HCPT achieves fastest time to market and high customer service quality with Managed Services

HCPT is one of the mobile operators in Indonesia, the fourth entrant in a crowded market. Operating both 2G and 3G networks, they entered the market in 2007 and serve more than eight million subscribers to date. This number is expected to grow rapidly as they expand their network to 9,000 network sites in 2010.

Entering a crowded market successfully with the right partner
Entering as a foreign investor and fourth operator in an already saturated market where price competition was intense and ARPU (average revenue per user) quite low was a major challenge for HCPT. Leveraging on the amount of growth still possible in the Indonesian market, HCPT poised itself to gain customer confidence and market share by providing a better service than its competitors.

HCPT saw that collaborating with an established company could help them start up quickly as they would have better knowledge of the local market’s requirements and could also benefit from the partner’s pool of competent resources and expertise. In order to increase efficiency, HCPT decided right from the start to outsource not just the site rollout and management of its network, but also most of its backend operations, such as IT system, call centre, and billing centre.

Nokia Siemens Networks was a natural choice as it had long established operations in Indonesia, and had a track record of delivering fast, high-quality turnkey deployments and end-to-end managed services. Leveraging on its network operations, know-how and multi-vendor capabilities, Nokia Siemens Networks provides all services necessary to operate, maintain and optimize a complete network. These services range from: network monitoring, fault/ configuration/performance management to field operations, network planning and optimization, to product testing, and real estate and interconnection management. The technology scope includes 2G/3G radio, transmission and core networks as well as an extensive suite of multi-vendor VAS applications.

“The fact that Nokia Siemens Networks was familiar with the environment in Indonesia has helped us set up fairly quickly without having to recruit a complete organization ourselves. We’ve leveraged in that sense from a bigger organization that was already there,” said Benoit Hanssen, Chief Technical Officer, Hutchison CP Telecommunications Indonesia (HCPT).

HCPT has managed to keep its network management team small, thus freeing up resources for other purposes.

Achieving goals with Managed Services
With Nokia Siemens Networks taking care of its network rollout and operations, HCPT was able to focus on its strategic goals of providing high quality services to its customers and building its brand while rapidly acquiring market share.

“We’ve been executing on that strategy, and we are now - more than any other operator - being associated with high quality, innovative services and that’s basically been the strongest driver for us in terms of business and acquisition of customers,” said Hanssen.

Further, HCPT was able to put more focus into its promotional strategy, particularly important in an aggressive market like Indonesia.

“Low revenue per subscriber and a very dynamic promotion environment makes it a big challenge for us in Indonesia. What the managed services have done for us is to enable us to adjust quite rapidly to those changes. It gives us a framework on which these services, promotions, and new functionalities can be developed quickly,” added Hanssen.

Ramping up their network coverage was another priority for HCPT. Having launched their network with 1,300 sites in 2007, HCPT swiftly quintupled the number of sites to 6,400 by end 2008. Working closely with Nokia Siemens Networks, HCPT reached its target - the fastest rollout any operator has ever achieved in Indonesia.

Already, the operator is reaping the benefits of an expanded network: “If you look at where we exited in 2008 versus 2009, we’ve more than doubled the subscriber numbers as well as the total revenue of the company,” commented Hanssen.

One-stop shop
Having an experienced end-to-end Managed Services partner has its advantages, as HCPT has seen.

“Nokia Siemens Networks offers a one-stop shop that provides a very broad scope of services and that gives us a lot of flexibility, without having to go to someone else to get things done each time.

Whenever we have an issue, be it technical- or architecture-wise, Nokia Siemens Networks has been able to bring in competence and I think that’s also one of the key benefits that we get from a managed services organization with a multinational vendor whereas as HCPT, we would have much difficulty getting that competence on board,” voiced Hanssen.

Growing from strength to strength
In the next three years, HCPT expects to continue to grow its subscriber base and network traffic, and foresees that data-centric services will be the dominant service in the market. As Nokia Siemens Networks has been one of the key players in that domain, HCPT hopes to continue its strong partnership with Nokia Siemens Networks to develop that market.

Looking at the partnership of the two companies thus far, Hanssen has this to share: “The key to a successful managed services relationship is, primarily, that the interests of both parties are aligned. Once that has been established, all the details fall into place naturally.”