How can the Telecom Industry Start Growing Again? Part II

By Marc Lippe, Director, Worldwide Field and Corporate Marketing, InfoVista

In Part 1 of this series, I began a discussion of the thought-provoking ideas shared by Emily Nagle Green and Camille Mendler of Yankee Group during a recent briefing in London. Here’s some more of what I heard at the briefing.

Loving and leveraging the network

Benoît Felten, Principal Analyst at Yankee Group led a session that focused on how assets can be used to create new opportunities in the world of communication.

Historically in most countries around the globe, the State has supplied funding to assist the incumbent Telco in building out a communications infrastructure. The innovative way that the service provider created and sold services then contributed to the maintenance and upkeep of the network.

If we now take a look at deployed business models by comparison we can see that these service providers tend to generate their biggest revenues with moderate and high cost services but to a defined market and (in most cases) regional demographic. The other key provider market that is playing a significant part in the communications evolution is the cloud services provider who will typically create their biggest revenues with very low cost services and applications being offered to the global market across all regions and demographics.

Another observation made by Benoît is that operators have historically not been the best innovators, generally due to the size and complexity of the, sometimes slow moving, organizations. Internet-based operators on the other hand have the latest technology at their fingertips, such as Web 2.0, and the freedom to create services or applications that the user wants in a very short time-to-market.

The facts are that these days a country’s “State” is very unlikely to invest in the plethora of private providers and operators in terms of innovation or infrastructure, so it’s up to those organizations to look at ways to reinvent themselves. This is great justification for collaboration between peered networks, and innovation outsourcing to dynamic and technology savvy partners. The combined contribution would create an “Anywhere” opportunity with extended reach, scope, and user alignment.

Farewell flat rate

Declan Lonergan, Vice President at Yankee Group, tackled another discussion to complete a very rounded view of opportunities for the Telecom industry by looking at the way we view and manage Anywhere-aligned billing transformation.

In a similar fashion to how Camille had discussed evolution demand and gluttony (see Part 1), Declan observed that we have transitioned from a state of over-supply and under-demand, to where we are now with under-supply and over-demand. This will only be compounded by the launch of iPhone 4.0 and its video-calling capability – to be followed with other “iClones” with the same feature enrichment over the next twelve months. Intelligent management of network capacity versus demand is absolutely key.

Another interesting point from Declan had to do with Anywhere mobility. If subscribers are buying a service (be it handset or laptop-3G dongle), the expectation will very soon be all calls, all applications, all media and all contacts available everywhere at anytime – or in other words roaming and restrictive tariffs need to become more intelligent. Networks and roaming partner networks know when you travel, they know where you are and in the case of the home service provider, they know what services you have bundled.

Is the next step to be more user friendly and aligned, to dynamically adjust tariffs based on work-life pattern? Let’s face it, we know the capability is in the network – but can the OSS and Billing platform cope?

Options for a restart

So from the briefing, Yankee Research recommends that there are three main areas that could bring a restart to the Telecom industry. The first is go-to-market innovation by leveraging cloud-based technology & services and the wholesale and partnering opportunities that can be built. The second is network sharing and innovation or peering and partnering for success, leveraging a commoditized infrastructure to create competition and value at the services and application delivery level. The third and final area is intelligent billing and more innovation surrounding automated tariffs based on user type, geography, and situation.

A key takeaway that lends itself to this entire discussion is the need to refresh the OSS in the form of strategic deployment aligned to customer experience management. If the infrastructure – both network and data center – is becoming a commodity and the access domain has reached the right level of maturity, it makes sense to deploy OSS platforms with a holistic view and comprehension of services and applications.

InfoVista offers a multi-domain, holistic performance assurance perspective that aligns itself with these “next generation” requirements and trends, including a customer experience linked operational dashboard that can aid the triggering of a telecommunications reboot.

As always, I invite your thoughts. Additionally, with the Yankee Group’s significant research and commentary linking to the Anywhere revolution, I encourage you to visit their site for more information.