- Startup Gaiia aims to help ISPs overcome the technical hurdles of M&A
- The company started out as an ISP but became independent in 2023
- ISPs that merge typically keep their operating systems separate for some time
Telecom M&A is ramping and so are the technical challenges around merging two different networks, according to Gaiia, a startup in the broadband OSS/BSS space.
Olivier Falardeau, co-founder and CTO of Gaiia, told Fierce when ISPs first merge they’re typically in a “discovery phase” where they’re not ready to centralize everything into one technology stack. They have trouble with accessing data, observability into how the acquired ISP operates as well as managing what’s often an “enormous product catalog” of legacy offerings.
It's not just about figuring out how to “snap together some of their systems,” said Gaiia VP of Operations Evan Matthews. For many ISPs, M&A is a time to “really challenge everything about the way that they operate and to transform their business model…that’s what they want to do but they don’t necessarily always know how to do it.”
Gaiia’s origin story
Gaiia has some firsthand experience in the M&A department. The company used to be part of Canadian ISP Oxio, which in 2023 was acquired by Cogeco for about $100 million. Following the deal, Gaiia spun out into a standalone software business and now currently has over 40 ISP customers – including Oxio.
A big reason Gaiia was founded in the first place was because Oxio’s old OSS/BSS system left a lot to be desired, Matthews explained. The company had a hard time connecting consumer-facing applications with the billing and CRM platforms and then making sure those work properly with the network provisioning layer.
“The genesis of Gaiia was really like stitching all these things together and making them simple for end users,” he said, not just for the internet customers but for the agents and field technicians that serve them.
Gaiia has zeroed in on challenger ISPs rather than big incumbents to grow its customer base, with customers such as IQ Fiber, Kwikbit, Resound Networks and Vistabeam. Similar OSS/BSS broadband players are AEX and GOCare.
Gaiia’s take on M&A integration
When it comes to M&A, what Gaiia does is create different organizations or “tenants” where the acquirer still has visibility into the data of the other ISP, but the respective operating teams have “completely different permissions and different views,” Falardeau said.
It’s like creating “a separate instance of Gaiia” for each ISP team, Matthews noted. That way, the ISPs can “harmonize their back-end processes” into one stack without merging all the operating teams into one and “deal with all that type of integration work.”
This approach allows ISPs to technically function as separate companies on the same OSS/BSS framework until they want to fully integrate. When that typically happens – if at all – depends on the M&A.
ISPs that made a “big bang acquisition” might want to consolidate their systems right away, said Falardeau, whereas others prefer to spend 1-2 years as separate entities to “really grasp all the nuances of their operations.”
And some ISPs “never want to centralize it into a single entity and they just want to have different brands,” he added. That way, the ISP just has “a portfolio of companies that they might want to resell to others at some point.”
Ideally, the ISP’s customers don’t notice any behind-the-scenes changes, but of course there are exceptions.
Matthews said there have been cases where an operator chose not to migrate all their payment tokens at once, so a customer may get a message asking to confirm their payment information is up to date. Or the customer is asked to login to a new online portal “at [their] earliest convenience.”
“With any migration, you’re working with a whole lot of data,” he said. “We’re trying to ensure any sort of discrepancy in customer information, or particularly billing information is caught during a migration process…before any of the data is actually pushed to a live production environment.”
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