Raghid Charara, Vice President and Khaled Chatila, VP of Business Development at ANALITICO

ANALITICO is a newly established ICT company offering customized solutions for the telecoms and IT sector and providing full Digital Transformation services.

Inside Telecom sat down with the VP of ANALITICO Raghid Charara, and the company’s VP of Business Development Khaled Chatila for a closer look into their work and the prospects offered by the company.

Let’s jump right in.

Gentlemen, please introduce yourselves and tell us how ANALITICO was formed?

I am Raghid Charara, an expert in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) with over 20 years of experience in managing big projects covering both the telecoms and banking Sectors in different regions of the world.

I hold a double degree in Statistics and Computer Science from the American University of Beirut (AUB), and I am an alumnus of INSEAD having completed several executive education certificates in leadership, general management, and transformation. In addition, I work as a learning coach at INSEAD, teaching different courses such as innovation, strategy, and FinTech to MBA students and high-profile executives.

I am Khaled Chatila, a senior Operations and IT expert with a diverse experience in management and technology. Throughout my career, I assumed different managerial roles centered around operations and information & communication technology such as information security, system administration, IT management, software development, networking, and telecoms.

I also worked in different fields such as education, logistics and manufacturing in a handful of different countries. I spearheaded digital transformation as well as developed and integrated IT solutions which increase efficiency. I hold a Bachelor’s in computer science from the American University of Beirut (AUB) and a master’s degree in information security from the University of London, Royal Holloway.

We have been friends for a long time and we both share a passion for technology. We were always keeping up with and closely following the telecoms market trends, from there we identified several gaps which we were confident that we could cover through our knowledge, experience, and know-how.

When the right time and conditions came our way, we were able to create ANALITICO using our individual long track records in ICT and management, our synergy at work, in addition to our wide range of exposure and rich portfolio of relationships. The company was creating alongside world-class professional executives with accomplishments in business on international scale under their belts.

ANALITICO’s offering provides a set list of services, what areas of operations currently interest you the most?

We provide customized and innovative turn-key solutions that assist and empower different sectors including governmental institutions, banking, and telecom sector (government, regulators, and mobile operators).

Our portfolio includes services such as digital transformation, Equipment Identity Register (EIR), International Traffic Management, Carrier Services, Fraud Management Solution (FMS), Technical Audit (TA) and Revenue Assurance (RA), Traceability of Items (mainly for pharmaceutical, tires, and many others), and Value-Added Services (VAS).

Our offering can be on Premises (OnPrem) or Cloud-based and can cover Software as a service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a service (IaaS). We believe in the power of data and we heavily focus on the outcome and patterns extracted from Big Data through our analytical tools and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms.      

Each one of our team members, has a long track record of projects and has deployed different kinds of solutions in different parts of the world. Most of the projects we’ve done are located in West Africa (Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Niger, Mali, and Togo) and Central Africa (Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic and Cameroon) and some of them in the Middle East (Kuwait, Oman and others) as well as other projects in different parts of the world (Latin America and APAC).

Several of our completed projects, were originally outsourced to us by local companies in those countries or through third parties. The interesting part is that our solutions and services are universal and needed worldwide and there are no geographical limitations or barriers. We have offices and representatives in several regions, mainly: London (UK), Paris (France), Beirut (Lebanon) and Douala (Cameroon).   

From a competitive standpoint, how does ANALITICO stand out in the face of its competition?

We use the latest technologies and the best tools and methodologies, and our team is composed of experts that hold the highest certifications in their fields. We are flexible and adaptive to our client’s requirements thus making our solutions competitive and affordable, yet, we always add our innovative recommendations bridging between different fields and technologies while offering state-of-the-art solutions.

Our long track record and wide experience and knowledge enable us to provide custom made solutions that ensure our customers’ satisfaction and always deliver far more than what the customer wanted initially; that’s the essence of transformation, as opposed to change.

Our company culture believes in “customer obsession” opposed to “customer focus.”

Is your business strategy keeping pace with the market? What challenges are you facing at the moment?     

Technology is evolving fast and there is a high demand for digital transformation.

The challenges we face come in two-fold; the first being to always keep up with the swiftness of technological advances, new services, and innovations. While these are manageable, we consider ourselves to have the right setup, tools, and mindset to adapt, expand, and introduce changes as we go.

The second is more client-oriented, where we can group the challenges in 3 categories: resistance, culture, and budget.

Usually, employees of companies undertaking a transformation resist the introduction of new solutions and methodologies and they fight back. We ensure to communicate, train, and involve them in this transformation journey and provide all the coaching needed.

Next, some companies’ cultures are robust and do not facilitate transformation and we always need the support of the top management and the flexibility in introducing new processes to enable the change.

Finally, is the budget, as companies see it as a big bulk one shot amount, and to resolve this point, we provide a comparison showing them the cost of the traditional setup they have over 5 years versus the cost of the transformation and the cost of the new digital setup for 5 years and they can clearly see the difference.

The pandemic has undoubtedly accelerated the pace of transformation. To what extent will digital workspace growth push cloud adoption and spending?

Since cloud computing empowers digital business transformation, the cloud became the catalyst for this transformation. It is used to improve the scalability of the capabilities while reducing cost and risk. So, it is a crucial element since the success of the transformation relies on it.

We fully understand this need, and that is why we tailored our offering to include the three main service models of cloud computing: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).

How do you plan on accelerating business growth?

To accelerate our business growth, we ensure to include the key skills and resources that are needed for our continuity and success. We believe that employees are key assets and part of the

journey, and we strongly invest in our team while embracing continuous learning to ensure they are up to date with the latest skills and technology trends.

As explained above, our business model allows us to be adaptable to the technology changes and at the same time to our clients demands and given our agility we can easily accommodate this and always expand our products and services. Finally, we believe that we should always think ahead.

Telcos across the world have suffered heavily due to cyberattacks especially since the pandemic began, how can your services help providers defend themselves against such threats?

First, it is important to highlight that cybersecurity is a combination of technologies, processes, and practices that we work on heavily and deeply. In parallel, we encourage our clients to follow the top-down approach to cybersecurity where management leads the line across all business practices.

We focus with our clients on identifying the threats and risks facing their data and information; and outlining the damage their organization would incur should that data be lost or wrongfully exposed.

We also analyze how was the data collected, stored, and secured, in parallel, our cyber security offerings include Encryption, Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Access management, Firewalls, Anti-virus and anti-malware solutions, Web filtering and Risk and compliance management. Those solutions can be in-house or outsourced, while providing security as a software as a service (SaaS), available via the cloud. To reach out to ANALITICO: info@analitico.tech.