Accruent’s Siterra provides a platform much like a dedicated ERP for towercos and MNOs – they are experts in helping clients clean up and organise their data, making the solution ideal as companies scale their operations across multiple regions and countries. In the latest of a series of interviews exploring the capabilities of Siterra, TowerXchange focuses on the merits of using a native SaaS platform, and on data accuracy and standardisation, critical to accelerating time to market for tenants, and critical to driving tenancy ratio and valuation growth for the towerco or MNO.
TowerXchange: Please introduce your company – where do you fit in the telecoms infrastructure ecosystem?
Bill Glass, General Manager of Telecom, Accruent:
We have developed an enterprise-class Software as a Service (SaaS) product for tower companies which encompasses the full site life cycle from site construction to co-location and the decommissioning of towers. Our software facilitates efficient operations and drives strong revenue growth for tower operators and managed service providers.
Think of us as an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) provider for tower companies and MNOs. We have the capacity to manage the entire ecosystem that surrounds tower infrastructure.
Co-location is one area we have a special focus on; most tower companies want to increase their co-tenancy ratio. What makes our company unique is that it has the capacity to manage the entire process from marketing through to fulfilment and operational management.
TowerXchange: The first question our readers will want to know is ‘how proven is your solution in the field?’ Can you please tell us about the performance of your solution the field – who is using it and what results have been achieved?
Bill Glass, General Manager of Telecom, Accruent:
Our solution has strong credibility in the market. Thirteen of the top 121 tower companies listed by TowerXchange are already current Accruent customers. At present, we operate in twelve countries across five continents and have a particularly strong focus for 2016 on Europe and Central and Latin America. We are constantly adding new portfolios for our current customers and carrying out implementations in multiple countries.
At first, many of our clients purchase our solution to use it in a particular territory. However, once they have the solution installed, they realise that they can achieve operational efficiencies by rolling it out across all of their countries and portfolios, and we can support them in this endeavour. If a company wants to roll out our solution to multiple countries, we can help them standardise processes including reporting, colocation, license management, project management, vendor management, and inspection management.
One of the selling points of our solution is that it cleans up and standardises data. It puts data into a much more efficient site-centric format, which makes it easier for MNOs and tower companies to buy, integrate and market their assets. What’s more, by handling data in a digestible manner, tower companies and MNOs can make towers available on the market faster and more cost efficiently, thereby increasing tenancy ratios.
by handling data in a digestible manner, tower companies and MNOs can make towers available on the market faster and more cost efficiently, thereby increasing tenancy ratios
TowerXchange: How does your solution help manage different stakeholders within the tower supply chain from tenants to subcontractors?
Bill Glass, General Manager of Telecom, Accruent:
The solution can help tower companies handle leads and administration models. In addition, the asset register and customer portal integration that sits at the heart of Siterra’s colocation solution can be used to provide up-to-date information on colocation. For example, a tower company may wish to inform an MNO of open towers that are available for rent. They will be able to do this through our portal.
Our solution can also be used to support contract and service provider management. In fact, Siterra uses a permissions-based model. If an operator or tower company wants to give a contractor or service provider access to the system it can do so very easily. The contractor or service provider can then carry out a task and post a photo to provide proof that the project has been completed. Siterra offers sophisticated tools for project managers to efficiently review work submitted for accuracy and quality. What’s more, the system has built in security features so that each contractor’s access and visibility is limited to only the assets, tasks, and sites that are necessary for their work.
TowerXchange: How can your SaaS platform be configured to adapt to different towercos’ unique business processes and workflows?
Bill Glass, General Manager of Telecom, Accruent:
We are constantly developing and upgrading our platform to suit the needs of tower companies. As things currently stand, Siterra provides for more than 90% of tower companies’ needs straight out of the box. The remaining 10% can be easily configured on the platform so customers can adapt it to meet their specific requirements. We come to the engagement with our customer with best practices available to immediately drive efficiency based on our knowledge of the industry.
We’ve also developed many feature requests in partnership with our clients. A client will typically come to us with a request for a particular feature. Once we have developed that feature we will incorporate it into later versions of our platform so that other customers can take advantage of it.
Thanks to our focus on long term partnerships and successful product co-development, we’ve been able to create a stable platform for tower portfolios. However, we notice that many companies in the market continue to invest in custom software. We feel that this is a failed strategy because, over the long term, companies end up wasting IT resources and limiting the potential to make long term efficiency gains.
TowerXchange: How can a robust approach to asset registers and asset lifecycle management improve the valuation of tower assets?
Bill Glass, General Manager of Telecom, Accruent:
The main benefit comes in being able to understand the condition of the assets and the inventory associated to those assets. Being able to keep track of inventory is a benefit, particularly for large, international tower companies. Smaller companies, on the other hand, are looking to maximise their tower valuation for strategic buyers. That’s exactly where the site-centric focus of our software comes into play.
Our platform can provide complete access to maintenance records, site information and pictures of site equipment. This makes it extremely useful for strategic buyers and companies that are seeking to sell their assets.
For example, it isn’t really feasible for a strategic buyer to use manpower to inspect four thousand towers when purchasing a portfolio. By using Siterra, buyers and sellers can perform clean searches without digging through files and records to get access to the right information. We find that most buyers and sellers prefer to use Siterra to carry out the portfolio valuation process – at the end of the day our system reduces acquisition risk for acquirers and improves return on investment for sellers.
TowerXchange: Please sum up how you would differentiate your solution from your competitors?
Bill Glass, General Manager of Telecom, Accruent:
Our annual product investment is larger than most of our competitors’ revenues – that in itself differentiates us from our competitors.
With some solutions on the market, users tend to become beholden to professional service teams after deployment. That’s not the case with Siterra. Once a customer has bought the solution and implemented it, they’re up and running. They don’t need to constantly check in with our professional services department
On top of this, Siterra is a SaaS platform, so we have benefited from the shift towards cloud applications. Unlike many other solutions on the market, our SaaS application was not built from scratch based on an on-premises application – all of our incremental investments have been to enhance its functionality. Total costs for the customer can escalate quickly if a solution needs to be re-built over time or requires extensive support. That’s why it makes much more sense to purchase a proven SaaS solution like Siterra.
With some solutions on the market, users tend to become beholden to professional service teams after deployment. That’s not the case with Siterra. Once a customer has bought the solution and implemented it, they’re up and running. They don’t need to constantly check in with our professional services department. Of course, our professional services and customer teams are always available if needed, but we are strongly of the opinion that our customers should not be dependent on us for their daily business needs.
There’s also a huge amount of functionality built into Siterra that allows customer system administrators to modify workflows, create new reports and manipulate site data on a large scale within the administration console. Users don’t need to receive any code or help from Accruent to make these changes.
In summary, our market share, our investment, and our product functionality significantly outweigh our competitors’ products, and over the last fifteen years, we have successfully brought the best of the best when it comes to industry best practices and knowledge.
