Rory Mapstone completes his third Cape Epic
Posted by: lgrtelecommunications on: April 18, 2011
Ror
y Mapstone, CTO of LGR Telecommunications, recently celebrated the completion of his third Cape Epic cycling race – a major sporting achievement. Competing in LGR colors, Rory finished in the top 20% of riders with a time of just over 40 hours across the 8 grueling stages of the race.
Like the Tour de France, the Cape Epic is internationally recognized as one of the cycling world’s biggest stage races, and is certainly the pinnacle of the sport for pro mountain bike riders. With a route that changes every year, the Epic is complete off-road, and leads aspiring amateur and professional mountain bikers from around the world through the unspoiled nature of the Western Cape in South Africa. But riders rarely have time to admire the view, as they cover approximately 800 kilometres while climbing more than 16,000 metres in the magnificent Cape mountains.
To view more photos of Rory competing in the 2011 Cape Epic, please visit the LGR Telecommunications page on Facebook here.
LGR welcomes the AT&T purchase of T-Mobile USA
Posted by: lgrtelecommunications on: March 21, 2011
LGR has reacted positively to the announcement that AT&T will acquire T-Mobile USA in a deal worth $39 billion. As a leading provider of strategic ETL and DW systems to AT&T, LGR has an extensive track record of driving significant business value for its customer through previous M&A cycles, and remains 100% committed to providing complete support to AT&T as it closes this deal in the months ahead.
While largely unanticipated by industry speculators, LGR is unsurprised by the acquisition given the clear synergies on so many levels. Both companies operate GSM-centric networks, and their integration would be far less onerous than if T-Mobile were to be integrated with the CDMA-centric network of Sprint – which was widely rumored as the prime suitor for T-Mobile. Furthermore, this integration provides AT&T with much-needed capacity while simultaneously offering T-Mobile subscribers a welcome path to LTE.
The deal also makes a lot of financial sense to both parties. T-Mobile USA emerged when Deutsche Telekom bought VoiceStream for $24 billion in 2001, but the European telecoms giant has never been able to deliver on the potential of the acquisition. This then offers an ideal exit strategy at a comfortable profit, along with the bonus of retaining an 8% stake in AT&T. AT&T has likewise struck a great bargain at a 7.1x EBITA multiple and about $1000 per subscriber.
The proposed acquisition will now undergo review by the FCC and DOJ, and the deal will likely take up to 12 months to be finalized. What is clear though is that AT&T is already advanced in its planning, as evidenced in the Webcast delivered on Monday 21st.
You can download the presentation from the Webcast here:
LGR and Teradata formally announce their global alliance
Posted by: lgrtelecommunications on: March 9, 2011
LGR and Teradata today formally announced their global alliance, the culmination of many months of preparation in which LGR conducted extensive testing of Teradata systems and the two companies integrated their worldwide sales and marketing initiatives. The announcement was met with some surprise, given that LGR has traditionally been a long-time Oracle partner, but Grant Salmon, CEO of LGR, explained that this was a natural evolution for his company.
“Our relationship with Oracle remains strong and we have numerous CDRlive sites around the world that continue to operate extremely successfully on Oracle,” he said. “However, our customers were increasingly asking to be given a choice when it came to the DBMS, and Teradata was the logical option. Teradata has a massive presence within telecommunications and is trusted by operators around the world – including most of our existing customers – as the hardware and DBMS platform of choice for their most strategic business systems. Teradata is also recognized as a market-leader in terms of its performance, and we certainly witnessed this in our testing through 2010, in which it exceeded our most demanding benchmarks.”
Rory Mapstone, CTO of LGR, stated in recent meetings that “Teradata has come at just the right time for LGR. Following the release of CDRlive Version 4 and the growing shift of our business towards systems that support advanced analytics, it has been gratifying to find a partner that not only aligns with our vision but is able to accelerate our progress. Our porting of CDRlive to the Teradata platform has gone better than expected, and we look forward to building on this through 2011 to deliver exciting, first-to-market innovations in telco data warehousing.”
