ConnectM: A data backbone to optimise tower management

The award-winning ConnectM platform has been chosen as the first RMS to integrate with Gemalto’s M2M horizontal data platform, enabling ConnectM to connect with an even greater range of devices. ConnectM has already contracted close to 9000 towers across India, Africa and South East Asia and enables intelligent tower management through its software and analytics capabilities. To find out more about the partnership, TowerXchange spoke to CEO Sriram Chidambaram.

TowerXchange: Please introduce our readers to ConnectM - what role do you play in the telecoms infrastructure ecosystem?

ConnectM is a six year old company focused on providing remote monitoring and management solutions for several verticals. We’re able to demonstrate significant value adds in the management of telecom towers, but we also provide services for ATM, industrial, building and energy management monitoring.

ConnectM is a proven solution managing 5,000 towers in India, 4,000 in Africa and we just won an order in Southeast Asia, so we focus on many of the same geographies as TowerXchange – in fact we’re hoping to get into Latin America as well!

TowerXchange: We’ve spoken to some players in the RMS category who are focused on hardware, others more focused on backend data analysis – what’s ConnectM’s focus?

Initially ConnectM focused on our own hardware, but over the years we’ve become hardware agnostic – we can integrate with third party sensors in the field. Our core value-add lies in the backend analysis of data; in building software applications and customising data analytics to improve tower management.

Today ConnectM has tie-ups with different hardware manufacturers worldwide, and can deliver comprehensive tower management solutions with business analytics.

We are confident in the value and RoI we can deliver with our total solution.

TowerXchange: The first question our readers want to know is “is it proven in the field” – who is using this platform and where?

ConnectM is working with three major towercos in India in some pretty tough locations where there is rampant fuel theft, and uptime issues because of energy supply deficiencies. We also work with three tier one operators across eight or nine countries in Africa.

We recently won a contract in Myanmar where our local partner will manage the hardware installation, and ConnectM will provide the backend data analytics.

So ConnectM is a proven solution, not slideware!

TowerXchange: What are the key performance indicators used at the NOC to manage and optimise the performance of distributed cell sites?

There are five different vectors on which our clients use ConnectM to monitor and optimise cell site performance and efficiency.

1. Energy monitoring; particularly to reduce diesel consumption at unreliable grid and off-grid sites, enabling our clients to reduce the working capital requirement for fuel

2. A real-time view of site alarms; minimising SLA penalties whenever a tower is down, whether it be due to the temperature shooting up in the shelter, DG malfunction, a battery bank failing, et cetera

3. Security and access management; controlling who gets access, integrating feeds from third party security cameras, and determining who was present in the event of lost or stolen assets

4. Maintenance opex reduction; ensuring adequate information is available about the health, condition and function of towers, so clients don’t have to send technicians for every issue, making tower maintenance more efficient, and ultimately optimising to the point of achieving preventative maintenance

5. Asset tracking; with sites distributed over remote geographies, tracking assets as they are added to sites is a key parameter

Our clients want to see data driven analytics – to examine the top performing districts or clusters, or consider the top five reasons for downtime. We can analyse trends to generate predictive alerts.

TowerXchange: We have interviewed several Site Management and Infrastructure Lifecycle Management solution providers - what’s your view on the best way to deliver your services? As an installed license for clients, from the cloud, or as a managed service offering where your own analysts interpret the data and ensure integration between alarms and job ticketing?

We don’t have strong preference for one use-case versus the others, and ConnectM has been implemented under all these scenarios.

We provide some clients with a complete managed service, monitoring through the cloud. Other customers buy our hardware and software and run it themselves, and we’ve delivered in-house analytic solutions too.

Personally, I believe the managed service delivered via the cloud yields the best economies of scope and scale, and there’s an element of business intelligence driven efficiencies we can deliver as we can learn from different clients we serve in the cloud.

TowerXchange: How do you unify information flows, and therefore projects and workflows, across complex, outsourced and sub-contracted supply chains?

Indian tower operators face many of the same challenges as their counterparts in Africa. There are many different stakeholders, each with different information needs – the tenant, the towerco, O&M and refuelling subcontractors and equipment providers.

