A Brief Description of the Company I Work For

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1. Table of contents

1        Table of contents        0

2        References        2

3        Introduction        2

4        PART I        3

Differentiation        4

Collaborative Advantage        5

5        PART II        9

1. References

1. Introduction

A brief description of the company I work for to later understand the description of the module assignment. Vama.com provides real-time software solutions for mobile operators. It creates and optimises the software behind the billing and charging for every single second a mobile is in use, whether it is voice or data, pre-paid or post-paid. Vama.com has more than 70 customers (mainly Tier 1 operators) and its products are used by more than 600 million people every day. The complexity of its software lies in real-time transactions that occur in a mobile at the same time. Example: A customer can be ringing from Ireland to Australia while downloading a document from a server in Japan and receiving a Whatsapp message from Spain simultaneously. The software needs to be exact and accurate and understands the price behind each kilobit downloaded, and how its rates change depending on download speeds, originating and terminating call among others. 

1. PART I

Analyse Vama.com’s marketing strategy and the impact which this strategy has had on its performance

One of our main marketing campaigns come from social media like Linkedin. This platform enables us to deliver our message to existing and potential clients by releasing white papers, but we also promote our company through webinars, whitepapers, ebooks (containing demo videos), video-calls with open questions, newsletter, and use congresses like the Mobile World Congress or our annual sales conference to divulge our company capabilities.  We have regular meetings with customers and we invite industry leaders to share their views on the future. We conduct surveys regularly with CEOs and CTOs to understand their concerns. Our marketing department works hard on creating a weekly blog which helps push our thought leadership and we got some great coverage for our globe press release and continue to get coverage for our thought leadership and opinion pieces in the industry press.

Our main marketing strategy is organising our stand for the Mobile World Congress with the campaign:  “Mixing it up with the Big Guys”. At MWC this year our Digital Business Platform messaging helped drive over 160 meetings. In 6 of these meetings we were asked for proposals for the Vama.com Digital Business Platform. Because of the MWC, we were invited to present alongside C levels from AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat Group and Telefonica Group. This is our main showcase to publicise our company and solutions but we are also member of TM Forum (the global industry association in telecoms which represents over 850 member companies generating US$2 trillion in revenue) where we have an exhibition stand for Digital Transformation World. This allows us to publicise our solutions and to give visibility to new customers. As a result of our marketing push to promote our solutions, Vama.com’s Digital Business Platform has been shortlisted for two main industry awards: Light Reading has shortlisted us in the Outstanding Digital Enablement Vendor category in their Leading Lights Awards and TMF has also shortlisted us for the TMF Excellence Award in the Open API category.

Analyse Vama.com’s market position and competitive advantage over time.

Vama.com is a privately owned company with around 600 employees, so a small player compared to global listed companies, and we all compete against each other to win projects with big Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) like Vodafone, Telefonica, etc, but also with big Mobile Network Virtual Operators (MNVOs) like Tesco, Lidl, etc.

Our main competitors are:

Number of employees Huawei: 180,000

Number of employees Ericssons: 100,000

Number of employees Cisco: 73,000

Number of employees Amdocs: 26,200

Number of employees Oracle: 138,000

Their main advantage against our company lies in their company size, their annual turnover and allowing them to invest more in R&D, innovation, marketing, etc. Plus also the way they finance projects. They are able to win projects < 5,000,000 € by offering a 10 years repayment at 0% finance to the customer. For our company, that is not an option.

So how do we survive an adaptive disruption? What does Vama.com need to do to survive? We are moving into a content based model, in which operators can buy our micro services rather than entire boxes needed to run their billing system. These new approach is agnostic to any vendor specific (like supermarket white brand) and operators now have a choice to buy new ones rather than always the same provider.

In order to survive in such a competitive market, we need to focus on our competitive advantage. Our 2 main competitive advantages are:

1. Differentiation

We had to adopt a differentiating strategy, and decided on a low cost factors to differentiate from our main competitors by developing open source APIs(*)but also to embark on a new digital business platform.

Traditional telecom software vendors used APIs that were specific to their company (ie: Ericsson products would have Ericsson APIs), so that created a dependency and a “locked-in” partnership that was very costly plus also gave the control of the solutions to the vendor rather than the operator. We listened to our clients who told us that their main concern was that any future upgrades or new solutions had to be with their existing vendor, therefore losing to open bids from other software companies. More companies across industries want