DTWS: Drawing on telco strengths to become a techco

As communications service providers (CSPs) transform their IT architecture and operations, bring in new skills, and re-think how to target and serve customers, rapid technological and cultural change can help them exploit their most important historical strengths: local market knowledge and experience interoperating securely and at scale.

“Telcos need to accelerate their path to being fully digital techcos because it’s such a big opportunity to…rebrand themselves with what they are so strong at: creating interoperability and security for scaled services,” said Boris Mauer, Managing Director, Communications & Media Lead for Europe, Accenture, speaking during TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World Series.

The way that CSPs interoperate and deliver services, however, will look very different. Accenture’s Mauer describes the business model of the last 20 to 25 years as “defending silos on top of the network...and products built on top of the network.”

Instead, in the future CSPs’ focus will be on the customer, using automated, zero-touch, cloud native systems that enable partnerships beyond their network boundaries.

“If we think about…softwarized and virtualized networks, this creates a completely new control point for all virtualized applications…on the edge…and the control point for the clouds – bringing the virtual world and the real world together with IoT, with industry x, and so on,” said Mauer. “Who is it that created interoperability between all those silos in the past? It was the telco industry.”

As CSPs look towards distributed cloud-based services on the edge, they will have to consider how to work with cloud hyperscalers.

“Edge…distributed cloud has become really, really critical to CIOs,” said Jaya Deshmukh, EVP Strategy & Transformation, Colt, speaking on the same panel. “The moment you say, ‘distributed cloud and distributed intelligence, intelligence on the edge’, you are really taking the entire network and the embedding it into the fabric of the cloud players.”

Interoperability is of crucial importance in an ecosystem of partners working to deliver a positive customer experience.

“When we talk about an ecosystem, both internal and external, what you're talking about is…interoperability, so that our enterprises can have a seamless experience,” said Deshmukh. “So, whether they begin at the application layer and then go all the way down to the network, or they begin…in the cloud and go to the network, they should have one seamless experience so that all of us together, help serve their customers better.”

Collaboration also relies on frameworks, said Kamran Ziaee, SVP, Technology Strategy and Planning, Verizon, pointing to TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture.

“Partnership requires seamless access and seamless cooperation,” Ziaee said. “ODA provides that framework where we can provide experiences, jointly with our partners to our customers.”

Going local

One of the strengths CSPs bring to partnerships is the knowledge they have gained in national markets, which they can use within partnerships to create services that have appeal elsewhere, according to Cathal Kennedy, SVP IT Europe and Global Architecture, Telenor.

“I live in work in Norway, and fish farming is a very important business here,” he explained. “To understand the health of your fish, and understand what situation they're in, you can use video analysis…to get a lot more insight into how the whole ecosystem around your fish farm is operating.”

A video analysis service developed for a Norwegian fish farm can be applied to other markets, for example in Asia, he added.

“We can leverage the global capabilities of our partners to make it extremely relevant for local need,” Kennedy said. “And this is one of the key differentiators that we as telcos have: We are actually very close to the customer and what their local problem is.” It’s also a differentiation that hyperscalers are unlikely to replicate, according to Mauer.

“The technicians that actually know the local conditions, the granularity of the network, and the topology – that is still a differentiation that nobody can basically take away or replace easily,” he said. “I think that also the hyperscalers don’t want to really get into that, and so absolutely, there is a lot of reason why a lot of the business will stay local.”

Watch the session 'At the intersection of technology and business: How to think and operate as a techco… and should you?' on demand here.

Note: Registration to the Digital Transformation World Series is required to watch the recording. Not registered yet? There’s still time. Register here to get access to all the keynotes, panel discussions and master classes. Communication service providers can register for free.