Spur innovation with an open and intelligent digital transformation 2.0 platform

However, the traditional business and business models of Communications Service Providers (CSPs) are facing many uncertainties, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. Revenue of traditional services to consumers like voice, roaming, and SMS has been in significant decline, and the explosion of data volumes hasn’t brought massive revenue growth as expected. What’s more, expansion in customer base is much more difficult. Over-the-Top (OTT) players and hyperscalers continuously disrupt traditional business models by providing digital, minimalist, transparent, and full-scenario digital services.

The global deployment of 5G networks is in full swing, with 170 mobile operators having launched commercial 5G services, according to GSMA Intelligence. The massive investment in 5G has proved that it presents vast market opportunities, and the applications & services market will be the actual revenue growth for 5G. Nevertheless, the lack of clear B2B and B2C scenarios hinders CSPs from realizing the monetization of 5G investments. The industry is still waiting for the killer use case for 5G.

Back to digital transformation 1.0, CSPs achieved explosive business growth by investing in infrastructures, system consolidation, and process optimization to grow the customer base and reduce operating costs. Currently, CSPs are in a bottleneck that impedes them from sustainable business development. How to break through the bottleneck and break past the revenue plateau are moving higher up the agenda, driving CSPs to move towards digital transformation 2.0. A platform that integrates a myriad of digital technologies (cloud, data analytics, AI, Machine Learning, blockchain, low-code, digital DevOps pipeline) can further improve customer experience and optimize business processes while sharing core system capabilities with partners to maximize the value within the ecosystem - that is what we call ‘the digital transformation 2.0 platform’, which will help CSPs regain the power, incubate innovative business and scenarios, and build the core competitiveness.

Expose IT core capabilities to improve business agility and accelerate service innovation

An increasing number of CSPs’ IT transformation projects are currently focusing on bringing concrete business values and solving specific business pain points. Some examples are the realization of digital channels, automation of B2B business processes, unified customer management, and 360 customer views, etc.

It has become prevalent that CSPs realize IT transformation not in a disruptive but smooth manner by adding, replacing, or upgrading relevant modules integrating with legacy systems, placing a higher demand on vendors to provide flexible integration capability and plug-and-play products. TM Forum Open APIs, as the foundation of the open platform, provide efficient and standardized interfaces to facilitate collaboration and interoperability with third-party partners. At the same time, flexible orchestration & control of these APIs and microservice capabilities will power CSPs to achieve efficient and cost-effective business transformation, improve business agility and IT operational efficiency. For example, the open product catalog API enables quick partner onboarding and rapid launch of their products and services. The flexible packaging and pricing of mixed products with partners provide one-stop services to customers, resulting in improved customer satisfaction and market competitiveness.

Adopt corporative R&D to build a DevOps pipeline and transform to TechCo

As CSPs embrace cloud-native technologies, they are gradually moving the Business Support Systems (BSS) and Operations Support Systems (OSS) workloads to the public cloud to take full advantage of reliability, scalability, security, and agility.

Meanwhile, most CSPs are building a DevOps pipeline and empowering their IT teams to collaborate with vendors on software Research & Development (R&D), apart from direct purchasing or outsourcing. A low-code development platform featuring drag-and-drop interfaces and a library of pre-built templates can quickly define business processes and customized logic, effectively reduce the training cycle of IT staff and R&D skills, rapidly respond to market and business needs, and fasten the time to market.

This has further given rise to the demand from CSPs for cloud-based DevOps platforms. By exposing digital DevOps pipelines, traditional BSS/OSS vendors can onboard CSPs' IT teams to participate in the entire lifecycle of software R&D, realize agile development and delivery, and help CSPs transform from Telcos to TechCos.

Develop the platform economy powered by digital-channel first and one-stop service ecosystems

To fuel growth in the Business to Consumer (B2C) market, CSPs are providing ‘digital-native’ customer experience by building a new, cloud-native IT stack to meet the needs of digital-savvy customers, increasing customer loyalty through a minimalist, transparent and gamified experience, and reducing customer acquisition costs via an online model.

Some CSPs (e.g., Jio in India and Vodacom in South Africa) have imbibed the best practices from OTT players, developing the Super App to gather partners from various industries into an ecosystem via mini-programs. Unlike regular apps, the advantage of mini-programs is that they are very light, and there is no need to download them to your phone. Customers can access them anywhere, anytime, and always up-to-date. CSPs’ data and analytics capability will also enable partners to conduct accurate marketing. Furthermore, CSPs’ zero-rating service for dedicated apps will further stimulate and cultivate customer habits and mine data from customer transactions.

In a nutshell, CSPs can play as the digital infrastructure provider of the whole society by building the digital transformation 2.0 platform and collaborating with diversified players, e.g., OTT players, hyperscalers, industry leaders, ISV, developers, etc. Leveraging strength on the network, customer scale, authorized customer data & insights, and brand advantages, CSPs will become the industry orchestrator to coordinate broader ecosystem partners, providing end-to-end solutions to satisfy customer needs and unlock the potential for revenue growth.