With projects launching in three continents, Treefrog is a new company with bold targets. Daniel Reiter spent most of his career serving the telecom industry from different angles, including Telefónica and Tarantula, and has created a solution that responds to the demands, expectations and frustrations he has gathered in his previous professional experiences. In this interview, he introduces Treefrog’s products, what led him to the creation of the company and what customers can expect from Tower BPM™, their configurable software package.
TowerXchange: From Telefónica to Treefrog, can you tell us more about your professional path?
Daniel Reiter, Managing Director, Treefrog:
I have always been interested in software and pursued a degree in Physics and a Masters in Software Engineering which pushed my career in that direction. After various experiences with companies like BACG/Armature and IBM, I landed a job with Telefónica/O2 within their EAI team, which dealt with various technical integration projects around Europe.
Those five years with Telefónica gave me a clear understanding of the software needs of the telecom industry. I acquired a very broad experience from high level issues to the technical side of things.
I then moved to Tarantula which at the time was operating in the UK only. During that time, I dealt with so many different aspects of the telecom tower business and was able to truly grasp what our customers needed. In general, I realised that software tended to lack the level of configurability customers look for. And I made it a mission to create something able to offer enhanced flexibility for the tower industry within one single system. I knew that if, as the supplier, I was experiencing frustrations with the limitations of the solution this must be felt much more keenly by the customer and I believed that giving the customer what they needed rather than what suited the supplier was a better way to go.
That was the biggest driver that pushed me to create Treefrog - to go beyond the architectural and technical limitations that most software in the market are unable to overcome. At the forefront of all development was creating a product with the advantages of a bespoke product married to the advantages of an off the shelf product and none of the downsides of either. I firmly believe that’s what we have achieved.
I started working with some angel investors from London, spent two years in R&D and the set up of Treefrog and created a software which is flexible, quick, completely adaptable and yet very simple to use.
TowerXchange: Tell us how Tower BPM™ was “developed from the ground up in consultation and collaboration with industry insiders and working project managers”?
Daniel Reiter, Managing Director, Treefrog:
My career gave me a very clear understanding of what satisfied and what frustrated customers. I was able to work with them and really see the strengths and weaknesses of various products and, in the instance of Telefónica, worked on the customer side of the business, which widened my perspective even further.
You see, there are certain similarities across the globe in terms of how towercos and MNOs operate but eventually, every company has its own strategy and business model. There are a lot of different components to their business such as their cost model, their outsourcing strategy, their asset registry system et cetera.
Those small differences and our ability to integrate it into our system is what we were after. Seamless adaptability, especially when we deal with towercos that are acquisitive and own an ever-changing portfolio was the aim and that’s what we have managed to do.
I have seen large software companies trying to create a solution for towercos and failing because they didn’t understand the industry business model. Treefrog is positioned right in the middle of the telecom tower industry to better serve its needs.
TowerXchange: One of the first questions our readers always ask is “how proven is the solution”? Please tell us about some of the deployments of Treefrog with MNOs and towercos.
Daniel Reiter, Managing Director, Treefrog:
To date we have a live customer in Brazil and we offer them a series of modules to deal with site management in real time. They have been able to monitor anything from their operational workflows, automatic recover, real time data from the sites et cetera.
In the meantime, we’ve created a very strong pipeline of projects in the UK, Europe, The Middle East and Africa and we are working towards getting them started.
One of the strongest features of Tower BPM™ is being multi-language, which makes it adaptable to every company around the world. I strongly believe that you need to offer customers a solution able to literally speak their own language and this was one of the characteristics I have been pursuing since day one.
One of the strongest features of Tower BPM™ is being multi-language, which makes it adaptable to every company around the world. I strongly believe that you need to offer customers a solution able to literally speak their own language and this was one of the characteristics I have been pursuing since day one
TowerXchange: What are the KPI’s for the successful management of a tower portfolio?
Daniel Reiter, Managing Director, Treefrog:
There are various streams of KPIs. From a revenue perspective, it’s about their customer base but then things get more complicated by adding the asset side which incorporates existing and projected portfolios, audit, who’s done what on each site, opex per asset, et cetera.
You can obviously add the rollout component which will help you track what’s happening with each given project and how long it is taking you to complete tasks. Customers will be able to identify bottlenecks and will understand where they’ve “failed” in one specific project.
When it comes to their relationship with the final tenant, a towerco wants to have visibility into the SLA to ensure they stay within targets.
TowerXchange: Why is having an accurate, up to date tower asset register so important?
Daniel Reiter, Managing Director, Treefrog:
Accuracy goes beyond the asset register. It’s about having a clear picture of your processes, detailed information about the management of each asset and keeping track of proactive maintenance, site visits, H&S et cetera.
The configuration really depends on a company’s model but eventually, who doesn’t want to check the structural integrity of their assets? And who doesn’t want to know when it was last inspected?
Having all the information available at a click is key. It’s about knowing one’s business - from the asset register all the way to its maintenance.
On a more financial level, knowing a portfolio inside and out will affect the value of your company. It’s not only about the revenue a company generates today, via leases and amendments, but also about how to finance the business and eventually, maybe even sell it.
TowerXchange: What are the benefits of using a system designed for MNOs and towercos rather than, at the low end, customising Excel or an Access database or, at the high end, using an ERP solution?
Daniel Reiter, Managing Director, Treefrog:
I believe there’s a magic number after which a towerco needs to abandon any simple tracking system - Excel or Access - and move on to a more sophisticated solution, yet without adopting anything that will completely change the way they do business and require ages to configure.
In my opinion, a portfolio of two hundred towers is too large to be managed via a spreadsheet and that’s when I’d advise towercos to get hold of a professional piece of software.
You see, Treefrog sits in between Excel and an ERP solution. We give customers a fast, powerful solution without the need to spend ages on it to understand its functionality. On the other hand, we allow our clients to create any type of process and import it into the system, beyond their tower assets. They can track virtually anything they want via our software - any single expense, operation, workflow and task related to their company.
TowerXchange: How should towers integrate job ticketing and management of the O&M workforce with RMS data, asset registers and longer term project management workflows?
Daniel Reiter, Managing Director, Treefrog:
For us the integration process is fairly simple. In fact, we can create a set of specific rules that will allow our system to integrate with SAP, Oracle or any other solution companies have adopted. And we are talking about a few tweaks and thirty minutes of updates, so a very quick turnaround.
one of the major drivers behind creating Treefrog was that I believed there must be a more customer focused way of creating solutions and I firmly believe this is what we have achieved
TowerXchange: Finally, please sum up the capabilities of Treefrog’s Tower BPM™ solution and how you would differentiate it from competitive platforms such as Tarantula, Siterra and Infozech’s iTower.
Daniel Reiter, Managing Director, Treefrog:
Essentially, I believe that our solution is the most flexible out there in the market. I appreciate that any innovative supplier should constantly seek to improve and innovate but from the information I have our solution has major advantages in terms of customer experience. I also believe that Treefrog solutions have the strongest architecture which will integrate with any existing system very quickly. We focus on open standards which allows us to create solutions that are very quick to integrate and deploy and this also gives our solutions a longer life time value.
Thanks to years of experience developing software, I am fairly good at comparing solutions and I believe Treefrog’s products are the most efficient platforms in the market with a strong operation engine and a very adaptable system which allows customers to do most configurations and tweaks by themselves, after appropriate training. We also have some very advanced features around location, imaging and extendible plugins which allow for customer ideas to be rapidly turned into reality.
As I said earlier one of the major drivers behind creating Treefrog was that I believed there must be a more customer focused way of creating solutions and I firmly believe this is what we have achieved.
