Steve Legge, the CEO and President of netnumber will be speaking at the Cloud & Data Centre Convention and joining a discussion panel at Interconnect World in Melbourne on April 3rd. In this interview he looks at some of the challenges and opportunities he will be speaking about.
Legge is currently the CEO and President of netnumber, an organisation that provides global telephone number intelligence solutions and runs the authoritative registry for 10 digit non-mobile numbers, – both toll free and landline – in North America. He has been at netnumber for 12 years, 3 as CEO, and before that he spent the early years of his career working in Australia at NBN Television before starting SP Telecommunications. After 10 years that business grew to become a significant player in the telecommunications industry and was listed on the ASX in 2001. Within a further couple of years, the company was one of Australia’s first IP carriers.
He moved to the US in 2008 where he worked for Cisco, then running global business development for the Global Government Solutions Group and then eventually on to netnumber. Steve sees his career as shaped by his enjoyment of “building things”. In Australia’s regional television business, aggregation led to the need to build the world’s first multi-channel solution for broadcasting and moving to server-based play out systems. He gives a further example from the USA of developing the market around text-enabled fixed line numbers: “About one in four numbers in the US that can send and receive a text message is a non-mobile number. We’re talking about hundreds of millions of numbers and that has opened a significant amount of opportunity for businesses. So the CPaaS companies all use landline numbers here to help businesses who have had landline numbers for a long time to send and receive messages over those numbers”.
The growing incidence of fraud has added a further impetus to the kind of services that netnumber provides: “As fraud has become rampant and a topic of conversation globally, we have seen number spoofing in messaging as a major issue in other countries. That is not a problem that we have in the US for hosted messaging services, because the netnumber services registry manages those numbers such that spoofing isn’t possible on them”.
This use of netnumber services is not one that was originally envisaged as fraud hasn’t, until relatively recently, become a challenge in the US market. Yet it has led the company “to realize the value of the architecture and the solution that we have”.
Netnumber provides “number intelligence” as a service solution: “That means we have all of the phone number code range and number portability information for every country, and every phone number globally. We are a global supplier for the 10 billion active telephone numbers in the world. If you ask us about a telephone number, we can return all of the network intelligence-related information about that number in real time anywhere on the planet”.
The company also offers a Number Check service whereby they score every telephone number in the world. This returns a score related to the number from zero to five with zero being “definitely not a number that you want to deal with” while five is very likely to be a good number. “Typically, our fraud or number check service would be used in a KYC [know your customer] process. We have customers who use the high volume, low cost service very early in their KYC waterfall so that they can detect and screen out any problematic activity to avoid paying for expensive identity data later in the process.”
At the very beginning for netnumber, the company was both a telecom network software provider as well as a data services provider. The company built technology for the core of the network on a platform that would run all of the applications for routing, signaling, and database functions. From there, netnumber began to provide the number intelligence data as both a standalone offer and an integrated solution globally.
In terms of data center housing Legge states that “We moved out of physical data centers some time ago”. Originally netnumber had a large footprint in a number of data centers across the USA. The need to increase capacity to cater for a global infrastructure and an expanding customer base led netnumber to migrate to AWS in 2017.
This allowed the company to meet customers directly in the cloud via the different types of connectivity provided there. It also allowed netnumber to deliver much more cost-effective and advanced solutions by leveraging cloud technologies. Legge points out that both carriers and service providers have evolved and that CPaaS companies have come to the fore over the last few years, expanding the breadth of the industry and the types of use cases. Accordingly, netnumber has been expanding footprint, technology and data sets to help service customers.
Legge comments that demand expansion has meant new challenges for network operators, principally in “trying to find more cost-effective ways to deploy more advanced technology” and that this challenge will characterize the future.