IQGeo announces planned acquisition of Deepomatic at FTTH Conference 2025.

Hi, this is James Page here at the FTTH Conference 2025 in Amsterdam. Just a few days ago, there was an announcement made that IQGeo were planning to acquire Deepomatic, and I'm really pleased to say I've got representatives from both organisations here with me today. You've got Ralf Meersman, who is SVP for IQGeo, and then Augustin Marty is representing as CEO of Deepomatic. Thank you for joining me, James. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having us. Now, look, it's a really exciting time. You've just been making that announcement for the planned acquisition. Ralf, maybe if we start with you, what's the rationale behind that? Why is this possibly going ahead? Yeah, yeah. Well, for us, IQGeo, we obviously want to offer a solution to our customers that covers the whole lifecycle of the network, and in a lot of the network, and in a lot of those things, we see interactions in the field. We have a lot of people daily running in the field doing stuff, and we know data quality is very important, and we've come across Deepomatic as a partner in several customers. We saw a technology that looked very promising, and that can help us with the whole process of validating data, and fits very well in our, you know, vision and end-to-end story. And so, yeah, it was a great relationship, great cooperation, and now to indeed our offer. And okay, it will take probably a few more months to officialize going through things, but that should be a couple of months. Just a time to get through regulatory approval by the government, but let's say the deal is done. Everything has been signed. Excellent. We look forward to that process continuing, but it is part of a process, Augustine. You mentioned it, Raf, but this hasn't come out of the blue. You already had a working relationship, particularly some recent software integration that's taken from us. Absolutely. We have met each other many times. I think we were at the IQGeo customer conference two years ago in the USA. We have been invited, inviting each other to our mutual customer conferences. I presented at your meeting last year, right? Yeah, absolutely. You presented. So, we have always had very good relationship, and driven by customer needs, we started a few times ago to integrate both of our products. So, story is ongoing. Fantastic. There's a lot of conversation here at the FTTH conference, and we've been on a panel talking about AI and what the possibilities are for the FTTH sector. Maybe some of it closer to actually becoming a reality than others, but your AI computer vision software is here. It is reality, and Raf, it's potentially game-changing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I must say, when we talk to our customers, AI is always a hot topic. It comes in every meeting. Customers are saying, oh, what are you doing with AI? What's your vision? We want to see what you want to do with AI. But to be honest, we were always a little bit afraid of the hype, and where's the value. And for me, Deepomatic is the number one technology on AI that I saw, where I actually could see really delivering value today. And that's what really triggered us to say, this is a company that really fits because of the value and the proof. It's more than a hype. This is actually, and to be honest, there's so much talk, like you say, but I don't see that many concrete things. As well, you guys, you've been doing this and really proving it, right? Yeah, yeah. Everything started 10 years ago. So we took the time to first develop the computer vision platform. Then we specialized the platform and the computer vision topics on the world of telecom and utilities. So it fits perfectly your world, your customers. five, six years ago. And we have deployed more and more use cases in production, helping our customer to deploy the right way, succeed their intervention, right? The first time, collect trustful information that started a long time ago. And now, for example, in 2024, we had 20 million jobs analyzed, 100 millions or approximately images analyzed. So it's really something that has been proving its value for the past year. It's fantastic. Well, that's great. And we can see that it's going to make a real impact. It forms part of longer term vision for IQGeo, which is all about intelligence and all about proactivity. Yes. Yeah, indeed. We see the network model and the way an operator will act and run its processes in, let's say, five to 10 years from now to be highly automated, supported indeed by AI and agents and intelligence. That can proactively tell you when somethings and the quality in an operator. But to get to that, you can only get a decent automation and outcome from an AI if the base data is right. And this is the nice thing with our cooperation, that we can actually, on short term, already work with customers to secure the base of the data being accurate and then gradually further develop the technologies to add that level of intelligence on the processes side. So you can actually run very smooth and efficient operators stuff. Absolutely. I cannot say it better. All the team are super excited as well to enter into this. This vision, this program, because not only we are going to do computer vision, but we are also in charge for the next years to identify and to work on that data to provide intelligence and predictive things and use cases. So it's super exciting to the entire team as well. Well, look, it is super excited. And look, we're really happy that you could go into a little bit more detail. We hope everything goes well for the next few months and then. And the future seems very bright for yourselves and for customers and for the entire sector to benefit. But for now, Raf and Augustin, thank you for taking some time to talk to them. You're welcome. Thank you.