Nebula OneView certified Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, development partnership to continue on Azure

1Nebula Team

Jan 31, 2016 PRODUCT OVERVIEW

Microsoft has renewed and extended the Gold Certified Partner status awarded to Nebula for the company’s next generation telecommunications management platform, OneView. Nebula and Microsoft have also firmed up their development partnership for future cloud-based innovations in the Azure platform.

OneView, the evolution of Nebula’s Enterprise Mobile Management Services (EMMS), is a next generation, cloud-based telecoms management system that delivers real-time visibility and control of enterprise telecoms consumption and service provider performance. Developed in South Africa by telecommunications specialists Nebula, OneView gives enterprises unprecedented control over their telecommunications systems and spend.

Control is crucial in the new, high performance telecoms environment, the company says. Nebula CEO, Daniel Nel believes more and more enterprises are moving into the high performance telecoms space. “Now, enterprises depend on their voice and internet connectivity in order to do business. Telecoms supports their sales, customer service, payment systems and websites. It enables the mobile workforce, supports online bookings and loyalty programmes, and service offerings. Without connectivity, businesses lose revenue.”

High performance businesses and their associated high performance telecoms environments are much like Formula 1 racing cars: a lot goes on behind the scenes to make them work, and when something goes wrong, it can go horribly wrong. Control, efficiency and speed are crucial for their success.

“In an uncontrolled high performance telecoms environment, enterprises are spending at least 20 – 30% more than they should,” says Nel, and this is on direct costs alone. Indirect costs associated with the telecoms environment include the resources needed to monitor and manage spend, allocate costs to departments, track SLAs and monitor network performance. “It is a complex environment,” says Nel. “A large enterprise might have 30,000 line items and entities they get billed for, as well as multiple service agreements with multiple service providers. It’s time for enterprises to regain control over their telecoms environment: to simplify it in order to optimise it.”

Andre Witte, Nebula’s Chief Technology Officer, notes that the new Nebula OneView solution has been in development for three years and is the evolution of the company’s ground-breaking EMMS, a cloud-based mobile monitoring and lifecycle management platform that gave enterprises full visibility of their mobile contracts and spend, devices, SIM cards, in real time and across all service providers.

“OneView builds on the EMMS innovation by adding capability to manage fixed voice, internet and WAN and SLAs in a simplified, automated environment,” Witte says. Through its integration with service providers, OneView enables automated data collection, enrichment and verification of enterprise usage, spend and vendor performance.

The solution is unique on a number of fronts: because it is developed in South Africa, it supports compliance with local legislation; it offers implementation in as little as 40 hours; and it encompasses the entire high performance telecoms environment, straddling service providers and customers. Capable of delivering savings of up to 30% on direct and 70% on indirect telecoms costs, OneView is streamlining operations and simplifying telecoms environment management. “The market has long understood the need to optimise the telecoms environment and run it more cost effectively, particularly in an increasingly tough economic climate,” notes Witte.

As communications become increasingly critical to business success, the need to simplify and automate the environment, control costs and manage service levels effectively increases. Off the EMMS platform alone, Nebula client Deloitte reported direct saving of over R5.2 million in a year.

With OneView spanning across the entire fixed line, mobile and internet environment, Nebula expects customers to realise even greater savings on both direct costs and indirect administration and management costs, in addition to achieving greater communications reliability.

Nebula’s partnership with Microsoft not only gives customers the assurance that Nebula OneView is an approved platform; it also enables Nebula to innovate yet further in collaboration with the global giant. As pioneers in the local telecoms management space, Nebula constantly moves ahead of trends to develop solutions in line with where the market is headed.

Collaboration with Microsoft on new cloud-based services, with future Nebula development to take place in the Azure platform, positions the company to bring more innovative, agile, scale-able and secure solutions to market in future, says Witte. “For us, this partnership is about more than credibility: Microsoft is investing as much as we are in terms of training and developing a product road map.”

While OneView is set to revolutionise South African high performance telecoms management, Nebula sees potential to further expand and enhance the platform – possibly to encompass the entire IT environment in future. With a steadily growing developer team and a focus on the development of more in-house Azure skills, Nebula is continually growing and refining its product suite to reinforce and enable the high performance telecoms landscape.

About Nebula

Nebula is a leading telecoms innovations firm redefining how high performance telecoms can play a role in successful business strategies. At their core, Nebula is passionate about the achievement and success of their clients. Nebula helps enterprises simplify their fast-paced and ever changing telecoms environment by eliminating complexity to give their clients optimised control, speed and accuracy. Nebula offers a unique set of next generation telecoms solutions to give your organisation enhanced capability to manage and optimise your entire telecoms environment.

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