Teradata and LGR are currently engaged with numerous customers around the world, and their global alliance is further strengthened through the strong partnerships that both companies share with other key players in the market such as SAS Institute and Accenture.
Read the Teradata press release here
LGR exhibits at Africa Com 2010
Posted by: lgrtelecommunications on: November 16, 2010
The LGR South Africa team has just returned from Africa Com 2010, a landmark telecommunications event that is held annually at the International Convention Center in Cape Town, South Africa.
Having spent two days interacting with the more than 4000 attendees of the event, the LGR team has returned full of enthusiasm.
“The event was a tremendous success for LGR,” says Melani French, general manager of LGR Labs. “We gained a huge amount of interest, not only from telecom operators that are looking to leverage the power of CDRlive within their operations, but also from new potential partners. We’re very confident that a number of relationships built at the event will lead to new business opportunities in the near future.”
To view the photos taken at the event, click here
LGR presents at the China Telecom EDA Forum
Posted by: lgrtelecommunications on: September 3, 2010
Paul Hartley speaking at the China Telecom EDA Forum, September 3rd, 2010
LGR delivered a keynote presentation today at the China Telecom EDA Forum in Xining, China. Taking the stage along with local Oracle colleagues, Paul Hartley introduced the audience to global examples of innovation in telecom BI and Analytics, before providing a detailed analysis of the best-practice architectures required to achieve and maintain these competitive advantages.
Speaking at the reception after the first day, Hartley was enthusiastic about the event as well as the response from attendees. “We all know that China is a huge telecom market with seemingly unlimited growth potential, so it is a privilege to be invited to speak at this event,” he said. “Its very clear that like many other high-growth regions that LGR is active in, China is moving rapidly from a volume-centric to a value-driven model for enterprise intelligence, and we can expect to see some significant innovation emerging from this market in the next 2-3 years.”
Hartley now moves on to Beijing, where he will be spending time with key executives from China Mobile and China Telecom over the course of next week.
LGR joins SAS at the Canadian Telecom Summit
Posted by: lgrtelecommunications on: June 9, 2010
LGR recently joined its partner, SAS Institute, in speaking at the 2010 Canadian Telecom Summit held in Toronto, Canada from June 7-9 2010.
Paul Hartley, head of global sales and marketing at LGR, was part of a broader panel discussion on mobile data intelligence, focusing specifically on the topics of social network analysis, social media, fraud and telco analytics. The panel was chaired by Pat Finerty, SAS Canada’s VP of Alliances and Business Development, and also included Ken King, Director of Telco Convergence at SAS, Stephen Kerwick, VP of Marketing Science at Neuralitic, and Lori Bieda, Marketing Executive at Lori Bieda Consulting.
More info on the Canadian Telecom Summit can be found here
MIT takes note of CDR analysis
Posted by: lgrtelecommunications on: May 31, 2010
Technology Review, an MIT publication, recently published an article titled ‘Mobile Data: A Goldmine for Telcos’, which gives a snapshot on CDR analysis and data mining. The article provides some insight into the work of AT&T Labs, which makes use of the CDR data stored within the LGR-provisioned CDRlive data warehouse at AT&T.
Quite astonishing that the concept of mining CDRs is still newsworthy for academics – if only they knew just how valuable it is and how much it is used. But well done team on making the news…
See the article here
LGR drops in on the SAS Global Forum
Posted by: lgrtelecommunications on: April 14, 2010
SAS Global Forum is undoubtedly the biggest event on the SAS annual calendar, and as new SAS partners and users, LGR decided to drop in on the 2010 event that was held in sunny Seattle from 11-14 April.
View from the Seattle Space Needle during the Communications/Media/Entertainment industry dinner
Paul Hartley, head of global sales and marketing, reported back that the event was a tremendous success. “We were able to attend some really exciting sessions on the ground-breaking technologies that have gained so much traction at our global telco customers over the last year – things like Social Network Analysis, Churn Modeling and Competitor Analysis,” he said.
“Another highlight was being a part of the special dinner for the Communications, Media and Entertainment industry, hosted at the Space Needle restaurant, and getting to spend time with a number of leading players in the telco sector.”
