Accruent is a trusted partner of all four major US carriers, who leverage their infrastructure lifecycle management solutions, including Siterra, to manage assets, leases, tasks and projects, creating a central system of record - a “single source of the truth.” Siterra has proved particularly indispensable when managing the complexity of major networks rollouts and upgrades, and has played a critical role in making LTE accessible to 90 percent of the US population in just two and a half years. Accruent is expanding into international markets, with new clients in Latin America and Europe.
TowerXchange: Where does Accruent fit into the telecom tower industry ecosystem?
Laith Dahiyat, Director, Product Management, Accruent:
Accruent helps infrastructure, facilities and real estate leaders optimise their operations, delivering ROI and best in class financial performance. Accruent was founded over 18 years ago, and we are active in a number of different industry verticals, including wireless in which we have 13 years of experience.
Siterra is our flagship product for telecoms which, having been through various iterations is now considered best in class for wireless infrastructure lifecycle management in North America.
Siterra hits all the different points in the infrastructure lifecycle. We’re probably best known for our project management capabilities. We have 1.5 million projects in our system across all of our customers, and we specialise in large scale network build outs and upgrades, connecting wireless carriers, tower companies, and the service providers who do the work.
It took just two and a half years for LTE to reach 90 percent of the US population, and a large chunk of those LTE network investments were managed in Siterra. We are proud to be a big part of the LTE success story.
Siterra provides a holistic tool to manage all aspects of the infrastructure lifecycle, creating a central system of record for all assets (towers, cell sites, active equipment, lighting, backhaul, RF data and more), giving a top-down view of the state of the network.
The value of Siterra becomes apparent very quickly because we deliver massive ROI through our platform. Pre-deployment, we’ll often encounter a very fragmented information management environment, with multiple point solutions that each manage a little piece of the pie, but which don’t feed into a consolidated view of the network. In parallel to the complexity of legacy information management systems, the complexity of networks and deployments are growing to meet growing demands for wireless data, which in turn leads to growing complexity of financial and project management requirements.
As networks in the US and international markets progress from 3G to LTE and LTE Advanced, and with the introduction of heterogeneous networks, complexity grows, and carriers need a purpose-built tool to manage the network. Siterra is purpose built for wireless.
TowerXchange: Are Accruent’s solutions offered on a license or SAAS basis?
Laith Dahiyat, Director, Product Management, Accruent:
Over the last four years, Accruent has transformed its business model and products from on-premise software to cloud-based solutions that are easier and less expensive for customers to implement. One hundred percent of our new software revenue is now derived from cloud products.
TowerXchange: I understand that your Siterra product is used to manage over 750,000 sites globally - can you tell us about some of your typical use-cases in telecoms?
Laith Dahiyat, Director, Product Management, Accruent:
We’ve cultivated deep partnerships with all four carriers in North America , who use Accruent for a multitude of use-cases; to manage site selection, assets, project management, maintenance, financials and lease administration (as landlords and payees).
However, the US market pales in comparison to the size of the global telecoms industry, so a big focus for Accruent now is the international market, especially Latin America and Western Europe. Across the business, Accruent has 1,200 customers in 56 countries. We recently signed on two companies that are aggressively investing in infrastructure, both buying and building towers, in Central and South America. We are also in talks with some major Western European players. We’re finding that in markets where LTE is gaining traction, project complexity creates an even greater need for a proven tool like Siterra. We’ve been a trusted partner during the evolution to 3G, 4G LTE and the future of LTE-A and heterogeneous networks.
TowerXchange: Readers always want to know about the financial stability of potential strategic partners - what is Accruent’s financial status?
Laith Dahiyat, Director, Product Management, Accruent:
At the end of 2013 Accruent was acquired by TA Associates, a private equity firm that specialises in growth markets and which owns a number of wireless companies across the world, giving us a great opportunity to leverage their relationships to accelerate our own international growth. Our existing investor, Vista Equity Partners, has retained a significant ownership position.
Accruent represents an extremely strong financial foundation for investors and clients, as evidenced by our track record of profitability and revenue growth and a customer retention rate of over 95 percent. We are consolidating the best people and products in the industry and will continue to do so.
TowerXchange: Is price a barrier for potential customers of enterprise-grade software in emerging markets?
Laith Dahiyat, Director, Product Management, Accruent:
Price isn’t really a barrier for becoming a Siterra customer. Whether you’re a carrier or towerco, once the size of the network reaches a certain point you need a management tool for to help manage growth. Once we start conversations with a new prospect, the ROI of investing in infrastructure lifecycle management far outweighs the cost even for a 50 site startup pushing to 250 sites; we structure the partnership to grow with them. Ultimately, it’s the same tool whether you’re managing 50,000 or 250 sites.
TowerXchange: How can site management systems help carriers and towercos identify potential new sites and new technologies that will add the most value to their networks?
