During the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2021, Telecom Review spoke with Nabil Haddad, chief executive officer at IPT PowerTech, a pioneer in combining power expertise along with telecom services and managed services in the Middle East, Africa, and neighboring countries.
Can you briefly tell us about IPT PowerTech as a company?
IPT PowerTech Group has been established since the end of 1993. We started off as being a specialized group in energy-efficienct solutions which then moved to telecom infrastructure services. Later on, we decided to merge those two specializations into the ESCO pillar of the group which whereby today, we are the largest ESCO provider within the Middle East, Africa, and worldwide, with more than 10,000 sites under management.
The ESCO concept is one of the latest concepts that allows our Group to become the powerco for a towerco and for the MNO. We are using our energy-efficient solution and renewable energy solution together with our telecom infrastructure expertise and managed services expertise to give an end-to-end service to MNOs and towercos.
In a nutshell, the Group is composed of three main pillars. The first pillar is the energy-efficient solutions, where we have the largest portfolio of hybrid energy solutions. The second pillar being the managed services and the telecom services pillar, while the last and latest pillar, is ESCO which is the marriage between both.
Fusing energy and telecom, how do you see your services evolve in the coming years with the ongoing digital transformation among telcos?
Digital transformation is a natural power consumer. As technologies evolve, we see 5G coming with more loads, more telecom load consumption on the side of infrastructure, and consequently more power needs. The challenge here will be how can we economize energy consumption for telecom operators and towercos at the same time? Especially with the rising need for carbon reduction.
We are working to develop more energy-efficient solutions using renewables and available technologies. We definitely see a lot of prospects and a lot of challenges in the coming two years in order to really serve the digital transformation in telecom.
Can you elaborate more on how technology and sustainability going hand-in-hand is very important for long-term growth?
Sustainable growth is embedded in what we are doing from solutions and services. This is our motto, this is what we do, this is what we breed on a daily basis. Sustainability, in our sense, is from an energy perspective. When we talk about telecom infrastructure and sustainability, we are talking about sustainability related to energy on telecom networks. Technology, developments, renewables, and energy-efficient solutions are inherent points in really achieving sustainability on those networks.
What is your commitment as a company in line with MWC 2021’s key theme “Connected Impact”?
People might think that the passive infrastructure portion of networks is a not-connected infrastructure. However, with more and more challenges coming ahead and with the optimization needs for those systems that we are deploying and developing, we find ourselves obliged to really go more in-depth into digital transformation in our solutions and our remote-power monitoring systems and power platforms in order to really create the most optimum solutions to serve our clients and the infrastructure that we are managing.
So, from a commitment perspective, we are definitely committed. It's challenging to be really able to meet those targets, especially that we're working on lowering the carbon emissions, trying to digitize our solutions, and at the same time, through this digitization, create the optimum in terms of solution performance for optimized network performance and optimized and reduced carbon emissions.
