Digital Trinity: digitising towercos

Digital Trinity is an innovative new digitisation platform originally developed for one of the leading tower companies in Myanmar. Promising to be the antidote to expensive annual subscription fees, Digital Trinity provides a full set of operations, project and asset management tools for a one-time license fee, which could save a medium sized towerco upwards of US$1mn per annum in IT costs alone!

TowerXchange: Please introduce yourselves and your business.

I was Heading IT Transformation for one of the leading tower companies in Myanmar and in 2018, I Co-founded Digital Trinity to meet the data acquisition and revenue assurance challenges of tower companies across the globe. I come from Telecommunication background with experience in  various products and services in CEM, IoT, Enterprise IT, Mobility, Big-data, Core Networks, VAS, NGN platforms, BSS/OSS and identity management solutions spread across ASEAN, India, Middle-East and Africa.

Along with the co-founders we developed a digital platform to help us overcome the challenges of accelerated tower network rollout in Myanmar, while integrating with remote monitoring reporting and billing tools. That platform was to become Digital Trinity, so it originates directly from meeting the needs of a fast-growing, green field towerco.

We have put a lot of effort into developing a systemised and digitised solution to capture assets, uptime, and O&M elements, as well as the active and passive infrastructure variables within a tower site; an ecosystem of data created out of necessity in order to achieve operational excellence.

We are 100% focused on developing software for the telecom vertical, leveraging IoT, Blockchain and digital mobility tools to connect the field force and consumption data with reporting and back office reconciliation.

Digital Trinity’s partners include Microsoft, Tardid, Nokia, Odoo, Knowesis, the Blockchain Council, and Digital Trust.

TowerXchange: How do towercos manage data – and how should towercos manage data?

Most towercos think they have a data strategy, but systems are typically very distributed and poorly integrated. For example, the towerco we worked for was initially a vendor-driven organisation before we identified critical workflows and brought critical processes in-house.

We customised our ERP platform as an end to end solution to integrate critical processes for a towerco: from warehousing and operations to finance – we brought everything together on a single platform. We integrated with existing installed systems such as trouble ticketing, asset depreciation and remote monitoring systems (RMS), and tied in mobility apps for the field force. And we used IoT technology to connect with sensors and aggregate data.

TowerXchange: Please sum up the operational challenges you are seeking to help tower owners and operators overcome.

Whether you are a tower company or an MNO, you are probably struggling to reconcile conflicting sources of data. Digital Trinity can be your gatekeeper – your single source of the truth.

Tower companies providing power as a service, with Service Level Agreements that might require 99.95% uptime, need to harvest from multiple sources of data from diesel gensets, fuel filling contractors, CPS levels, load – Digital Trinity acts like a constantly updated audit and revenue gatekeeper.

TowerXchange: What are the key functionalities Digital Trinity provides?

I would like to highlight three key functionalities:

1. Tower operations: we have developed a proprietary tower rollout project management and reconciliation system, based on a Microsoft SharePoint and Odoo platform to ensure it is open and readily configurable by any tower company. Too many towercos are still using orphaned Excel spreadsheets to manage operations – going online and using a platform like SharePoint enables creation of a single, secure, shared document repository.

2. Power solution: We’ve integrated our power module with the sensors embedded into the energy equipment vendors most widely used in Myanmar, including those provided by Lineage, Cummins, Helios, Huawei, Greenpole, Flexenclosure and Invendis and we know the optimum operating parameters from Myanmar. Within this module we have developed a unique load alert system, first generated for an Operator in Myanmar. For example, if your tower has 2kW load and a new co-location or equipment switch breaches the MSA (Master Services Agreement) you get a real time alert. Such alerts are critical when seeking to solve conflicts between tenants or between towercos and their refuelling contractors.

3. Fixed asset register: Digital Trinity also makes a comprehensive asset tracking and management solution available from the tower operating centre (TOC). We understand the challenge of maintaining an up to date inventory of assets in the field, having audited towers, with up to 99 different assets on each tower. For example, we would separately audit 64 battery cells in a power cabinet – each would have its own scanned barcode sticker. Too often we’ve seen towercos and MNOs with incomplete or out of date asset registers, often dating back to the original acquisition of those assets. Having an accurate, up to date fixed asset register is critical for reconciliation.

Digital Trinity’s goal is to create a shared platform for towercos and their MNO partners, consolidating data from multiple sources, and configurable by the end user. Our operational model combines: - Project management

- Billing

- Collaboration

- ERP

- Asset management

- Operator integration

- Business intelligence

- Remote monitoring systems

TowerXchange: Please explain the criticality of having an accurate fixed asset register when it comes to valuation.

Whether you’re a buyer or a seller of towers, asset verification is key to correctly defining the value of a tower portfolio.

ERP is a poor solution for managing tower asset depreciation, and so many asset registers in our industry are not properly updated. But more importantly, we are able to maintain that asset register on a day to day basis.

TowerXchange: Our readers will always want to know: how proven is Digital Trinity in the field?

Digital Trinity has been refined and proven over three years of development and usage in Myanmar. We are in active discussions with one of the country’s MNOs. And we’re talking to a West African towerco about helping them with revenue assurance, asset management and drone based tower inspection. We are also in discussion with major tower companies in the region for pilots of drone inspection and asset management solutions using the latest tracking technologies.

TowerXchange: What is Digital Trinity’s commercial model?

One of the reasons we created Digital Trinity was our dissatisfaction with the cost of annual subscription fees to cloud-based software, compounded by the professional services costs of these ’off the shelf’ solutions. We had three separate IT software agreements, and each of these pieces of software had a three to five year annual subscription, billed per site per month.

Digital Trinity does not charge monthly fees, thus avoiding recurring costs.

For example, for one of our towerco partners, we managed to save over US$1mn per year through avoidance of a perpetual license cost.

TowerXchange: What is the implementation roadmap?

We start by conducting our due diligence on the current architecture and compare that to the ‘to be’ architecture. We do a detailed gap analysis and define the necessary re-architecting and total cost of ownership. And if that is all acceptable to the client, we implement, train and handover.

We can host Digital Trinity in our own data centre, or we can deploy it for our clients to self-operate.

TowerXchange: Tell us about how Digital Trinity proposes to use drones for tower inspection.

We don’t think it’s feasible to climb towers on a quarterly basis to audit them and check for safety.

We have a partnership with Tardid to use machine learning to inspect towers using drones. Drones can capture more than just pictures – we can use sensors to gather data on the nature of the materials used and any corrosion, and combine that data in a materials analysis that predicts future stresses on materials.

Combined with legacy barcoding tools, drones can be used as an active and passive asset reconciliation solution.

We are about to pilot drone technology in India, and hope to bring the technology to Myanmar shortly thereafter. Its already proven in oil and gas applications.

TowerXchange: How does Digital Trinity propose to attract new customers?

We would like to offer a free pilot to any tower owner – give us a chance to manage at least 50 sites and prove our solution works!

We are keen to work with any towerco seeking to achieve significant savings by replacing software subscriptions with a one-time license fee platform. This can significantly reduce the costs of IT, particularly for small and medium sized towercos that lack the financial means to spend US$1mn plus per year on software.