Over the past months, several multi-country towercos including EuroTeleSites, Telia Towers and TOTEM have signed partnerships with workforce and asset management companies including Sitetracker, Shapemaker and Kwarto to accelerate digitalisation strategies as towercos look to enhance operational, technical and commercial efficiencies.
EuroTelesites partners with Sitetracker
On 21st August, Sitetracker, a provider of deployment operations software, announced it has struck up a partnership with EuroTeleSites, one of Central and Eastern Europe’s new towercos.
EuroTeleSites operates a total of 13,465 towers across six CEE markets including; Austria (6,094), Croatia (1,573), Serbia (1,702), Slovenia (782), North Macedonia (573) and Bulgaria (2,741).
Rising customer expectations led to the towerco’s decision to shift off its legacy asset management software to a platform that can provide improved usability and built-in data analytics. Sitetracker will be providing its prebuilt intelligent templates and workflows for management best-practice.
The vendor has signed agreements with several other major industry players which the firm will no doubt leverage expertise and knowledge from, including Vodafone, Vantage Towers and VerticalBridge.
Lars Mosdorf, CFO of EuroTeleSites and head of IT strategy, commented “The approximately 400,000 mobile towers of all telcos and TowerCos throughout Europe form the infrastructural backbone of an increasingly digital, mobile society. As a tower operator, this requires close coordination with customers, authorities, landlords and suppliers: from site selection to construction and maintenance. Sitetracker helps us synchronize all the necessary information across countries and in real time and use it more effectively,"
"With the introduction of Sitetracker, we are creating state-of-the-art support for our team and the basis for big data analytics, machine learning and, in a later step, digital twins."
Sitetracker and other software vendors continue to see success winning strategic partnerships with telecom and digital infrastructure operators amidst the connectivity boom driven by the EU's Gigabit Infrastructure Act which was approved in April this year.
Telia Towers partners with Shapemaker
Just a few days prior another software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company Shapemaker announced extending its partnerships with Scandanavian towerco Telia Towers Finland and Sweden, in addition to Norway. Shapemaker will improve visibility over the tower portfolio, reducing inefficiencies for civil engineering, structural reporting and colocation requests.
By automating the complexity of engineering design, Shapemaker states it can achieve 50x faster structural analysis, providing 3D-modelling of ancillary placement, non-linear and linear FEA, advanced wind-profile calculations and structural reports.
Telia Towers CIO Peter Borgfors commented that the firm “is on the path towards digitising our whole tower portfolio with all the capabilities Shapemaker has to offer to accommodate and be in the forefront of customer needs on mast and equipment space services in the Nordics. With Shapemaker, Telia Towers will be able to predict space capacity on co-locations requests in a matter of minutes”.
Telia Towers operates a portfolio of 5,610 sites across three Scandanavian markets; Finland (3,000), Norway (1,000) and Sweden (1,610).
TOTEM partners with Kwarto
Last month, Kwarto, another 3D SaaS platform, announced a collaboration with France and Spain-active towerco TOTEM, implementing digital twin technology to digitise site visits, speed up design and redevelopment of mobile sites for lease up, and remote management for preventative maintenance operations.
Commenting on the partnership, Thierry Papin, CEO of TOTEM France commented how digital twin technology can improve safety by reducing tower climbs and improving structural visibility, and forms part of an ongoing digitalisation project.
Papin discussed the need to move towards what he called “TowerCo 2.0”, understanding the world of tomorrow for towercos, which includes digitisation and process automation for both CSR and efficiency enhancements.
TOTEM is Europe’s 6th largest towerco operating 27,100 towers, predominantly in their home market of France where they operate Orange’s total tower portfolio of 19,500 sites, as well as 7,600 towers in Spain.
A strategic focus on digitalisation
The pick-up in asset and workforce management partnerships comes off the back of a strategic focus in the European tower industry to drive efficiencies, improve data visibility and accelerate speed of lease-up to drive value creation in-line with customer needs.
Back in April at TowerXchange Meetup Europe, big towerco CXOs highlighted the need for improvements in business process optimisation off the back of a strong pipeline of M&A transactions.
The CEOs of Cellnex, Vantage Towers and TOTEM all stressed the importance of digitalisation to speed up structural upgrades and colocations, enhance emissions reporting for MNO ESG commitments and improve the management of multi-market tower portfolios.
There is also a consensus among towercos that taking a dynamic approach reduces human error in document processing, data management and billing reporting. AI is being increasingly looked at to help streamline everything from site selection and structural upgrades to data analysis and reporting.
Towercos are now looking for more suppliers to come forward with compelling use-cases that embrace new cutting-edge technologies, although this needs to be carefully balanced with realistic budgets.
