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In the world of comprehensive telco digital commerce platforms, Matrixx Software is the one, transforming the nature of reality for telcos with a complete, cloud-based digital business support system, and it's just had a major financial upgrade.
Matrixx Software is a very interesting company in today's world, selling the ultra-modern digital tools telcos need to replace their existing product design and lifecycle management, customer engagement, service delivery and monetisation systems into a single, comprehensive ultra-modern, real-time, fully equipped and scalable platform.
The company says its solutions deliver instant visibility, intelligence and control of services for communications service providers.
Now comes the news that Silicon Valley-based Matrixx Software has announced a $40 million Series C funding round led by Sutter Hill Ventures, with Matrixx's media release saying the money is to be used for global expansion.
{loadposition alex08}The Financial Times has written an article on the news, entitled "CK Hutchison buys stake in Silicon Valley’s Matrixx Software", stating: "The new funds will be used by Matrixx to grow its sales and engineering teams as it adds more telecoms companies as customers."
Stefan Dyckerhoff, Sutter Hill's managin director, will join Matrixx Software’s board of directors. Additional new investors include Spring Lake Equity Partners and strategic partner CK Hutchison whose 3 brand group of telecommunications operators serve more than 130 million customers globally. The round also includes existing investors and strategic partners Greylock Partners, Adams Street Partners, Tugboat Ventures, Telstra Ventures, and Swisscom Ventures.
Some of its existing customers include Telstra in Australia, Vodafone in New Zealand, Wind Tre in Italy, Swisscom's global roaming, Carphone Warehouse's iD Mobile MVNO in the UK, and Celcom Axiata Bhd's new Yoodo telco brand in Malaysia which started in January 2018.
The company says it "provides a next-generation digital commerce platform for Telco and related industries", and "has experienced explosive 130% year-over-year growth, adding new customers across North America, UK, Europe, Middle East and Asia".
In an obvious clear message to the world's telcos, old and new, Matrixx said that "faced with the threat of disruption from online-savvy market entrants, telecom operators around the globe have been moving quickly to digitalise their businesses".
"Challenged by ageing IT systems that are out of step with evolving network and service portfolios, telcos are looking outside of their traditional vendor ecosystem for innovative IT solutions."
Naturally, Matrixx Software proudly boasts that its "Digital Commerce platform is a reinvention of telco business support systems that brings together typically separate applications for product design and lifecycle management, customer engagement, service delivery and monetization into a single, comprehensive platform".
It should come as no surprise to see Matrixx remind us that "with customer engagement increasingly digital, Telco’s have prioritised their IT investments to favour ‘digital out-of-the-box’ as a replacement to their traditional BSS/OSS applications, which as Wikipedia reminds us stands for "business support system/operations support system", and notes that "the two systems, operated together by telecommunications service providers, are used to support a range of telecommunication services".
At this point, Dyckerhoff said: "We embrace the telco meets Silicon Valley ethos of Matrixx Software. They’re empowering operators in ways no one else is.
"Their solution is packaged so that telcos aren’t dependent on expensive service contracts and multi-year transformation projects. The industry has been saying for years that it needs a better, more repeatable model for transformation. We believe Matrixx Software has the solution the industry has been seeking.”
After all, as Matrixx states, "streamlining IT infrastructure continues to be a priority as global operators move aggressively to simplify backend operations to more effectively compete against agile, digital rivals".
Frank Sixt, chief financial officer of CK Hutchinson, said: “Simply recreating existing applications as ‘digital’ isn’t good enough. This is a tremendous moment of opportunity for telcos to reinvent themselves with the customer journey as the driving force for their IT infrastructure decisions. We believe that the technology developed by Matrixx Software can help every operator achieve its transformation objectives.”
Dave Labuda, co-founder, chief executive and chieftechnology officer of Matrixx Software said: "We founded Matrixx on the principles of digital scale and agility. As a Silicon Valley company, we design software with both the Telco and the end consumer in mind to deliver capabilities that will provide valuable and meaningful change to the way telcos operate.
“We are thrilled to have Sutter Hill, CK Hutchison, and Spring Lake Partners as investors that share our vision of how the Telco Industry can thrive for decades to come.”
So, what's my take on what it all means for the future?
Well, as Matrixx Software's Architect, it would seem that Labuda is clearly offering telcos worldwide a chance to learn what the Matrixx really is, and how the wave of disruption that threatens legacy telcos keeps growing into an ever larger splinter in their minds that can no longer be ignored.
This new reality has just received a $40 million funding boost, and has attracted an impressive range of customers and investors, with the best still clearly yet to come.
For telcos worldwide on today's ever faster-paced journey of discovery as they navigate the future, the opportunity to discover the true nature of the Matrixx and harness the new digital opportunities Matrixx offers, a simple choice emerges.
They can take the blue pill, and the story ends. Those telco executives wake up in their beds, and believe whatever they want to believe, running their telcos however they want to run them.
The red pill delivers unto those a telcos stay in Matrixx's Wonderland, and they get to see how deep the rabbit hole of ultimate telco transforms goes, and what it's like to live, breathe and deliver a whole new normal on doing business, serving customers, offering today's and tomorrow's digital services while actually being profitable in the 21st century.
Matrixx Software clearly wants us to remember that it is simply offering the truth.
An example of that is one of Labuda's statements in the Financial Times article: “Twenty years ago, AT&T didn’t have to sell you anything. You went to them. It’s a very different world now.
“Legacy vendors haven’t got around what this means. They are still pushing the propeller [on their networks] and pretending that it is a jet plane.”
The Matrixx has been reloaded, and its revolutions await telcos old and new.
Indeed, for while every beginning has an end, and while some "ends" will end, a new beginning awaits all the disruptable "ends" that have no intention of ending anytime soon.
After all, Matrixx knows telcos are out there, and can feel them now. It knows that they're afraid of disruption, and afraid of change.
Me? I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin.
I'm going to end this article, and then let telcos discover what disruptors don't want them to see.
Telcos, Matrixx promises to show you and your customers a new world without the "old you" where the old reality was telcos being hated alongside banks and politicians, into that new world without outdated rules and imprecise controls, without OSS/BSS borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible – where even telcos are loved.
Where we go from there, is a choice I leave to you.