M&A drives modernization at Liberty Latin America

The breadth and diversity of Liberty Latin America’s geographical spread and its growth from multiple mergers and acquisitions (M&A) could be viewed as a daunting challenge for a technology leader. But the company’s Chief Technology and Product Officer, Aamir Hussain, who joined Liberty Latin America from Verizon in 2022, sees an opportunity.

Formerly part of Liberty Global, Liberty Latin America (LLA) serves 6.7 million mobile and 4.0 million video, internet and fixed-line telephony customers in more than 20 countries across Latin America and the Caribbean. The economic diversity of its markets means that average mobile revenue per user (ARPU) can vary widely. As an example, during 2024, mobile ARPU in Costa Rica was $11.52 while in Puerto Rico it was $35.32 a more than 300% difference.

Liberty Latin America became an independent, publicly traded company in 2018. Its assets included Cable & Wireless’ fixed and mobile operations in the region, which Liberty Global acquired in 2016. Among LLA’s recent acquisitions are AT&T’s operations in Puerto Rico and the USVI, América Móvil’s Panama operations and EchoStar’s (SATS) spectrum assets and prepaid customers in Puerto Rico and the USVI.

M&A has delivered benefits of economies of scale, allowing the company, for example, to reduce the tower infrastructure used to serve a merged wireless customer base, explains Hussain. It has also helped drive the modernization and simplification of networks, systems, and operations.

“M&A provides us with additional technology and operational options in terms of cloud-native architectures, AI, machine learning, outside plant assets, OSS/BSS platforms; helps us leverage best of breed processes to drive operational excellence in the combined operations … and brings new skill sets to the combined operations,” says Hussain.

Managing the unknown

Nonetheless, overlaying and integrating different networks and technology systems “shifts our landscape by adding more technology and complexity,” he says. And managing it requires a mix of adaptability and pragmatism.

“As you go through this process, you learn that the key is to adapt very quickly,” explains Hussain. “You have to accept you don’t always know what you are getting into. You usually don't have a full view upfront of the opportunities and challenges.

“You know a bit about the products and network, and have data about the customers and services,” he continues, adding: “In some cases, there were a bunch of ‘a-has!’ and we had to design things to end up in a better place.”

LLA’s commitment to building a consistently high-quality experience across very different markets is an important consideration for Hussain and his team.

“We will not compromise customer experience just because it’s a smaller market [or lower ARPU],” he says. “When we build systems and processes we don't want to spend too much … where the ARPU is low, but we still want to give the customers a great experience. That's a unique challenge in our markets, because they are very diverse.”

Serving OpCos

Hussain leads a center of excellence that serves all of LLA’s operating companies (OpCos). Until recently LLA managed all IT centrally, but earlier this year it gave each OpCo its own CIO charged with optimizing technology evolution to their specific markets and technology environment.

The aim is to “have the best breed of tools available, best talent, best operational processes/platforms, more SaaS, less on prem, more local operational autonomy, to provide a very consistent experience to our customers,” says Hussain.

The central team helps OpCos migrate or manage their operational and business support system (OSS/BSS) environments, while navigating the patchwork of systems when centrally designing products.

“We look at the architecture that is deployed, what's the complexity, and work with the CIO in each market [to build] their own roadmap,” according to Hussain. And we “make sure that whatever we build from a product and technology perspective supports local operations.”

The answers range from using in-house, on-premise systems to adopting the latest cloud-native BSS-as-a-service, hosted by a third party.

“The operations that work best are supported by either applications that that are home grown and we manage it end-to-end, third-party systems which are hosted and managed by third parties, or a combination of both. The idea is to drive outcomes that improves our operations and customer experience end to end,” Hussain explains.

Centralization lays a foundation

At the same time central teams drive key future-facing technology initiatives.

“We are closely following and implementing trends such as migration to a SaaS model and migration to cloud, Operational improvements driven by AI” says Hussain. “All of our wireless core is fully virtualized, containerized, and today we run it on our data center. Tomorrow, we may run it on a hyperscaler platform.”

“We have a central data platform where we ingest all customer data, network data, operational data,” Hussain continues. “Then we build a pipeline and tooling that is enabled for every OpCo, whether it's commercial, whether it's operations, whether it's HR or finance. And then through that tooling they can manage their own operational needs.”

The selection, certification, and testing of all customer premise equipment (CPE), as well as the management of the global logistics and warehousing of CPEs is another centralized function.

“It’s better to have one CPE team that does all CPE testing and integration work, and we have one Wi-Fi strategy than to replicate the same thing in each operation,” Hussain explains.

Its AI platform is also led centrally but each use case creation is managed by individual operations locally for their own needs. Having established an AI governance framework, LLA is now rolling out internal AI services.

For example, LLA upgraded its call center platform and is now working very closely with its outsourced provider and has also deployed a text-to-speech engine,” according to Hussain.

A willingness to “embrace change and initiate opportunity … is our culture,” he says, adding that his teams have a very low rate of employee churn.

“It's all about the customers,” Hussain concludes. “We work together, and we have one goal, regardless of which OpCo we support.”