2012 has been a thrilling year for our company and the entire telecom industry. We’re delighted to announce that we have marked our fifth year of significant growth. This period continues to show an average 40% annual increase in financials reflected in a 200% growth in global employee headcount over the term. Furthermore, we are working with customers and partners in over 28 countries, from new spaces in Malaysia and Brazil. The investments in these regions reflect the maturing markets within each country and region, and we look forward to helping operators manage this growth and identify new ways to monetize network transactions to ensure costs don’t exceed revenues. Much of our expanding global reach can be attributed to more mobile broadband investments, increased LTE rollouts and new operator services. While it’s always critical for operators to offer their subscribers superior network quality and enhanced coverage, differentiation within today’s market increasingly depends on operators being able to quickly spot future market needs, identify new revenue models, and introduce new services that not only enhance their bottom line, but also improve their customers’ experience. Incorporating policy and charging control solutions and creating a network that is more than ready to manage data traffic in real-time has enabled operators we work with to be more flexible and quickly iterate what they introduce to the market. An example of this operator success occurred recently when a Tier One U.S. carrier was able to quickly and easily develop new subscriber services for new devices, such as the Kindle Fire HD and the Nexus 7. This particular operator was able to understand the impending device and data demand and designed tailored rate plans and network policies to better match its subscribers’ individual preferences, thanks to the built in flexibility of our products and solutions. In addition to providing new services to improve the subscriber experience, we’ve found a network that is easy for third parties to engage with through secure APIs and has infrastructure capable of supporting other people’s business models in a timely and economic fashion empowers operators to grow their customer base.  We have witnessed that being able to effectively do business and partner with others can transform an operators competitive positioning. To this point, the cloud and virtualization have proven to be key elements in opening up networks to third parties. The cloud creates an efficient infrastructure that carries virtualized charging, policy and other applications to enable developers to identify how network services can be better leveraged to meet subscriber and business needs. A further key to building our customer and partner base has been the addition of Express Solutions, our pre-packaged Policy and Charging Control (PCC) solutions that rapidly deliver common operator business requirements with reduced complexity and ease of operation. By Pre-configuring  these solutions for rapid deployment with reduced risk and administrative cost, they enable highly scalable turnkey deployments of Openet software. So what’s next for our industry in 2013? For starters, M2M and WiFi solutions are going to unlock big opportunities for operators. WiFi is evolving beyond a temporary offload solution and showing massive potential to offer operators new revenues, further differentiate services and provide needed network capacity. Additionally, M2M is becoming a natural – and necessary step – for operators. The rise of M2M creates an exponential amount of data traffic and success in this space will require accurate data collection and distribution. Operators have proven their success at this already but those that identify how to best jump into this market will be able to quickly reap the rewards. Outside of M2M and WiFi, we will continue to see a dramatic change in how operators source innovation. The walled garden approach to business that used to be the norm in our industry will continue to diminish and more and more operators will build partnerships with global innovators to ensure they can continue to be creators of content and services to identify where they can add value to their subscribers. Needless to say, these are exciting times and we’re looking forward to jumping into the New Year.

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To learn more about Openet’s plans for the future, please read the current European Communications feature article on the company.