Navigating Telco Innovation on a Global Platform
We talked to Suren Pinto, Directo and CEO of Global Wavenet, a leader in providing powerful telecommunication software, systems, and infrastructure solutions for wireless and wireline telecommunication carriers in South America, Africa, and the Asia Pacific. This is what he said:
First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times?
Suren Pinto: We are all keeping well, thanks.
Tell us about you, your career, how you founded Global Wavenet
Suren Pinto: Excited about the world of the ‘internet,’ almost 20 years ago, I founded Global Wavenet at the tender age of 19. As a young entrepreneur, it was a ‘happy accident,’ and I Initially started to develop simple websites for clients. Later, I set up a team of engineers, and we got our foothold into the growing telecoms industry by building an email-to-SMS application which became popular with enterprise clients. We then used that technology to develop a new service to assist CSPs in driving customer engagement by developing a service that offered live sports scores via SMS, which became very popular with the mobile operators.
The business has come a long way since then, delivering multiple software solutions portfolios in data, voice, and media solutions to large blue-chip telecommunication organisations around the world. Today we are known as a trusted value-add vendor in the telco space who has deployed state-of-the-art VAS and IT services in over 23+ MNO clients located in 20+ countries. Since its inception, Wavenet has won multiple awards for telco solutions in Asia Pacific, such as the mBillions awards, The National Business Quality Service Awards by the British Computer Society, and Merit Awards by the Asia Pacific ICT Alliances. Wavenet today has grown from a simple startup to a 185+ employee company with office locations in multiple continents in Africa, Latin America, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Australia.
How does Global Wavenet innovate?
Suren Pinto: Yes, we invest heavily in R&D with an ‘innovations first’ approach – it is in our DNA to create, evolve, and continuously add value to our clients and partners. Each of our tech solution roadmaps are infused with innovation, ensuring strategic alignment with evolving market trends, ever-growing customer needs, and the requirements of the larger telco ecosystem. Our latest innovation lies in the telco tech space, ahasa®, which is a revolutionary containerised application orchestration platform that helps Communication Service Providers to design, integrate and deploy containerized applications (using an innovative design studio toolkit) in their choice of either a Public Cloud such as AWS, or a private Cloud such as VMware. The ahasa platform will revelutionalise and change the way mobile operators, communication service providers, and enterprises will consume software applications online.
How does the coronavirus pandemic affect your business finances?
Suren Pinto: The pandemic, fortunately, has not had the anticipated negative impact on our business. We have always been proactive and preserved cash strategically to ensure that we have a sufficient runaway, and as such, we have avoided any financial pitfalls even during pandemic times.
Did you have to make difficult choices regarding human resources, and what are the lessons learned?
Suren Pinto: No, we did not have to let any of our people go. We understand people are our best asset – all our award-winning solutions have come from our pool of very talented software architects and engineers. To lose them during any critical situation would be a real loss to our business. In fact, it is our very own staff that have gotten onboard and developed new innovations during these testing times, helping the business to stay ahead of competition, and more importantly, our entire team of staff, including account managers, global support teams, and digital communication teams, worked around the clock to build geographically aligned agile teams to keep our client’s systems safe and afloat, and running smoothly during the pandemic time.
How did your customer relationship management evolve? Do you use any specific tools to be efficient?
Suren Pinto: Our default selling model was personal selling. I believe that there is nothing stronger than face-to-face contact with our customers when laying a good foundation for great customer relationships. With travel restrictions following the pandemic last year, we have had to rely heavily on online tools for client collaborations such as MS teams. This is an area that we are constantly trying to improve.
Did you benefit from any government grants, and did that help keep your business afloat?
Suren Pinto: No, we did not use or had the need to benefit from any government grants.
Your final thoughts?
Suren Pinto: What we have understood is that the need for communication is pivotal to the global economy and to people and that there is a lot of room to innovate in the digital economy. Solutions that will drive efficiency for enterprise and help consumers better manage services will be big in the coming years. We have the right products, people, and importantly mindset to meet that demand.