately 40% of total operational costs and the other 60% is represented by equipment such as diesel generators, batteries, SMPS and other passive infrastructure, operations, maintenance and field force costs.

In order to manage these huge operational costs, operators are constantly looking towards solutions which can reduce their opex without affecting the existing system. We believe that our products are the optimal solutions to serve passive infrastructure providers.

Our solutions include an RMS called iROC which monitors tower operations on a single platform, the energy tracking and management, iETS, to check energy consumption, the iAsset and iMaintain to schedule, track and report activities related to maintenance and critical events, the iAnalytics to improve actionability, and the iAccess for security and accessibility purposes.

TowerXchange: Can you tell us about a recent success story from your Asian portfolio?

Infozech has developed ‘iTower’, a complete tower product suite which caters to the people, asset and energy needs of passive infrastructure providers. We started deploying ‘iTower’ for the leading tower operators in Myanmar.

In India, we are currently managing energy costs of approximately US$830 million across 150,000 towers.

Our success story started with one of the leading towercos in India. They have a portfolio of over 42,000 towers and created an industry benchmark with the highest tenancy ratio of about 2.2 from over 92,000 tenancies. The client is committed to green and sustainable energy initiatives and wanted to monitor and reduce their energy consumption as a part of these initiatives.

The diversity of telecom towers in India is highly distinct because many are spread across remote areas with very low electricity grid availability. The client had to collect energy consumption data from these remote locations and evaluate and optimise their operational performance, which had been a critical challenge for them. Moreover, there were lots of reconciliation issues in their energy supply chain (both power and fuel), which led to high operational expenditure and long billing cycles between telecom operators and passive infrastructure providers.

In order to optimise and control energy consumption, the overall supply chain of power and fuel consumption was the key area to be addressed. We offered an innovative and cost effective service which involved very low capital expenditure and superior operational efficiency.  Infozech helped our client to monitor their energy consumption through energy tracking, analytics and reporting.

To deal with various types of data, we built various check points in the system to bring transparency and accountability in energy consumption. In order to make sense out of data, we built an analytics platform and real time dashboards to drive actionable insights for the client.

To ensure smooth implementation of a service, we also offered onsite operational and help-desk support to bring the different types of data to a granular level and provide energy consumption records for billing.

We solved this challenge through the implementation of iETS (our Energy Tracking Service). Our solution made a significant impact on the client in terms of time savings, which led to improved decision-making and cash flow. They were also able to reduce the operational expenditure by saving 5% of diesel costs with a commitment of “Going Green” in line with the Indian regulator requirements.

Our client recently stated that “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.”

TowerXchange: Infozech has done extensive work in Myanmar, please tell us about your experience, challenges you’ve encountered and the opportunities you’ve found in the country.

Myanmar is one of the last few greenfield telecom markets with huge potential for growth. Therefore, it presents various infrastructure challenges including limited grid and power supply, poor transport et cetera. Power provision is crucial for deploying and operating Myanmar’s new mobile networks in a cost effective manner. To achieve cost effective network deployment in Myanmar, MNOs and their towerco partners are looking beyond diesel based solutions and are considering efficient energy management.

Myanmar tower companies are looking beyond RMS solutions. Thanks to the fact that the Myanmar industry is being created from scratch, tower companies have decided to go for a complete automation of sites. One of challenges while working with leading towercos was about bringing all their data on a single platform, as there were multiple power equipment vendors each giving alarms and data from sites. Moreover, 50% of tower sites are located in remote areas. Tracking the field force activities and operational status of these telecom towers was a big hurdle for tower companies. We enabled tracking of these field force activities through our mobile application.