The event also offered LGR a chance to spend some ‘time off’ with customers old and new. “We spent some considerable time with AT&T, and particularly the folk based out here in Seattle that we don’t get to see that often,” said Hartley. “We also spent some time with some of our new telco friends and SAS colleagues from Canada, who we look forward to spending much more time with in the coming weeks.”
Kate McKenzie, CMO at Telstra, receives the SAS Enterprise Excellence Award from Mikael Hagström, EVP EMEA/APAC
Another highlight was spending time with the delegation from Telstra, which had made the long flight from Australia to attend the event in Seattle. Telstra is one of LGR’s longest standing customers, having had a production CDRlive system in operation since 2001, and as one of the largest SAS users in APAC, it knows just what it takes to maximize business value from Network Intelligence.
Thus it was a moment of great pride for both LGR and SAS when Kate McKenzie, chief marketing officer at Telstra, accepted the SAS Enterprise Excellence Award during the opening evening of the event. Well done Kate!
For more information about SAS Global Forum 2010, click here
RapidReport – providing ‘on-demand’ CDRlive
Posted by: lgrtelecommunications on: February 25, 2010
LGR announced an interesting new launch today – RapidReport, which allows customers to access the data processing and reporting value of CDRlive via a “Software-as-a-Service” (SaaS) model. The rationale is clear: Major network operators such as AT&T, Vodafone, Telstra and MTN already obtain massive value from CDRlive, and both the core technology as well as the business processes around it are very mature. But in order to make the clear benefits of CDRlive accessible to ever-more network operators, regardless of their size or location, a hosted / on-demand was called for.
The RapidReport service utilizes a dedicated instance of CDRlive, hosted within the LGR Data Centers in Atlanta (US), Melbourne (Australia) and Centurion (South Africa). Customers transmit their network data to the RapidReport gateway servers via a choice of secure mechanisms, and it is then processed and enriched in real time by the CDRlive applications, and made available to end users via a choice of presentation layers (e.g. static reports, web portal etc.). And because RapidReport is using EXACTLY the same CDRlive Enterprise Edition software that on-site users have, customers have unlimited access to the same core technology that has been provided significant competitive advantage to the market leaders for over a decade.
The advantages of RapidReport are obvious. Take away the upfront Capital investments, remove the ongoing IT headaches, and place control of Network Intelligence firmly in the hands of the Business which is now able to achieve rapid time to value. And best of all, it’s risk free – customers can try before they buy, and if they choose to use the service, only pay for what they use.
Check out the RapidReport Press Release here
Get more RapidReport detail here.
Or get in touch with the RapidReport team at rapidreport@lgrusa.biz
Love at first Site
Posted by: lgrtelecommunications on: February 1, 2010
Remember the days when some of the biggest events in town were the official launches of a company’s new website? I recall well the circa 1997 launch of a major airlines’ site in London, managed by an ad agency (for which I worked) that was given a tremendous budget to forge this brave new frontier of “cyber-advertising”. The development took many months but was still relatively cheap, so the bulk of the budget was spent on a lavish launch event for hundreds of invitees, which brought together a strange mix of dignitaries, celebrities and techie geeks to share the champagne.
A new Home for LGR
The culmination of the evening was the unveiling of the new website – back then, a case of Netscape Navigator pulling up a very simple home page in a slow, piece-by-piece manner, amongst much “ooh-ing” and “aah-ing” from the audience. It was of course just a basic online brochure for the airline – online bookings, for example, were still some way off yet – but that didn’t stop this momentous event from even making the papers the next morning.
Today it’s a bit different of course. LGR launched it’s new global website today, and managed to get it all done with no launch event, no dignitaries or celebrities, no champagne, no press, and of course no Netscape Navigator. But launch it we did, and we hope you’ll enjoy the new design and find the growing repository of LGR-related information to be informative.
Thanks to Piszko Design (www.piszko.com) for their tireless efforts in the face of far less budget and much tighter deadlines than we had in 1997!
