LCR moves to next level

Specialist telecommunications players, Multimatics and Huge Telecom, have launched a groundbreaking managed voice service to the South African market.

"TMT" from Huge Telecom is a dynamic new service that provides permanent real-time monitoring of a company's complete telecommunications infrastructure, using real-time data feeds from the PABX system. TMT has been designed to take the concept of "managed voice services" to a new level in South Africa. Conventional "managed voice services" offerings only monitor the performance of the service provider. This makes it difficult for a company to gain a comprehensive and immediate overview of performance and associated costs from all of its telecommunications service providers.

TMT deals with this issue by covering the entire PABX and all services from all providers. TMT achieves this via remote analysis of data feeds delivered in real-time to Huge Telecom's servers for immediate analysis.

Through this real-time monitoring ability, Huge Telecom maintains the data feed and offers reporting on the performance of all services. In addition, telephone management statistics are provided to clients. According to Steven Brown, Managing Director of Multimatics (TMT technology partner to Huge Telecom), "every least-cost routing installation Multimatics has come across needs some kind of real-time management". In fact, he believes LCR without real-time management is a thing of the past.

With conventional managed voice services offerings, service level agreement (SLA) times are counted from the time the provider becomes aware of a problem. Conventional response times are therefore at the mercy of data availability. TMT now offers the market an eight-hour real response time by SLA, calculated from the time the problem actually occurred. Importantly, SLAs under eight hours are also available to corporate clients, on request.

Anton Potgieter, Huge Telecom CEO, explains the market context behind the growth of managed telecoms offerings in the LCR space: "Many LCR operators - especially those where LCR is not a core focus - have been installing LCR solutions and assuming they will work, which has resulted in a lot of customers having really bad experiences, where they have been paying for airtime and services they have not been using. In a nutshell, in at least half the market there hasn't really been any 'service' offered at all! Hence more clients have begun to demand proper managed telecoms, where there is active, visible and accountable management of the system.

"Managed telecoms is a natural evolution of plain old LCR." Potgieter continues. "Offerings such as TMT are early adopters when it comes to managed telecoms; the general industry move in this direction is still only in its infancy."

Despite the fact that TMT has only just been launched, Huge Telecom and Multimatics already have over 300 active sites, and the market has been very receptive to the offering.

"TMT has set the bar as high as possible when it comes to managed telecoms," says Potgieter. "The offering brings significant differentiation to the LCR market, where every offering claims to be an 'alternative telco', and which for a long time has been homogeneous and this has reduced LCR to a commodity type product, with everyone selling the same SIMs on the same networks. Now companies really have something different to choose."

TMT is offered in two key packages, TMT Basic and TMT Plus. TMT Basic is an entry-level product that requires no involvement from the client and offers both full telecoms service management and additional targeted monthly management reporting. The entry-level cost is R339 per month (or R459 for ISDN sites), regardless of the number of ports and extensions being managed - another concept previously unheard of in the market.

TMT Plus adds a powerful suite of advanced management reports to the basic offering. In addition, the client may request any combination of additional customised reporting.

TMT Extreme incorporates cellular handsets into the management report to give a complete managed telecoms solution of both internal and external communication media.

1. TMT is not a telephone management system (TMS) - it is a live data monitoring service that continuously monitors a site's telecommunications performance, in real-time.
2. TMT can be installed alongside any existing TMS system. By simply splitting the PABX data feed, it is possible to run both systems in parallel with no impact on the operation of the TMS system.
3. TMT services are priced at an affordable monthly rental and management fee. No hardware or software purchase is required.
4. All TMT contracts have an unconditional, 90 days, money-back guarantee!
5. TMT can be installed and run even if the organisation does not have Huge Telecom's LCR services in place - in fact, it is the perfect way for a company to find out if it will benefit from installing LCR services, or if its LCR provider(s) are delivering what they claim to be delivering.