Embracing complexity: how Sitetracker is helping infrastructure owners level up their assets

Working with high profile clients like Verizon, Nokia. Cox Communications and Alphabet is testament to Sitetracker’s results and usability. Now more than ever, telecom infrastructure owners need to understand and manage their assets to plan, deploy, maintain and grow the value of their portfolios. As the number of points of presence globally proliferates at a huge rate, the processes of construction, colocation and maintenance become increasingly complex. We spoke with Sitetracker CEO Giuseppe Incitti, to find out more about how their solutions can help infrastructure owners manage complexity and position themselves for 5G success. 

TowerXchange: Please introduce Sitetracker, your company, and footprint.

Our mission is to power the successful deployment of critical infrastructure. As the global standard for managing high-volume projects, the Sitetracker Platform enables growth-focused innovators to optimize the entire asset lifecycle. From the field to the C-suite, our software enables people to perfect how they plan, deploy, maintain and grow their capital asset portfolios. Our customers are market leaders in the telecommunications, utility, smart cities and alternative energy industries, including Verizon, Nokia, Cox Communications, Alphabet, and Tillman Infrastructure. They rely on us to manage millions of assets and projects representing over $19 billion of portfolio holdings globally.

TowerXchange: Tell us about your solutions – can you give any examples of what you’ve delivered in telecoms to date?

We work with companies across the telecommunication industry, including fibre, engineering, small cell, DAS, and tower companies. Some of our telecommunications customers include Verizon, Cox Communications, ISCO International, and Tillman Infrastructure. Our tower customers, for example, use Sitetracker to manage assets, leasing, co-location, site acquisition, maintenance, and more.  So, we’re working with leaders in tower construction, site and tower asset maintenance, and site acquisition who have embraced change and are ready to succeed at this inflection point in the telecommunications industry.

TowerXchange: Sitetracker works across many verticals within critical infrastructure. Can you tell us about some of the similarities and differences between telecommunications and other verticals you work in? What does it tell us about the telecoms market?

We work with other industries, including utilities and smart city companies, which, similar to the telecommunications industry, have very unique challenges that lay ahead. Utilities are looking at issues like load growth and integrating renewable and distributed resources into the grid. These challenges will result in increased project complexity for the utility industry, so that’s definitely a parallel between telecom and utilities, but that’s not the whole story. 

Telecom companies are facing an unparalleled shift in the types of projects needed and how those projects need to be executed. 5G and network densification are completely new challenges that changes the dynamic of the industry. At this critical juncture, it’s imperative that industry telecom leaders embrace change. The race to 5G is a uniquely telecom-related challenge. 

Explosive growth in mobile data traffic means companies must make an important choice about their operations. The telecom industry is at an inflection point. As our communities become more connected, the volume, velocity, and variety of telecom-related infrastructure projects are exponentially increasing. Leaders in the industry are adopting purpose-built software to effectively plan, deploy, maintain, and grow the value of their asset portfolios. In order to keep up with the rate of innovation and increasing connectivity, successful companies are improving their operations with technology built for the management of site-based, repeatable projects like new tower construction, co-location, and tower maintenance.

These projects still require roughly the same end-to-end process for planning, deploying, and maintaining assets, including site identification, acquisition, regulatory approvals, design, construction, testing, validation, and more. But, instead of being vertically integrated, mobile network operators are increasingly relying on third-party service providers, who may, in turn, contract-out work to specialists for different project phases. More parties working on a higher project volume means higher complexity, making effective collaboration more crucial than ever before.

Throughout the industry, inadequate technology fails to offer live interaction between project managers and field workers, lacks the agility to handle the increasing variety of projects, and scatters mission-critical information across disconnected systems. We’re seeing this across a lot of other industries, too.

TowerXchange: With so many towers in Europe changing hands or being carved out at the moment, where can Sitetracker add value for tower owners?

There are over 600,000 towers in the Europe right now and, increasingly carriers are selling their towers to independent tower companies. This provides many benefits to carriers, but it does increase complexity by increasing the number of parties involved in co-location and leasing. Carriers must now work more with tower companies. If we had to sum this all up, we’d say that the industry is facing the greatest level of complexity it has ever seen and we believe the only way to navigate the complexity is through finding operational improvements on your way to operational excellence. That’s where we add value. 

TowerXchange: Tower owners are starting to evaluate their macro assets ahead of the load and support changes which will come into play as 5G rolls out – can you give us examples of some of the things tower owners will need to bear in mind, and how that information can best be used?

As 5G begins to roll out, tower owners will need to maintain and optimize their towers. Tower owners will need to embrace the changing telecommunications landscape and ensure that the pillars of telecommunication, towers, are in the best shape possible to support 5G. This means rigorous maintenance and upkeep, as well as coming up with new ways to make the most of existing towers.

The second thing I would say tower owners need to think about is how co-location will take place in the future. Some carriers are starting to work together on new builds, investing in the same, shared infrastructure. This means that tower companies could have multiple stakeholders from the outset of a new tower build. Managing complexity like this requires tower companies to embrace new planning and deployment technology in order to adapt to this new era.

TowerXchange: As well as telecoms, you also have a Smart City solution – can you talk to us about the scope of that offering? Do you find it is converging with your telecoms offering as tower companies and Mobile Network Operators begin to move into this vertical?

So, one example I’ll give is LinkNYC. The City of New York partnered with Intersection to create LinkNYC, a pioneering smart cities program to convert over 7,500 public payphones to kiosks and create the largest and fastest free wifi network in the world. This project lives at the convergence of telecommunications and smart cities. Beyond the challenge of creating an all-new, purpose-built fiber optic network, each kiosk deployment requires approximately 450 tasks, spread across 15 teams, from start to finish. Not only was Intersection deploying kiosks in New York City, but they also took on this project in the UK through their LinkUK program.

In New York, they were able to simultaneously manage over 4,000 kiosk builds effectively in phase one of the project, including coordination across 15 teams and the city government, shorten time to revenue for a $500 million opportunity in digital advertising over 12 years, efficiently forecast project completions, and share deployment progress with all stakeholders through dynamic maps.

Intersection recognized that they were embarking on a new, innovative kind of program and needed a correspondingly innovative way to manage it. Sitetracker enabled the entire LinkNYC team — from Intersection’s project managers and executives to vendors’ field workers and city representatives — to instantly see the status of all of their projects through easy-to-use reports, dashboards, and dynamic maps. Sitetracker keeps the public informed, too: a map of Link locations on LinkNYC’s website, showing in real time which kiosks are online and coming soon, is a standard Sitetracker feature.

In addition to this kind of tracking, the LinkNYC team is able to understand the maintenance status of all of their assets and keep a schedule of maintenance projects, ensuring that kiosks kept in working order. The Sitetracker Platform also enables Intersection to perform work management for each of these projects, ensuring that the right people with the right skills are in the right place at the right time.

We see Sitetracker as a solution for companies looking to embrace change, whether that means new types of projects at the intersection of telecom and smart cities or a new way of managing projects to scale with demand.