In a detailed exclusive interview, Telecom Review spoke to Omar Al-Anni, President & Chief Executive Officer, TelcoBrain Technologies Inc. to learn more about their disruptive approach of automating the entire process and providing businesses with accurate, real-time, and continuous insights that align end-to-end technology infrastructure with business objectives.
What Does TelcoBrain's Automation Mean for the Future of Network Evolution?
The current approach to technology planning in the telecom and ICT sectors often relies on outdated methods, such as paper, pen, Excel sheets, vendor-provided tools that focus primarily on their own technology, and third party tool that covers multi-vendors but focuses on technology aspects only. These methods fail to capture the full economic value of technology investments.
As technology layers become more complex and generate increasing amounts of data, these traditional tools struggle to link technology decisions to business value and investment needs, especially as digitalization and AI adoption continues to grow. The industry's status quo lacks the agility required for rapid decision-making, resource optimization, and delivering maximum value from technology investments.
As the demands on network and cloud infrastructure intensify due to AI, workload migration to cloud, 5G, the Industrial Internet of Things (IoT), and non-terrestrial networks (NTN), the pressure to make smarter, more efficient investments is growing.
With USD 8 trillion projected to be invested over the next decade in worldwide IT spending (cloud, communication services, HW/SW, and IT services), current inefficiencies such as poor planning, legacy tools, vendor-driven approaches, and misalignments waste over 20% of investments in telecom industry as an example. Additional hurdles include inaccurate (hyped!) demand forecasting, growing complexity with limited resources, and the need to align technology investments with business goals while ensuring sustainability. Future challenges, like increased data demand and AI-driven infrastructure needs, further magnify these issues.
By leveraging deep industry expertise with deep domain knowledge across technology, finance and business, TelcoBrain empowers organizations to navigate the coming wave of investment challenges across networks and cloud through data-driven insights, ensuring maximum technological and economic value.
Techno-Economic Strategies
For the first time in the telecom and ICT sector, in a unified software, TelcoBrain is pioneering an industry-first platform that automates end-to-end (E2E) network and cloud evolution, catering to both telecom and enterprise customers.
By applying a unique combination of techno-economic principles and advanced AI algorithms based on deep industry know-how and best practices, TelcoBrain delivers a next-generation SaaS platform that sets a new standards for technology evolution as it provide insights on network and cloud planning, predict future readiness, evaluate reliability and resiliency, and analyze “what-if” scenario modelling capabilities.
As per TelcoBrain’s vision, integrating technology planning with techno-economic strategies is essential for ensuring firms' innovation and competitive edge in terms of technology, financial returns and reliability. In tandem with this practical vision, TelcoBrain aims to reduce costs (TCO), achieve better return on investment (ROI), and enhance decision-making across the entire business.
“This is why I started TelcoBrain—to replace these manual, fragmented approaches with a platform that fully automates process across technical and non-technical teams,” explained Al-Anni. “Most importantly, we integrate techno-economic strategies to deliver a real business impact on both top-lines and bottom-lines.”
In this context, traditional planning methods, which often operate in silos, limit collaboration between financial and technical teams, making it difficult to adapt to changing conditions. While these methods may have sufficed in the past, today’s environment—with its rising complexity, increasing demand, and financial pressure—requires different methods and approaches for firms that want to stay ahead of the curve.
TelcoBrain’s platform possesses advanced modeling capabilities that allow for rapid scenario evaluations and more agile responses to market changes, optimizing not only network performance but also resource allocation and financial results.
“Integrating technology planning with techno-economic strategies ensures cost-efficiency, sustainability, and improved customer experiences,” noted the CEO.
Impressively, TelcoBrain’s fully-automated, techno-economic strategies are helping clients achieve anywhere between 10-40% total cost of ownership (TCO) savings within the first 1-2 years, with potential savings exceeding 40% over 3-5 years.
Additionally, both telecom and enterprise customers have experienced significant improvements in net present value (NPV), ROI, CapEx intensity, reliability and resilience, as well as reductions in CO2 emissions and carbon footprint.
The real game-changer lies in TelcoBrain’s superior and industry-first, zero-touch, multidimensional modelling capabilities delivering unmatched results. “Achieving these results is no small feat, but from day one, we prioritized building a platform that could handle hundreds of business dimensions,” explained Al-Anni. He noted that each dimension contains over 100 sub-dimensions, with each sub-dimension potentially encompassing more than 1,000 parameters, all of which generate numerous data points over time.
Al-Anni highlighted that, in light of the immense complexity of the constantly evolving array of possibilities and scenarios, TelcoBrain enables organizations to transform complexity into clarity, providing precise, actionable insights that guide better decision-making across all levels. From C-level executives seeking strategic direction to senior management overseeing operations, and specialists focused on granular details, both technical and non-technical teams benefit from this enhanced clarity.
