KPN headquarters in The Hague: the company runs mobile
networks in the Netherlands, in Belgium and in Germany, and
MVNOs in France and Spain 
                            
                          
Netherlands operator KPN has launched an MVNO in Spain only four and a half months after the company started discussions about the project.
KPN has carried out this project using its own newly developed Magnum platform, on which it hopes to launch many flavours of MVNO across different European countries — and perhaps also to use for its traditional mobile network operations.
The new Spanish service, Ortel Mobile, uses a brand that is already familiar to customers in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and France — where it is aimed largely at multicultural communities living in those countries.
Ortel operates as an MVNO in each of them, using a variety of network providers. For each, KPN maintained a relatively traditional approach to the OSS/BSS.
But for its new Spanish operation, the KPN team decided to take a radically new strategy — and the lessons are being learned throughout all of KPN’s mobile businesses in Europe.
“We decided to create an integrated strategy, which we’re calling Magnum,” says Martijn Kock, head of IT for KPN Mobile International’s MVNO business. Kock is also managing director of Magnum.
“Magnum is a one-stop-shop for MVNOs, and we were looking for one partner to create the value-added services, the OSS, the BSS and so on.”
The network providers are, naturally, different in each country. In Spain, KPN’s MVNO services are carried by Orange; in France the company uses Bouygues Telecom; and in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany it uses KPN’s own traditional mobile carriers.
But it wanted to outsource the IT to a sole provider — and chose Huawei as that provider. “Huawei was already working with the bigger KPN group, providing network equipment,” says Kock. “But in the past few years it has become a much more dominant player in the software and IT area.”
KPN Spain acted as a systems integrator for its MVNO brands — Simyo among others, says Boelie Vigeveno, a former director of KPN Spain, and now manager of demand management at Magnum.
The very idea of MVNOs fits in with KPN’s international strategy. “We believe in an open network,” he says. “In the Netherlands there is a split between the network, IT and retail sides and we allow other companies to make use of our network, and at the same time we use multiple brands.” The Simyo brand, for example, began as a very simple internet-only proposition targeting the “no thrills segment”. Vigeveno adds: “By using these you can get customers that are not being served by other brands.”
All of the existing MVNO services have “a fully specified IT and network stack”, but for the launch of Ortel in Spain, “we wanted an integrated IT landscape from one vendor”. It had to be capable of supporting a number of brands, including new brands, as well as new propositions and new services. “The main objective was to have a reliable platform, with all the servicing implications,” says Kock.
The company was also looking forward, adds Kock — looking for a platform that could ultimately be rolled out to MVNO services in other countries and “also connected to our own MNO countries, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium, so we can be a one-stop-shop for international brands”.
The idea, he explains, is that KPN could then offer MVNO services to other companies in one or more of its operating companies.
Magnum is KPN’s platform for this — a name consciously borrowed from Unilever’s Magnum ice cream brand, launched in 1987 and now available in many countries around the world with subtle national variants where necessary. “We want our brands to sell across Europe,” says Kock. Just like Unilever sells its ice cream across the world.
KPN commissioned Huawei to work on the project, delivering it as a managed service to KPN. “Huawei configures it for us. They do all the changes on our behalf,” says Vigeveno.
The software was configured by Huawei’s own team in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, with support from Huawei’s headquarters team in Shenzhen, China. The service is hosted by Getronics, a data centre company owned by KPN in the Netherlands.
“We decided to launch Magnum in a greenfield operation, in Spain,” says Kock. “We had the first meeting between my team and Huawei’s team on July 1 2010 and we launched the service four and a half months later.”
Kock is used to what he calls “hiccups” with the development of any IT platform over the first few months. “But this has been a remarkably stable platform for the first few months of operation.”
KPN delivered the overall specification to the Huawei team but did not go into the details of how the team should do their work. “We delivered our requirements to them and then we do the user acceptances. So we see the results, but we don’t interfere in how they achieve them. We did not specify the standards they should use.”
KPN did require “short development times” in an iterative development process, adds Kock. “A business changes its mind, and it is best to have a series of rapid and short deliveries than a few long and big deliveries.”
But KPN has retained the idea of the software being “out-of-the-box”, he adds. “Otherwise the IT landscape becomes spaghetti and development times become longer and longer.” His role “is to ensure the integrity of the platform and we do that by out-of-the-box functionality”, says Kock. “And we have a very rich box from Huawei.”
The system has been designed so that it can be expanded quickly if and when KPN decides to launch new greenfield MVNOs or migrate over existing operations. “We can expand quickly and we can maintain the efficiency of the platform,” he says.
The platform from Huawei has proven at other companies to work with up to 80 million customers, says Kock. “In terms of scalability we have few concerns as long as we can maintain the integrity of the platform.”
The IT team continued to involve the marketing teams of its operators as early as possible in the development of the platform, said Vigeveno.
This is one way to assure that functionality requested by marketing to fulfil customer needs is feasible, and can be delivered with favourable time to market timelines.
A proactive dialogue between IT and marketing people allows the IT team plant ideas of what functionality could be available, and gives the marketing team a better idea of what is possible.
The project was Huawei’s biggest OSS/BSS work so far in Europe and as a result Huawei’s IT specialists have learned much more about the intricacies of the European telecoms market — such as value added tax and its different rules and rates from country to country. “There is not one Europe,” says Kock. “Payment requirements differ per country and so do legal requirements.”
The first roll-out of Magnum, with Ortel in Spain, has been successful. The next step, says Kock, “is to migrate our legacy platform in France to Magnum”, a move planned to commence in April. Then, he smiles, the KPN team will be celebrating with other forms of magnum — appropriately enough for a French project, some one-and-a-half-litre bottles of champagne. GTB