Are you paying enough attention to your data?

Made by telecom people for the telecom industry, ClickOnSite offers some unique features, such as its low-cost methodology to MNOs and towercos across multiple regions. In this exclusive interview, Jerome Perret, CEO of ITD, offers TowerXchange’s readers an updated overview of ClickOnSite’s characteristics while exploring the latest trends from the industry in terms of data collection and utilisation – an analysis that is becoming increasingly fundamental to succeed for MNOs and towercos worldwide.

TowerXchange: Can you please reintroduce ITD and your ClickOnSite product to TowerXchange readers, and tell us a bit about your background in telecoms?

Absolutely, always good to remind readers of the ClickOnSite basics.

In the 90s and early 00s the founders and management of ITD managed tower rollouts in Europe, Africa, Middle East and Asia. From that experience we realised how technology can make tower rollouts and maintenance of site infrastructure much more efficient. As a result, IT-Development SAS was founded, and we created ClickOnSite, our flagship product for managing infrastructure assets.

As time goes on, we continue to add layers of business logic for elements such as project management, reporting and search, atop the comprehensive database and document management system. And, of course, our APIs interface to integrate other enterprise software.

TowerXchange: How has the ClickOnSite product evolved in the past year since we last spoke to ITD, which new capabilities does it feature?

Our product dashboard is driven by features our customers tell us they need, combined with our extensive knowledge of the telecom industry. For example, we made an integration for IFRS16 compliance months before it became a topic in the press because we knew from our industry experience that there will be a big need for it.

We have added great functionality to ClickOnSite this past year, items that we are proud of from a technical standpoint, and excited about, for the benefits they bring to companies and their staff. These include:

- ClickOnSite Mobile app

- Full-featured Project Management Office (integrated with BPM, task tracking + reporting)

- Executive dashboards

- Global search

- Lease contracts management (IFRS16)

- User usage analytics

- Simplified ClickOnSite user permissions management

Listing a lot of new features reminds me to mention that adding features to ClickOnSite does not add complexity. In fact, we do low-code development, which means we reduce the need for developer intervention in implementation or configuration with the customer. This makes implementations significantly faster, which of course means lower costs all around, and also less headaches.

TowerXchange: When looking at establishing a presence in Asia, why did you choose Southeast Asia rather than India or China?

While the size and characteristics of the Indian and Chinese markets are attractive, we decided to open our office in Vietnam, and focus on customers across Southeast Asia in light of a few considerations.

First of all, the net-net is that we see a strong need among the MNOs and towercos in the region to move away from Excel. In fact, many players are now shifting from a rather simplistic set of processes towards a digital transformation of their operations. Our company culture is entrepreneurial and dynamic, and that fits well to rapidly growing companies in smaller countries, which is also one of the reasons behind our success across Africa.

Also, ClickOnSite as a product and licensing model is suited for fast-moving operations, just like MNOs in Southeast Asia. We have chosen to focus and make ClickOnSite the best tool for managing rollouts and passive infrastructure and ease the way for integration with other specialised tools (RMS systems, IFRS16) via API.

Accordingly, ClickOnSite is priced to allow MNOs and towercos to use the parts they need and to add elements as they grow. They do not have to pay for an unwieldy ERP solution of which they will only use 50% of the functionalities.

We are in the final stages of signing contracts with our second and third towerco customers in Asia. As much as I’d like to announce it in this interview, the ink won’t dry for a few days yet.

An equal consideration for choosing Vietnam has to do with supporting customers – it wasn’t just about making sales!

Vietnam has a lot of talented developers and technicians. Among the big benefits of having a strong development team in our Ho Chi Minh City office include direct customer support without the limitations of time zones and business trips. Additionally, our Vietnam team starts working six hours before our European technical staff, which allows us to increase and improve our level of customer care worldwide.

TowerXchange: How do you ensure that your solution is correctly implemented and used optimally in the field?

By nature, we are a company that believes in being close to our customers. From the start we are always engaged, listening to our customers’ issues and needs and understanding their operations so we can optimise ClickOnSite for them. When we implement ClickOnSite for a customer, we do much more than just make software work, we set the stage for the digital transformation of their processes and way of working.

Our customer churn rate is negligible and one of the key reasons for that is our emphasis on delivering excellent, hands-on service and support. This means in-house training at our clients’ premises to ensure proper knowledge and skills transfer.

The mission of our travels and subsidiaries is to bring ITD/ClickOnSite closer to our clients, allowing us to offer top service in terms of support, implementation and change management related to site infrastructure management and digital transformation of operations. Additionally, we host ClickOnSite user workshops for customers to stay up to date with the latest features and to share best practices with each other.

All these activities are supported in the Asia through our Ho Chi Minh City office. As I mentioned earlier, we hire local developers, project managers, BPMN specialists, which makes for interesting international opportunities for the local telecom professional community. To us, being successful as a company means that beyond our own success, we are able to guarantee our customers and partners’ success.

TowerXchange: Geographically, Asia is very spread out. How do you handle customer support over such a large and diverse area?

Providing active, engaged support is great but equally important is that ClickOnSite is easy to use and implement from the start.

