Data Center POST Interview with Arnd Baranowski, CEO, Oculeus

By Contributing Editor Sarah Chamberlain

Arnd Baranowski is the CEO of Oculeus GmbH, a leading provider of innovative OSS/BSS solutions for telecommunications service providers and network operators and other providers of voice and SMS services. Oculeus’ systems portfolio includes the company’s flagship Captura solution, a wholesale, routing, operations and billing system for managing a service provider’s interconnect business for voice and SMS. Oculeus also offers complete systems for fraud protection, network quality monitoring and dispute management, which can be deployed individually or as bundled solutions. Oculeus has been serving customers since 2004 as a technology partner and strategic vendor. Oculeus is a German GmbH company with offices in Germany and the United States. For more information, please visit www.oculeus.com.

Arnd brings over 30 years of technical and software development experience, initially in the military, and a successful track record of developing database solutions for Commercial and Telecom applications.

Data Center POST recently had the opportunity to speak with Arnd and discuss how the company is evolving and what challenges are coming next prior to their participation at the ITW 2019 global event taking place in Atlanta, GA from June 23-26, 2019..

Data Center POST, Sarah Chamberlain (DCP-SC) Question:  In your own words, can you please describe what Oculeus does and what problems are you solving?

Oculeus, Arnd Baranowski (O-AB) Answer: Oculeus provides software-based solutions that enable providers of voice and messaging communications services to efficiently manage their businesses and network operations. Our technology and product offerings create an intelligent framework for our service provider and network operator customers to automate their operations and, as such, replace previous processes that often involved manual input. For example, in the inter-carrier space, we have a number of customers that manage their entire businesses with nothing more than our software and a few switches.

The theme of allowing telcos to do more with less is driving technology innovations in this market. All of our customers, from Tier 1 telcos to smaller OTT players can certainly attest to the fact that our software and technology are helping them achieve more results with less resources.

DCP-SC Q: What do you attribute to Oculeus’ success?

O-AB A: We have a highly efficient company structure that allows us to develop and bring to market innovative technologies and products that our target market needs. I am proud to say that we have a highly talented team across all the departments in our organization. Our staff is a huge part of the ongoing growth and success of our company. Another important fact is that we have developed excellent partnership style relationships with all of our customers.

DCP-SC Q: What milestones did Oculeus achieve in the past year and how will these developments help your company keep up with the demands of the quickly growing and ever-changing telecommunications industry?

O-AB A: We recently launched a significant new telecoms fraud protection offering. This offering, which we call Oculeus-Protect, is a cloud-based service that identifies, confirms and blocks fraudulent call attempts and telecommunications traffic in real-time.

Our Oculeus-Protect service is targeted at enterprises to protect their communications networks against PBX hacking and toll fraud attacks. You could say that Oculeus-Protect acts as an insurance policy against telecoms fraud and the underperforming fraud management practices of most telcos.

The need for Oculeus-Protect is clear and the demand that we are experiencing for the service since we launched it in a number of months ago is strong.

DCP-SC Q: What are you most looking forward to accomplishing over the next year? The next 3-5 years?

O-AB A: Telcos are constantly looking for new sources of revenue. With this in mind, cloud services for enterprises customers is an area that many telcos have targeted for expansion. In this area, our Oculeus-Protect service also has a number of interesting implications for telcos.

Oculeus-Protect and the automated framework that it creates for protecting against telecoms fraud can serve as the base for an important new cloud service that telcos can offer their enterprise customers.

Yes, telcos, who have been plagued for many years with a poor reputation for fighting telecoms fraud, can actually begin generating revenue from preventing telecoms fraud with our Oculeus-Protect service.

DCP-SC Q: What do you think is the greatest challenge in the industry and how are you working to overcome it?

O-AB A: As a technology vendor, our challenge is to constantly bring to market new technologies and innovations that offer significant and tangible value to service providers and network operators. The last thing a telco needs is another system to manage. Telcos want to hear about the benefits of technology that will facilitate earning new revenue or reduce operational complexity.

DCP-SC Q: What new developments are on the horizon for Oculeus?

O-AB A: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an area that we have been recently working on incorporating into our technologies and products. AI is certainly not a buzz word, but rather a tangible concept that is increasing the value of our product offerings to our telco customers.

For example, AI is being applied in our telecoms fraud protection solutions to automate the profiling of communications traffic and monitoring for exceptions to the expected baseline. AI allows our telecoms fraud protection systems to understand new patterns of telecoms fraud and independently build new sets of rules for taking action against fraudulent call attempts and communications traffic. In our Captura system for managing wholesale voice operations AI is also being applied to automate processes that previously required manual input.

DCP-SC Q: What are you hoping to accomplish at ITW 2019?

O-AB A: For us, ITW is one of the most important events in the telecoms space, especially in North America. ITW 2019 is an excellent opportunity for Oculeus to interact with the most important names in the telecommunications industry and showcase our innovations on a large stage.

DCP-SC Q: Thank you so much for chatting with us. Arndt and the Oculeus team will be attending ITW 2019 in Atlanta from June 23-26, 2019 at the Hyatt Regency and Marriott Marquis hotels.

To learn more about Oculeus, please visit https://www.oculeus.com/index.html.