Subtonomy has announced it is opening two new sales offices in Paris (France) and Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) to support its growing business in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) and Asia Pacific (APAC).
Fredrik Edwall, SVP Sales & Marketing at Subtonomy, comments: “We’re really excited to announce that as interest in our products has continued to increase across both regions it makes sense to boost our local presence. This enables us to support partners, customers and prospects more readily. And I’m delighted to welcome onboard Sorab Boubakour and Simon Kong who will help us take customer support to the next level in MEA and Asia.”
Subtonomy says it has seen a surge in demand for both its Customer & Network Experience Platform – which provides real-time insight into the experience of customers across all networks (2G, 3G, 4G, 5G NSA, 5G SA, fibre and broadband) to operational, customer care, business and marketing teams – as well as its applications supporting enterprise customers, MVNOs and customer self-service. This demand is being driven by:
- rising expectations for efficient, omnichannel customer service and personalized experiences
- demand for chatbots and self-service, which require real-time network experience data to support customer queries
- increased use of complex and QoS-sensitive service such as streaming video, videoconferencing and gaming driving support demands
- increased homeworking, which means CSPs now need to seamlessly support workers across fibre broadband, traditional broadband and mobile networks.
Edwall says that demand also has local flavours to it. In the Middle East and Africa, for example, it is being driven by fast expansion of 5G and the shift to a knowledge economy.
Here the UAE’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) is pushing for total coverage of 5G across the Emirates by 2025. Edwall says Qatar 2022 offers an “unprecedented” opportunity to showcase a wide variety of new 5G-based experiences. But beyond sport, the Gulf countries have been adopting 5G as part of a larger effort to transition from oil-based to knowledge-based economies. The Gulf states have even built high-tech hubs such as Lusail (Qatar), Duqm (Oman), Riyadh and Neom (KSA), and Masdar City (UAE). And the pandemic has increased demand for new digital customer support options such as Arab-language chatbots. All of which is driving the requirement for more efficient, personalised customer support.
Meanwhile, AI use has continued apace in APAC and 5G is being used for everything from Smart Ambulance Services to onboarding new employees. Alibaba alone has invested $1 billion in AR and VR startups in the last couple of years, with its latest round being $60 million in smart glasses maker Nreal. Gaming is also booming in Asia with South Korean operators using their 5G networks to launch cloud gaming propositions, including KT’s GameBox; while in Singapore, Singtel’s cloud gaming proposition uses its 5G standalone network to deliver a superior experience to users; and Thailand’s dtac has launched Gaming Nation. The challenge for Asian operators is to deliver superior customer experience at a low cost.
Edwall commented that service providers across both MEA and APAC recognise that they need to support customers with a better service proposition – providing personalised notifications when things go wrong, resolving problems rapidly and cost-effectively, and even fixing issues before customers notice. “Ultimately demand for our products is rising because our platform brings all the data they need together in one place, empowering them to transform customer support, while our easy-to-use applications enable the same data to be used across all channels of operation and for a variety of use cases. They can do this without any major disruption and re-using the data sources they already have,” he noted.