Laith Dahiyat, Director, Product Management, Accruent:
We’re proud of our business intelligence suite, which provides reporting fully integrated with MicroStrategy, an enterprise class business intelligence tool. This means every piece of information, every activity and every asset is stored in a secure, consolidated customer data warehouse, which makes it easy for stakeholders to create and consume reports even if you’re not a trained data analyst.
Every piece of information, every activity and every asset is stored in a secure single data warehouse, which makes it easy for people to create and consume reports even if you’re not a trained data analyst
Siterra enables the C-suite to have a top down view of project status, network status, and vendor performance. The C-suite cares about the bottom line, not the nitty gritty, and prefers a rolled up view. Functional heads and senior management have different dashboards showing more granular aspects of the network, for example an SVP at one of our US carrier clients created a custom report summarising the status of LTE deployment in the Northeast region, showing the number of sites on air in last 24 hours and a ‘task late’ report, providing transparency into any delays and why they are occurring.
Moving away from senior management, site development organisations responsible for the build out of networks and the deployment of new technologies need tools that make it easy to manage up to 80,000 concurrent projects. Complex projects, such as the rollout of LTE, require standardisation and templatisation, coupled with the flexibility to deal with real world scenarios such as adapting to local zoning regulations. With Siterra, you can implement centralised control of projects, retaining dynamic variability so that rollouts are standardised except in regions with exceptional zoning requirements, where we might need to add three additional tasks to the process, for example.
One of our US carrier clients had become highly fragmented regionally - they had started acting autonomously like franchises. With a multitude of different projects and procedures, everyone was doing similar tasks in a different way, so it was tough for management to “compare apples to apples.” Now with the rate of investment and network growth, the carrier has leveraged Siterra to re-centralise control. This is an example of how standardisation, with flexibility, gives the client the ability to roll up to a clear picture of programmes at HQ level.
TowerXchange: How do site management systems support the day to day maintenance and management of existing sites?
Laith Dahiyat, Director, Product Management, Accruent:
There’s huge value in having a single source of the truth for all attributes and all assets.
Mobile access to infrastructure management information is increasingly critical. An engineer in the field in Peru might have specific and time sensitive needs - from a mountainside, he can pull up information about the site, and examine specific assets and attributes. Our workflow can assign tasks and deliverables to our field engineer in Peru, so he can fulfill deliverables for approval, such as take a photo to prove installation - our system captures the longitude and latitude and can reject or approve based on location. Upload is instantaneous, and triggers any next steps in the workflow.
Project management results in improved time to project completion, but also results in a dramatic increase in the quality of task completion. Delays are often due to human factor errors, which themselves are due to a lack of controls, causing delays and cost over-runs.
Mobile access is governed by various permissions. Depending who you are, you see different information, which assists with compliance and security, while streamlining the experience for users.
TowerXchange: TowerXchange focuses on emerging markets where asset registers and lease documentation can be notoriously incomplete. How can carriers and towercos accelerate the process of surveying and evaluating towers, and how can they ensure asset registers are kept up to date in a multi-tenant context?
Laith Dahiyat, Director, Product Management, Accruent:
The functionally that’s delivered with our robust lease and financial management function is tailored for both towercos and carriers. Our lease and financial management capability integrates with our robust document management system - of course maintaining comprehensive asset registers is all about ensuring you have complete lease documentation.
With our predefined libraries, you can configure a requirement that specific types of documentation be uploaded. When that’s combined with our project management module, a 50 task LTE rollout can include a 10 step approval workflow to generate a complete set of documentation. You can also add reporting and notification, and complete tasks like sending a supervisor an email anytime a specific group of users uploads a lease. This allows for proactive management, and the workflow forces compliance - every task is audited and logged, every task has an owner, and tasks must be completed in the right order. This also enables management access to a granular view of uploads, versions and approvals.
A combination of workflows, financials, and document libraries is critical to ensuring compliance and consistency of execution.
We are proud that we’ve never had a failed implementation, and that’s thanks to our deep industry knowledge and expertise
TowerXchange: Finally, please sum up how you would differentiate Accruent from competitive infrastructure lifecycle management platforms.
Laith Dahiyat, Director, Product Management, Accruent:
Our credibility comes first and foremost from our partnerships with leading wireless carriers, originally in North America but now also in Latin America and in Europe. Accruent is a trusted partner of some of the largest wireless companies in the world, which has enabled us to develop solutions to important problems in collaboration with the industry.
We often find our solution compared to ERP platforms which were not purpose built for the wireless industry. Accruent developed a holistic, complete solution, purpose built for the wireless industry across the world.
Many of our competitors don’t have our depth of implementation experience - our Senior Director of Services has been with us since 2001, and has implemented infrastructure lifecycle management solutions across all parts of the industry. We are proud that we’ve never had a failed implementation, and that’s thanks to our deep industry knowledge and expertise.
