Innovation and strategic connectivity solutions are driving business growth like never before. By expanding into private networks, forming key partnerships, and delivering end-to-end managed services, companies are unlocking new opportunities. These advancements are shaping the future of seamless, scalable connectivity.
Alejandro Pinero:
Welcome back everyone to FNTV's coverage here at MWC Barcelona and I'm back at Ceragon's stand to talk to none other than Ronen. Ronen, great to see you, chief growth officer. I really want to pick your brains about what some of those growth opportunities are. Let's start by talking about your mantra, think of innovation, and what does that mean from you and your perspective of finding growth for the company?
Ronen Ben-Hamou:
Absolutely, as you can see all over the booth, innovation is the key point for us as a driver and when we look at it we look typically at the holistic view to the customer. We typically look with the customer on four stages, map, design, deploy, and operate, map being where we map all the requirements of the customer, not only technical requirements, but also financial and other barriers, pain points.
The design, help them design the most optimized with different criteria of the network. Deploy, help them deploy the whole network A to Z, get it all operational, and afterwards when it's operational help them operate it in the most cost effective way. When we look at innovation we don't just limit it to one of these. We look at all.
For example, if you look on our booth, we have the network digital twin, which helps you in the mapping to identify, map the whole network, identify different bottlenecks whether they're financial or technical, security-wise, any type of criteria, and help to map and help you. In the design, for example, over here you can see we have a whole network for millimeter wave, a whole tool that helps you innovate the way you design the network.
When we deploy, for example, we just launched the most advanced millimeter wave solution, 25 gigabit, and other innovations like we have here. In the operate, we have different tools with respect to NOC, for example, where we manage the whole network for the customers. They can focus on their business. We'll help them to operate the whole network. Whenever you look into that, we have different stages of innovation. Some of them come internally, some of them with partnerships, but for us we look at the customer first and how do we help them in all these stages?
Alejandro Pinero:
Let me ask you specifically about private networks and it is a big topic. It's increasingly prevalent I'd say. How is Ceragon positioning itself to capture that new revenue area, those potentially new enterprise clients?
Ronen Ben-Hamou:
Absolutely, that's a very good question and the heart of the focus for me as chief growth officer because this is one of the main growth areas we see booming up in the different areas. We are focusing on several verticals. To name a few of them, energy, that includes oil and gas, for example, and mining. We have defense. We have smart cities, public safety, different verticals that we see in the market, which are really booming and growing where basically digital transformation takes some of them traditional businesses that need to go through a transformation because of the different use cases.
We look with them with our customers on these whole four areas I mentioned. We don't just want to be the ones providing the technology whether it's this box or that box. We want to play as a one-stop shop, end-to-end solution provider. For that, we are building the whole range of hardware and software solutions, but as well we are adding system integration capabilities. For example, we just recently announced the acquisition of E2E Technologies in the US.
This is a system integrator, which is uniquely specializing on energy and utilities, and likewise the acquisition of Siklu. I was the CEO of Siklu, for example, before. It was exactly tailored for that bringing in new technologies, which are tailored to the private network with customer base and the ability to support them. All in all, we look at, one, growing the in-house technologies, capabilities, services, building an ecosystem with partnerships whether it's 5G or other technologies, and doing M&As to add more capabilities whether it's technology, system integration, or otherwise.
Alejandro Pinero:
Of course, this doesn't happen on its own, right? You need to build partnerships. You need to build an ecosystem to deliver on these solutions and drive that growth. Can you walk us perhaps through Ceragon's view or approach to end-to-end partnerships?
Ronen Ben-Hamou:
Absolutely, when we look at partnerships they come in different ranges. One range for example is technology. Let's assume we are operating of course worldwide in all the different territories. Let's assume we take 5G, private 5G. The challenge is when we took private 5G in the US versus India or Latin America or Europe these are complete different requirements whether it's CBRS or other spectrum license. It's very difficult to have one source of a solution that will fit all of these, not to mention use cases, mobility with or without, and so on.
We are building an ecosystem of partners, technology vendors, which basically help us to fit the right solution for the right customer based on these relationships we have with them. It ranges to technology, communication technology. It ranges to different applications like cameras, WiFis, network sensors, and so on, IoT sensors and so on. This is one dimension, building the whole ecosystem. The other dimension is what I call OEM partners. This is a great example.
Signify is the number one in the world lighting company. It used to be Philips Lighting. They changed the name to Signify a few years ago and you can see which is actually innovation and end-to-end basically taking out technology. Instead of just mounting on light poles, we joined forces with them. We embed the whole millimeter wave technology into the light.
You don't see it outside in the luminaire. It looks very aesthetic. It has embedded gigabit technology in it. If a carrier or somebody wants either to bring a small cell 5G, for example, or a public WiFi or security cameras for the city, they don't need to look how to connect it. All the infrastructure is there, power, connectivity. Just plug it in and move on. That's an example and we have many more.
Alejandro Pinero:
Ronen, I did want to also ask you, you touched on managed services. What role does that play? How do you position Ceragon as that partner to take it on?
Ronen Ben-Hamou:
This is a very important part of how we see end-to-end in our offering because when you go to the big carriers they have an army of people. They know how to manage the network and even though it costs them a lot of money, they still do it because it's a critical part. When we go to private network most of the companies and partners will find that they don't understand technology. They are perfect in what they're supposed to do, which is their business whether it's utility or other stuff, oil and gas, but they don't know how to manage for sure not a wireless network, which is more complex than just putting fiber or some wires.
This is where we come to play because we can basically offer them to take all of that complexity off their chart. It's a much easier cost of ownership. We can even offer business models where instead of even buying the equipment from us and having to deal with all of that, it's a network as a service basically. We will come. We will deploy the whole equipment. We own it still.
We'll manage everything on our network. If there are any failures or any optimization to be done, we'll take care of all of that and they will get a regular kind of analysis how the network is behaving. This is an example where we enable in some cases the business case of digital transformation to our customers that otherwise they could not have done it because they would not be able to afford all of this.
Alejandro Pinero:
To close then, I'm going to give you a challenge. It's a busy market, a lot of competition. MWC is a huge show. It kind of reflects that diversity. In one or two sentences, what sets you guys apart?
Ronen Ben-Hamou:
What sets us apart is that we look at the customers and everything we do is not just about taking different pieces, put them together, and just throw it and try to sell. We look at the use cases of the customers. We look at the pain points of the customers and we are able to bring differentiation. To give you a simple example, you see here the millimeter wave nodes for example. If you go again to a carrier, it'll be an army of technicians who know how to do it.
When you go to private network they cannot afford it and I've been to see in the field their pain points. We have different alignment modes, much more simplicity of the use of the radios to enable then much simpler business cases to operate. To make it in a bottom line, we don't only develop technology. We develop it to suit the needs of our customers, to understand their use cases, their pain points, and together collaborate to bring them the value.
Alejandro Pinero:
Wonderful, thank you so much, Ronen.