ConnectM can serve as an ERP or backbone for efficient tower management. Our ticketing and workflow can provide the ‘system of record’ or a ‘single version of the truth’.

We gather alerts from shelters and from equipment, and we have built intelligence based on which we can determine which alarms can be delayed, and which to escalate, and who, how and when to escalate them. One of our core values is the ability to generate logical alarms.

We have learned how to cross boundaries to interface with different stakeholders in the supply chain. For example, certain alarms are escalated directly to equipment maintenance contractors, so the job ticket may go to the DG service contractor, perhaps via our mobile or automatic voice calling options. By using these simple mobile extensions, the technician can attend the problem, then update to close the ticket.

TowerXchange: How has ConnectM’s partnership with Gemalto benefitted your business?

We’re very excited about this partnership. ConnectM has a strong understanding and experience of technologies for tower management – we understand the processes and pain points of towercos, and we have a roadmap of what they can do using the data we collect.

Gemalto is large company with considerable reach, and many strategic relationships in the telecom space. The Gemalto platform enables ConnectM to work with different hardware, to aggregate data, refined by us to make intelligent decisions to control equipment.

Partnering with Gemalto increases ConnectM’s reach into the telecom market, and increases the variety of devices we can integrate with.

TowerXchange: Finally, how would you differentiate ConnectM’s solution from competitive RMS, Infrastructure Lifecycle Management and Site Management Systems?

We have four key differentiators.

1. Our end to end approach; we have invested a lot of time in making sure we recommend the right partners and integrate the right hardware

2. Tower industry experience; we have developed logical rules specific to the tower industry, which are the product of managing 9,000 towers in difficult geographies

3. Customisation; our solution is architected at the application level to enable us to quickly customise, preparing new reports and new dashboards – we recognise that customer needs change, and that management need different analyses and reports as their networks evolve

4. Data analytics; we’ve built modules to predict downtime, helping customers with optimise fuel loads and deploy replacement capex efficiently.

Gemalto is renowned as the world leader in digital security, and they are applying their expertise to the evolution of cell tower monitoring, management and maintenance.

Gemalto has created a horizontal platform to collect data from M2M-enabled devices and make that available upstream to analytical intelligence platforms. The platform has been created through a combination of the data communication modules for M2M of Cinterion, a company Gemalto acquired in 2010, together with another acquisition, SensorLogic, a software platform for M2M data.

Gemalto is now integrating cell tower monitoring and management applications into this horizontal platform. One of the first site management system providers to port their software to Gemalto’s data platform is ConnectM.

As you’ll see in the interview with ConnectM’s CEO Sriram Chidambaram, ConnectM has a six-year track record of success, and is currently used to monitor and manage 9,000 towers in India and Africa. ConnectM collects data from sensors at distributed cell sites, conducts analyses and integrates with job ticketing, enabling predictive analysis and maintenance.

The system has been particularly successful at helping to reduce fuel theft within the supply chain. By monitoring and managing power use, and comparing with site access records, ConnectM can detect outliers, making it harder to hide fraud. This kind of analytic intelligence not only helps detect fraud, it also finds patterns to optimise power usage, and enables cell site operators to be proactive in working with their suppliers to optimise site efficiency and reduce energy opex.

Gemalto is currently working with ConnectM on a comprehensive trial at a single cell site, which will yield a full demonstration with ten months of comprehensive data.

Kenneth Lowe, Director of Business Development for SensorLogic M2M Platforms at Gemalto concludes: “We’re excited to be working with ConnectM, but we are also keen to partner with other participants in the TowerXchange community. While ConnectM is the only platform we can talk about at the moment, we have other service providers who are building on our platform already. Our objective is to build an ecosystem of solutions around our horizontal data platform, which has open APIs suitable for integration with virtually any device at a cell site. It’s easy to setup, and our open APIs enable users to stand up independent monitoring dashboards for specific devices – you don’t need to build a vertical app for every KPI. Using our platform, you can simply pass data into your existing NOC systems, and have the flexibility to expand and customize outside of any standalone app.”