INTERVIEW Wail Sabbagh - Strategic Imperatives
“We strongly believe legacy systems and outdated practices have stifled growth in the channel and have
become a barrier to innovation and ultimately success.” Wail Sabbagh, Managing Director - Strategic Imperatives
Time to get Strategic
In this interview Wail Sabbagh, MD of Strategic Imperatives, talks about the changes he is seeing in the billing
market and how the pandemic will accelerate the market’s development
CBM: Tell us about your
business journey in billing?
Wail Sabbagh (WS): We’ve had
an incredible journey delivering
billing and provisioning
solutions that have transformed
how our customers do business.
However, the industry and
the channel are undergoing
fundamental change brought
about by rapid advances in
technology and the emergence
of a truly hybrid subscription
and usage economy that is
challenging the channel’s
commercial model and the
viability of the traditional service
provider.
With the channel on the cusp
of such exciting change, this is
the perfect time for us to shine a
light on our vision, solutions and
capabilities and show that we are
well-positioned to welcome in
the new digital era.
ere is an urgent need for
ambitious service providers and
resellers to adopt creative and
insight-driven monetisation
solutions and our billing
service Elevate is the perfect
partner. Elevate enables the
channel to rapidly develop
imaginative propositions with
real-time insight and unmatched
exibility.
We strongly believe legacy
systems and outdated practices
have sti ed growth in the
channel and have become
a barrier to innovation and
ultimately success. As the rules
of how we live, work, and
communicate are rewritten
we are rede ning the role of
the billing system to be the
operational backbone for service
providers.
CBM: Can you tell us about
recent developments with the
platform?
WS: In the last twelve months,
we have made a multi-millionpound
investment in Elevate and
our service delivery capability
that we believe is unrivalled
in the channel. Whilst
improvements across are of
course a given, we also focused
on strategic and game changing
capabilities that make Elevate
truly stand out.
For our customers this means
superior automation, reduced
operational costs, exible
integration and actionable
insights via intelligent analytics
which will allow them to
embrace and e ectively compete
in the new hybrid economy that
is the de ning hallmark of the
channel going forward.
With billing and service
monetisation at the heart of
service provider’s Business
Support Systems, Elevate now
o er real time integration with
payment providers and Mobile
Virtual Network Enablers
(MVNEs) to streamline order to
cash processes for our customers.
We have also worked tirelessly
to develop a rich engagement
model between service providers
and their customers using
sophisticated analytics to provide
a real-time view of customer
behaviour, preferences, and
requirements; empowering them
to o er innovate propositions
to an intelligently segmented
customer base.
We also took the unique step
of virtually embedding Elevate
product specialists within
our customers’ operational
teams to further enhance
our understanding of their
challenges and processes
resulting in an innovative
automation roadmap that
has had a major impact on
streamlining their end-user
sign-up journey, optimising
their revenue assurance and
signi cantly reducing manual
steps across the board.
CBM: How has Covid-19
impacted you and your
customers. Are you starting to
see things return to normal?
WS: Covid-19 has undoubtedly
had an impact our business
and those of our customers.
But it has not all been bad
news and, in many respects,
the measurable bene ts we
experienced in our response to
the crisis highlighted a need for
us to change our mindset that
we as a company will embrace
and learn from going forward.
Strategic Imperatives
enterprise customer base and
our reoccurring business model,
combined with an established
working from home
culture and collective
decision to move all of
our infrastructure to the
cloud prior to the crisis
meant that our systems
and processes continued
to operate normally and
without disruption with
little impact on our
revenue.
CBM: Will the
pandemic
accelerate the
development in
generally?
WS: Covid-19
has not
fundamentally
changed the
channels
monetisation
dynamics,
however, it has
accelerated the
transformation
that was already
taking place and
reinforced the value
of the cloud, recurring revenue,
and as-a-service business model
for service delivery. ere
is now a clear emphasis on
service providers to ensure that
their billing and monetisation
capability is truly agile, cloudbased,
and is able to support
creative business models with
ease.
e future of billing as a
service is intelligent analytics,
sophisticated revenue assurance,
automation, and support for
the subscription economy to
complement the traditional
usage model the channel is
historically accustomed to.
e connectivity revolution
is already transforming the
channel, and it is my belief that
for providers to deliver gamechanging
services and
changing propositions, they will
need a modern, exible
and insight-driven
monetisation solution
that is by design
future-ready.
the billing market
18 | Comms Business Magazine | July 2020 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
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