Fast Forward: Anthony Finbow

After completing his mission to grow MetaSolv’s international footprint, Anthony Finbow has taken on another. Now back in the CEO seat, he will try to lead Psytechnics to a greater global presence. Finbow talked with Telephony’s Tim McElligott about the market opportunities for this niche company.

On what Psytechnics’ place in the market is: It’s a fascinating space. We are a subcategory within the service assurance domain. For most of the past five years people have focused on delivering service assurance solutions mapped to network performance rather than to the customer experience. So our’s is a unique proposition that maps and assesses the end user’s quality of experience. It is a significant area of focus for the service provider. The battle for market share will increasingly be won on quality and quality differentiated services.

On whether operators have enough to do with IP multimedia subsystem architecture and other transformational projects: Clearly IMS adds a new dimension, but fascinatingly enough, I think Psytechnics has a strong proposition in the IMS argument if and when it becomes a reality. And it will become a reality when service providers start to deliver assessment capability to the end-user devices. We recognize that this is some period away, but we are already working with handset manufacturers and set-top box manufacturers to do this. The most significant example is Micromuse using us in its Quality Management solution for voice and video assessment product, which they launched at 3GSM.

On why big test companies don't build their own assessment tools:Psytechnics is unique and has highly defensible intellectual property rights. Our quality assessment product also is backed by a huge range of subjective test data that has been amassed over the last 20 years, beginning with our [one-time] parent company BT [fromwhich we were spun-off]. People recognize we have something in the order of 30 patents and can correlate the performance of our mathematical models to measure quality of experience with actual subjective test data. That accuracy is second to none in the marketplace.

On which service requires the most quality assessment: The quality of [voice over IP] has to be assured to make multimedia services make sense. Multimedia services will be increasingly a larger portion of our revenue stream, but my objective is to ensure we take the most advantage of the short-term revenue opportunity—and I perceive that to be clearly in the VoIP domain.