Moreover, TelcoBrain's digital twin technology is a significant innovation that combines automated techno-economic models with advanced algorithms, demonstrating TelcoBrain’s years of industry expertise and an in-depth understanding of global challenges faced by various organizations. As the management of large-scale networks and cloud resources becomes increasingly complex, TelcoBrain meets the urgent need to optimize infrastructure for daily operations while ensuring resilience and scalability for future growth.
Global Expansion
To accelerate its development and bring its visionary solutions to the global stage, TelcoBrain has successfully raised an undisclosed amount in a funding round led by DEPO Ventures. As the company gears up to expand across North America, Europe, and the Middle East throughout 2024 and early 2025, it is preparing to revolutionize the way telecom players and enterprises approach technology evolution and infrastructure management.
According to the CEO, each of these regions presents unique challenges, ranging from stringent regulations and diverse infrastructure to specific technology needs and vendor preferences.
“In North America, the push for 5G, and development of 6G, non-terrestrial networks (NTN), AI, cloud, and edge computing is a key driver; in Europe, regulatory compliance and sustainability are top priorities; and in the Middle East, rapid infrastructure expansion and digital transformation are crucial for emerging economies,” illustrated Al-Anni.
TelcoBrain’s successful expansion comes, thanks to the platform’s ability to adapt to each region's unique requirements, including regulatory environments, vendor landscapes, and local infrastructure challenges.
“Our understanding for each region's specifics and commitment to continuous innovation and customer-centric solutions will drive our growth across these regions,” the CEO confirmed.
By offering a vendor-neutral platform with open APIs, TelcoBrain ensures seamless integration with existing systems, improving returns on invested capital and enhancing infrastructure reliability. Strong local partnerships further support this approach, enabling new markets to easily adopt its technology.
Commitment to Customer Success and Adoption
Traditionally, organizations have relied on internal teams, vendors, system integrators, consulting firms, and domain experts to assess their network and cloud infrastructure. These processes are often labor-intensive, costly, and time-consuming, resulting in static spreadsheets that quickly become outdated and lack operational flexibility. The reliance on high-level insights and vendor-specific views has limited the ability to capture a comprehensive and real-time understanding of infrastructure needs.
TelcoBrain revolutionizes this approach by automating the entire process, delivering real-time, accurate, and actionable insights that align infrastructure with business objectives.
TelcoBrain is seeing strong recognition and demand for its groundbreaking technology, not just from major telecom operators who are managing large infrastructures, but also from mid-to-large enterprises that are struggling with the misalignment between technology expenditure and financial impact. Furthermore, TelcoBrain’s potential has been recognized by industry experts, as Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) named TelcoBrain a "Vendor to Watch" in mid-2024, reinforcing its status as a trailblazer in the field.
To cope with the current digitalization demands, TelcoBrain plans to invest in further developing and expanding its techno-economic models within the realm of new cloud models. “We have a strong demand from our early adopters regarding evolution strategies not only for networks but also for their cloud—whether it be on-prem or public/hybrid models—due to the demand from new AI and GenAI workloads,” noted the CEO.
With the DEPO Ventures-led funding round, and potential investors in the pipeline, TelcoBrain will be accelerating and adjusting its roadmap to include more wireless networks including non-terrestrial networks, in addition to the wireline networks that exist on its platform today.
“Whether you are a telecom operator, a technology provider or services integrator, or a mid-to-large enterprise managing extensive technology assets, TelcoBrain offers unique opportunities to transform your technology evolution, reduce costs, and stay ahead of industry trends,” expounded Al-Anni.
Ambitious Evolution Backed by Telecom Operators, Enterprise Customers, Future Investors
For telecom operators, technology providers, and system integrators, TelcoBrain’s mission goes beyond addressing TCO or ROI. Partnering with TelcoBrain is synonymous with faster project delivery, reduced labor costs, and quicker time-to-value for clients. Notably, TelcoBrain's advanced capabilities allow partners to provide more value to their customers with less effort, effectively accelerating their path to revenue.
For enterprise customers across various industries, TelcoBrain understands the path ahead will bring more challenging network and cloud demands. “As technologies continue to grow in complexity, the need for robust architecture, evolution, and planning teams is crucial. These teams must consider not only the technological aspects but also the business value to drive growth and efficiency,” mentioned Al-Anni.
For future investors and partners, TelcoBrain’s DEPO Venture-backed strategic investment highlights respectable confidence in its vision. Moving forward, TelcoBrain is open to discussions with similar talented investors and invites partners to join them on their ambitious journey towards achieving 20-30% market share in the multi-trillion-dollar investment landscape for network and cloud infrastructure over the next decade.
TelcoBrain is set to disrupt the status quo of how technology planning and evolution are conducted, unlocking billions of dollars in potential savings in the coming years through its innovative, fully automated approach.
“TelcoBrain is setting new standards for the technology evolution landscape and is here to support you in navigating the intricate dimensions of technology and economics. We help you to seamlessly integrate technological and business strategies, separating hype from reality,” concluded Al-Anni.
Leveraging its industry-first platform, telecom and enterprise users, and future investors/partners can confidently face the future, optimize their investments, and unlock new opportunities for sustainable success.