In terms of user interface, ClickOnSite is intuitively designed; it can be used with minimal training. The interface on the screen is “responsive”, so it can be used on any device – being that a PC, tablet or smartphone.

Technology-wise, as I mentioned earlier, we do low-code development, which means that 90% of the needs of each client can be configured by a business analyst, rather than coded by a developer. This tactical and practical benefit is part of our strategic vision to make ClickOnSite low-impact to use and high-impact in delivering results.

The ClickOnSite mobile app is very easy to configure and use even without training. Creating new forms tailored to a company’s needs is simple and it works offline too.

TowerXchange: You recently went through a new round of fundraising, what was the investment for and is going to change for current and prospective customers?

In terms of product, ClickOnSite is full-featured and mature. This round of funding is focused on speed and scale of bringing ClickOnSite to customers. It will primarily be used to improve our proximity to existing customers and extend to new territories. We also aim at growing our sales team and improve the speed and quality of ClickOnSite implementations.

We will reinforce and expand our local presence in South East Asia and Africa from our offices located in Ho Chi Minh City, Abidjan and Johannesburg. Part of the effect will be higher visibility in the regions, but also continued top-notch customer support. We are investing in training programs for customers, and we are hiring managers with extensive experience.

We are putting special emphasis on growing our sales team to increase conversations with prospects about ClickOnSite. Simply put, we are adding people to let more companies than ever know how ClickOnSite can help them. Hopefully everyone in the industry will notice our raised profile.

TowerXchange: ITD targets both MNOs and towercos, and you offer your solution as both SaaS and on-premise, can you explain why your product is particularly well suited to the needs of your different customers?

The requirements of each MNO and towerco depend on the specific countries where they operate and each single market presents its own characteristics. To respond to this need, ClickOnSite can be broken out into tenants; in fact, each customer can divide the system into as many tenants as they need, to cover different requirements.

On a related note, some customers prefer to have their enterprise applications hosted on-premise within their own IT environment. ClickOnSite can be hosted that way or it can be hosted full SaaS, or as a hybrid of the two. In other words, we can mix and match the hosting model to optimally fit the company’s needs, structure and constraints.

TowerXchange: Our Data Collection and Utilisation Working Groups have raised lots of ambitions for using data better, what concrete steps have you seen taken in making the passive telecom tower industry more data-driven?

We are strong believers in the power of data to inform and strengthen business decisions. ClickOnSite helps unlock the data related to towers so that MNOs and towercos can use the information to optimise their businesses.

One of the key ClickOnSite benefits that we highlight is that everyone from the office to the field works on one set of data in real-time. No silos, no copies over on someone’s hard drive. This level of accuracy and transparency is a big leap forward for MNOs and towercos compared to using Excel, or a database which is not updated in real-time.

That said, as it has been commented by participants in the working group, the first task is actually having accurate passive infrastructure data. ClickOnSite makes it very easy to import existing data, or add them from the field, for example through the ClickOnSite Mobile app. Also, because ClickOnSite is interoperable with other enterprise software through APIs, it can combine information from multiple sources within the same organisation – for example, infrastructure data together with remote monitoring system (RMS) data.

But to get very technical for a moment about accuracy, the underlying data model of ClickOnSite ensures that a standardised and single source of data is used in the system, therefore across the company. No more need to try and decide which of two data points is the correct or which one is more recent. The ClickOnSite reporting module makes it easy to create reports across multiple data points and presents the results graphically. Lastly, ClickOnSite features dashboards offering a real-time KPIs’ overview.

We are excited about the data analysis behind ClickOnSite’s PMO (Project Management Office) module. Using a combination of data and reporting, MNOs and towercos can analyse their processes and identify inefficiencies or optimisation areas in their workflows.

Circling back to the topic of the Data Collection and Utilisation Working Groups, we applaud TowerXchange for putting this group together. It is a vital topic for the industry and we are sharing our expertise and experience with MNOs and towercos in a forum that even includes our competitors, for the benefit of the industry as a whole. Data collection and usage is extremely relevant to assess how efficiently MNOs and towercos run their businesses - this is just the start of a trend that will be very important in the coming years.

TowerXchange: Please sum up how you would differentiate your solution from your competitors?

Most site infrastructure solutions and tools available in the market are either very simple – hence a little more than a database – or overly complex – part of an ERP system not even made for telecoms. Given our hands-on history rolling out and managing towers, we know what core functionalities MNOs and towercos need to streamline their work and remain efficient at scale. The differentiators boil down to three areas:

Technology

- Future-proof technology

- Low-code methodology which keeps costs low and speed high

Features

- Business logic layers that use the underlying data, for example BPM driving the workflow to automatically distribute tasks

- Reporting and data mining to use your data to make decisions

- Our CTO is a search expert: the search capabilities built into ClickOnSite are world-class

Service (Partnership)

- Buying a great tool like ClickOnSite is one thing but easing its adoption and correct use requires a unique skillset, and as “telecom people making software for telecom customers”, ITD is ideally situated to facilitate that for its global portfolio of clients.

The last differentiator is time and money: we typically come in at about half the price of our competitors and are able to offer a much quicker product’s set up, which is approximately two months for a towerco.