Tower companies across the African continent are increasingly outsourcing their service management portfolios.
Charles Osburn, CEO at Quintica, says the rationale behind outsourcing this "mission-critical" component is partly due to a need for consistency.
For Osburn, companies that outsource components, processes and services of their network operations centres (NOCs) do so in order to tap into the expertise and skills of organisations that specialise in service delivery and service management.
This also enables them to take advantage of new technologies on a continual basis, he adds, which allows them to maintain and achieve their own key performance indicators (KPIs).
"The reality is that there are a number of risks facing tower companies; risks that will threaten their service delivery and hamper the key component of many of their KPIs with the mobile operators they service - that being availability of their services," he says.
According to Osburn, some of these risks include fuel leakages; downtime due to power outages, low fuel in generators, unplanned site access, and theft or break-ins at sites; as well as other security events.
"The pure geographical nature of where towers in Africa are situated is, in itself, a management nightmare for tower companies and cellular companies alike. The fact that many of these towers are in such remote locations is the reason why cellular companies outsource this real estate to tower companies in the first place," adds Osburn.
"Now couple that with the additional challenges we have, such as quality of service of consistent power supply, a skills gap for technical skills across the continent, and the lack of resources to fuel the towers themselves, and you will see the business case for the outsourcing of the service management centre of these tower companies."
He adds that the service management centre needs to deliver information timeously to maintenance contactors who need to visit the towers regularly. These site visits can then be checked against maintenance and access logs at the sites, to ensure SLAs are met.
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