"To become digital operators, companies appointed managers who did not come from the telco world, appointed Chief Digital Officers that emerged from retail, for example, and required them to within one year launch products and partner brands. But our recommendation is to start from scratch with a renewed focus. “This is what Jennifer Kyriakakis, founder and VP of Marketing at Matrixx, said at the close of the fair in Barcelona yesterday afternoon.

Matrixx has a flexible software platform that adapts to manage digital applications of the operator, as required. Among its customers is:  iD, MVNO in the UK operating on the operator’s network. The experience of an iD user is 100% digital, from the time he activates his cell line. First, the customer selects his plan, with preference minutes, number of SMSs and data volume, and then can monitor his expenses.

"You have to give the user the ability to have full control of his experience. Even in LTE networks, people resort to WiFi connections. If the data packets could be split in small portions, more data can be sold," said Kyriakakis.

With Swisscom of Switzerland and Vodafone of New Zealand, created data roaming packages, which allowed to double the traffic once the user became aware of their actual consumption.

Matrixx is now exploring opportunities in Latin America, where operators observed a desire to reduce customer costs as the main trend. The expectation of the company is to do trials this year in the region.

A hybrid app for Millicom and homogeneous flexibility for Digicel

In Latin America, Sandvine works with Digicel, Telefónica and Millicom, not only as a provider of solutions for traffic control, but also, as an enabler of services to assist the operator in their transition to becoming a digital service provider. In its passage through the MWC, Cassio Sampaio VP of Product Marketing, and Carlos Hernández, VP of Sales for Latin America and the Caribbean, commented to Convergencialatina about the results of the implementations with Millicom and Digicel. "The traffic identification technology used to be our core product, but is now used to visualize the network and from that create solutions for the operator to better monetize infrastructure and improve customer interaction," said Hernández.

In fact, 67% of Sandvine’s revenues today come from value services. Millicom incorporated the model of "hybrid app" inherited from Momac -user loyalty company purchased  in August 2015-, which runs on all operating systems and does not need updates (the update occurs automatically when the application starts). SmartApps within the portfolio of Millicom allows flexible options to offer the user: for example, choose three apps per month to use as a trial, and in that way test new services among subscribers.

On the other hand, Millicom has an agreement with Deezer by which it gets special plans, and thanks to the Sandvine platform, the operator can choose whether to include music streaming for Premium users or other options. With this feature Millicom is particularly strong in Colombia, according to Sampaio.

In the case of Digicel, contracted Sandvine's business intelligence solutions, analysis of traffic profiles and service quality, with the only requirement that they are homogeneous solutions to cover many small Caribbean operations. As for the foray into digital services, in late 2014 incorporated tools to activate short data plans in real time, and also hired Sandvine’s "Outreach" product, which allows customers contract data offers, for example, once he detects that he came out of a wifi area and wants to access social networks.