Accruent’s SaaS site management solution delivers for towercos

Accruent’s Siterra provides a platform much like a dedicated ERP for towercos and MNOs - they are experts in helping clients clean up their data, making the solution ideal as companies scale their operations across multiple regions and countries. In this latest in a series of interviews exploring the capabilities of Siterra, TowerXchange focuses on the merits of using a native SaaS platform, and on data accuracy and standardisation, critical to accelerating time to market for tenants, and critical to driving tenancy ratio and valuation growth for the towerco or MNO.

TowerXchange: Please introduce your company – where do you fit in the telecoms infrastructure ecosystem?

We have developed an enterprise Software as a Service (SaaS) product for tower companies which encompasses life cycle management tasks like site construction, help with co-location and the decommissioning of towers. Our software facilitates efficient operations and drives strong revenue growth for tower operators and managed service providers.

Think of us as an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) provider for tower companies and Mobile Network Operators (MNOs). We have the capacity to manage the entire ecosystem that surrounds tower infrastructure. Co-location is one area we have a special focus on; most tower companies want to increase their co-location. What makes our company unique is that it has the capacity to manage the entire process from marketing through to fulfilment and management.

TowerXchange: The first question our readers will want to know is ‘how proven is your solution in the field?’ Can you please tell us about the performance of your solution the field – who is using it and what results have been achieved?

Our solution has strong credibility in the market. Thirteen of the top 121 tower companies listed by Tower Xchange are already current Accruent customers. At present, we operate in 12 countries across five continents and have a particularly strong focus for 2016 in the Asia Pacific region. One of our largest strategic customers is based in Australia and we are actively prospecting in other Asian markets including China. We are constantly adding new portfolios for our current customers and carrying out implementations in multiple countries.

At first, many of our clients purchase the solution to use it in a particular territory. However, once they have the solution installed, they realise that they can achieve operational efficiencies by rolling it out across all of their countries and portfolios, and we can support them in this endeavour. If a company wants to roll out our solution to multiple countries, we can help them standardise processes including reporting, colocation, license management, project management, vendor management, and site-centric systems.

One of the selling points of our solution is that it cleans up and standardises data. It puts data into a much more efficient site-centric format, which makes it easier for MNOs and tower companies to buy, integrate and market assets. What’s more, by handling data in a digestible manner, tower companies and MNOs can make towers available on the market faster and more cost efficiently, thereby increasing tenancy ratios.

TowerXchange: How does your solution help manage different stakeholders within the tower supply chain from tenants to subcontractors?

The solution can help tower companies handle leads and administration models. In addition, the asset register and customer portal integration that sits at the heart of Siterra’s colocation solution can be used to provide up-to-date information on colocation. For example, a customer may want to get information on the amount of available space on a tower, or they may wish to inform tower companies of exactly what’s available on a tower in a particular city or region. They will be able to do all of this through our portal.

Our solution can also be used to support contract and service provider management – in fact, it has practically unlimited uses.

Siterra uses a permissions-based model. If an operator or tower company wants to give a contractor or service provider access to the system it can do so very easily. The contractor or service provider can then carry out a task and post a photo to show that it has completed its operation. Siterra offers sophisticated tools for project managers to efficiently review work submitted for accuracy and quality. What’s more, the system has built in security features so that each contractor’s access and visibility is limited to only the assets, tasks, and sites that are necessary for their work.

TowerXchange: How can your SaaS platform be configured to adapt to different towercos’ unique business processes and workflows?

We are constantly developing and upgrading our platform to suit the needs of tower companies. As things currently stand, Siterra provides for more than 90% of tower companies’ needs straight out of the box. The platform is also fully configurable so customers can adapt it to meet their specific requirements.

In fact, we’ve developed many feature requests in partnership with our clients. A client will typically come to us with a request for a particular feature. Once we have developed that feature we will incorporate it into later versions of our platform so that other customers can take advantage of it.

Thanks to our focus on long term partnerships and successful product co-development, we’ve been able to create a stable platform for tower portfolios. However, we notice that many companies in the market continue to invest in custom software. We feel that this is a failed strategy because, over the long term, companies end up wasting IT resources and limiting the potential to make long term efficiency gains.

TowerXchange: How can a robust approach to asset registers and asset lifecycle management improve the valuation of tower assets?

The main benefit comes in being able to understand the condition of the assets. Being able to keep track of inventory is another benefit, particularly for large, international tower companies. Smaller companies, on the other hand, are looking to maximise their tower valuation for strategic buyers so that is where the site-centric focus of our software comes into play.

Our platform can provide complete access to maintenance records, site information and pictures of site equipment. This makes it extremely useful for strategic buyers and companies that are seeking to sell their equipment.

For example, it isn’t really feasible for a strategic buyer to use manpower to inspect four thousand towers when purchasing a portfolio. By using Siterra, buyers and sellers can perform clean searches without digging through files and records to get access to the right information. We find that most buyers and sellers prefer to use Siterra to carry out the portfolio valuation process – at the end of the day our system reduces acquisition risk for acquirers and improves return on investment for sellers.

TowerXchange: Please sum up how you would differentiate your solution from your competitors?

Our annual product investment is larger than most of our competitors’ revenues – that in itself differentiates us from our competitors.

On top of this, Siterra is a SaaS platform, so we have benefited from the shift towards cloud applications. Unlike many other solutions on the market, our SaaS application was not built from scratch based on an on-premises application – all of our incremental investments have been to enhance its functionality. Total costs for the customer can escalate quickly if a solution needs to be re-built over time or requires extensive support. That’s why it makes much more sense to purchase a proven SaaS solution like Siterra.

With some solutions on the market, users tend to become beholden to professional service teams after deployment. That’s not the case with Siterra. Once a customer has bought the solution and implemented it, they’re up and running. They don’t need to constantly check in with our professional services department. Of course, our professional services and customer teams are always available if needed, but we are strongly of the opinion that our customers should not be dependent on us for their daily business needs.

There’s also a huge amount of functionality built into Siterra that allows customer system administrators to modify workflows, create new reports and manipulate site data on a large scale within the administration console. Users don’t need to receive any code or help from Accruent to make these changes.