By Business & Finance 
Pictured: Joe Hogan, founder and CTO, Openet
Joe Hogan founded Openet in Dublin in 1999. The company assists Communication Service Providers to grow to become Digital Service Providers through real-time monetization, control, and big data preparation systems.
Joe Hogan is the founder and Chief Technology Officer of Digital BSS company Openet. Founded in Dublin in 1999, Openet assists Communication Service Providers to grow to become Digital Service Providers through real-time monetization, control, and big data preparation systems. Its customers include AT&T, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone
Mr. Hogan founded the company having noticed the growth in the mobile communications market in the 1990s, along with the introduction of new standards such as The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM).
In an interview with Enterprise Ireland, he says: “The problem I saw was that all the major telecoms network equipment suppliers had their own interpretation of standards and there was no consistency with how mobile call records were collected from the network and passed to billing systems. Add into this the emergence of data going over the mobile internet that had to be collected and billed. The market was growing, the technology was evolving and I felt this was a perfect storm for me to develop Openet.”
Openet was developed at a time when the internet was in its infancy, and mobile communications were growing in importance. “I could see the point where both would merge and the impact that would have,” he says. “I wanted to be involved at the start of that technological revolution.”
Openet began life with a small team of engineers. With some financial backing, the company developed a mediation engine and within months they received interest from some of the largest mobile operators in Europe. At this time, operators began to form plans to upgrade their systems to cater for the mobile internet that would be driven by 3G. Although Openet’s first export drive was focused on Europe, they received a lot on interest in North America. This resulted in the company signing a major US operator within the first 18 months of existence.
In each of the last two years, Openet has had revenue of around $70m. On 24 July, the company was bought by US firm Amdocs for $180m. The takeover is expected to be completed before the end of the fourth quarter of this year.
On this, Mr. Hogan says: “We have been on a 20-year journey in Openet to build a business of which we can all be proud. In recent years, we have built new 5G products which are recognised worldwide for their innovation and modern open, cloud-native architecture. We all look forward to the combined technology strengths of Openet and Amdocs creating new opportunities for service providers at this exciting time of 5G adoption.”
Business & Finance, Business Person of the Month
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