Mounir Ladki, co-founder, president and CTO MYCOM OSI, bagged this year’s Telecom Review Award for Global Merit Leader CTO of the Year – Vendor. Here, he speaks to Telecom Review about his company’s efforts in hyperautomation to enhance operational efficiencies in customer segments.
Please tell us about MYCOM OSI's 5G Assurance solutions. How are they helping consumers and enterprises?
Today, CSPs around the world are deploying 5G at pace. There is a global competition to win market share with both consumers and enterprises. 5G comes with two key promises — enhanced mobile broadband experience to users and a new generation of use cases for enterprises for digital services. As such, 5G has to deliver an exceptional performance level and guarantee quality of service. Our assurance solutions are helping CSPs to deliver that level of unparalleled network experience to both customer segments. At the same time, 5G comes with cloud core architecture which it requires in order to manage the performance to bring and map together the data from the world of IT, cloud and networks. This is exactly what we are doing. We are eliminating these silos to enable end-to-end network and service quality assurance for both consumers and enterprises.
How is MYCOM OSI collaborating with cloud service providers for its automation solutions, and how is it transforming telco operation centers?
The assurance of 5G needs to come with automation, and automation needs AI at its heart because we don’t know what use cases would be deployed on these networks tomorrow. We don’t know what devices will be connected. So, we need automation that continues learning and exploring data, and that is why AI is so critical. To execute AI at scale, we need massive compute and storage resources, especially in the telecom use cases. Training modules take enormous bandwidth and resources. Hence, collaboration with cloud service providers becomes absolutely necessary. For this very reason, we have completely re-engineered our platform and portfolio to be cloud-native. Today, through our strategic partnership with AWS, for example, we offer our solutions as SaaS on the cloud and enable the successful delivery of scalable, AI-based automation solutions.
Please apprise us of MYCOM OSI’s latest projects using artificial intelligence (AI). What are the challenges?
We are focusing on four key use cases. 1) Forecasting: we are in a world where the behavior of users, be they people, machines or devices, is highly unpredictable with high mobility and different usage patterns. Hence, we are using AI technology to help our customers forecast and anticipate the usage and needs for optimal experiences. 2) Anomaly detection: we are using AI to detect the problems that humans cannot detect as fast in real-time. 3) Data correlation: we correlate complex datasets together for automated root-cause analysis (RCA). 4) Data fabric: there are a lot of challenges because complex technologies require a lot of IT resources and at the same time require high-quality datasets which we bring with our data fabric. The combination is bringing unparalleled AI/ML-based automation solutions for our CSP customers.
Given the current global economic uncertainty, how is MYCOM OSI strategizing its growth roadmap?
The current macroeconomic and geopolitical climate is in fact putting a lot of inflationary pressures on our customers. On average, 60% of the cost base of a typical CSP has been impacted by inflation as a result of rising energy costs, salary cuts and so on. Because of that, the automation solutions that we are bringing are helping our customers gain efficiencies. In fact, we are committed to automating up to 80% of network and service operations of our customers, enabling them in the longer term to progress towards autonomous networks and gain a 10x factor in terms of efficiency. The huge operational efficiency gains are helping us to grow, become more strategic with our customers and, then at the same time, give them the proper tools for efficiency and help improve their profitability levels.
