Highlights from Telecoms World Middle East 2016

The weather this year for Telecoms World Middle East was only in the 100s. And the change in venue worked well—Dubai really is the perfect spot to meet operators from the Middle East to discuss their network and service rollout plans. The conference tracks also covered compelling topics around 5G, virtualisation, services, and customer experience.

Chief on operators’ list is a need to de-risk and hasten the rollout of new technologies and services—whether software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), new service offerings, etc.—while also diminishing associated headaches. The Gigamon Visibility Fabric meets this need. During a Gigamon-hosted round table session, I had the opportunity to coach a number of operators on the industry-wide moves from average revenue per user (ARPU) to average profit per user (APPU) as well as demonstrate ways that Subscriber Awareness can deliver significant savings.

With Gigamon’s offering, gone are the days of monitoring entire pipes. Now, with an understanding of customers on a subscriber-by-subscriber basis, operators can focus more resources on their most profitable customers and tailor services, support, and how the network reacts to each subscriber’s requests. This level of insight provides an operational advantage that carriers can turn into a competitive advantage. As a key differentiator, it reduces the cost of delivering services to the subscriber. It also lessens the need to reduce Opex and Capex.

Gigamon also demonstrated how monitoring ‎latency-sensitive network segments and content can greatly help operators improve their customer experience. The Gigamon Visibility Fabric connects to the important interfaces in the core and around the network at speeds of up to 100Gb. It also optimizes traffic flow to various analytic tools so they can better understand what’s going on with the network and subscribers.

Security was another focus. With recent news covering IoT Botnet armies, operators are now looking to protect their Smart handsets and IoT devices. By delivering targeted populations of traffic, subscribers, or devices to various out-of-band or in-line security tools, the Gigamon Subscriber Aware Security solution allows operators to focus their security investment where it is needed most in the Telco data centre (e.g., to correspond to the security risk profile, and where the most sensitive data is housed).

A final standout takeaway was that every geography has a different focus. In Dubai, for example, there are a large number of overseas workers, far from home. One company introduced a dedicated handset and “phone-home” integrated over-the-top (OTT) service to roll out through an existing in-region operator. What this says to me is that it’s not all about Opex and Capex reduction anymore. Instead, it’s about finding cool new revenue-generating services—whether carried in-band or OTT—that subscribers want. The application for Gigamon is to de-risk the rollout and monitor the peered serving gateway (SGW) such that all the carriers involved in this service get an accurate packet count along with sustained call quality when the traffic is handed off at the peering point.

Overall, it was an exciting show full of interesting use cases and equally interesting opportunities for Gigamon to help carriers de-risk new technologies, speed up their rollouts, and reduce the time to revenue acquisition. And to know that we’re helping overseas workers get great quality of service on their calls home to family members, that was an added bonus.