The year 2010 was a significant one in telecom across Middle East and Africa, and emphasised the region was moving rapidly out of the trough created by the global financial crisis. The changing dynamics of the operational landscape has led to service providers in the region moving quickly to shore up their organic businesses while at the same time seeking opportunistic M&A activities as they arise. Comm. compiles a list of the 12 service provider CEOs in the geography to have had the highest impact on the sector in the past year
Getting to grips with the customer
January 2nd, 2011 — Issue 22 December 2010
Communications service providers’ ability to reduce churn and successfully introduce new revenue-generating services can be achieved through their ability to understand and cater to the customer experience. While many service providers know this intuitively, Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) has devised a framework that they can use to look at their networks, processes, and services, and implement practical measures to achieve the necessary results
End user expectations in mature markets have changed, and one reason is the growing usage of mobile broadband, which has increased focus on factors such as good network quality (Getty Images)
TMT talent pool
December 27th, 2010 — Issue 22 December 2010
Delta Partners is a professional services company whose rise to prominence mirrors the evolution of the telecom sector as it has occurred in and from Dubai over the past five years. Having completed its start-up phase with the establishment of three distinct yet related TMT-focussed business lines – management consultancy, corporate finance and investments – Delta Partners’ group managing director Victor Font, details the next phase of the company’s progress
Victor Font, Delta Partners’ managing partner says that reverse innovation is seeing companies in emerging markets starting to export their practices and ideas to more developed markets
Constant change
December 20th, 2010 — Issue 22 November 2010
Alcatel-Lucent’s Europe, Middle East, and Africa president, Adolfo Hernandez, believes the company’s decision to concentrate on the activities and technologies in which it has intrinsic advantages shall serve it even better as time goes on. High leverage networks, fibre, femtocells and LTE are amongst those areas in which the technology company expects to excel 
Hernandez, Alcatel-Lucent’s EMEA president says with 40 per cent of the company’s revenues being generated in the region, it remains a strategically significant one
Differentiate or suffer the consequences
December 18th, 2010 — Issue 22 November 2010
The monetisation of broadband networks is likely to be one of the key differentiators between successful and not-so-successful service providers now and into the future. Georges Dabaghi, general manager of On Demand Group, the content management subsidiary of content aggregation and video-on-demand (VOD) specialist SeaChange International, identifies areas in which telecom service providers can gain from IPTV and video content delivered over their networks
George Dabaghi is general manager of On Demand Group, the content management subsidiary of SeaChange International
