Ambition Quickens the Pace: More Takeaways from TM Forum
Nik Willetts
13 Oct 2021
Ambition Quickens the Pace: More Takeaways from TM Forum
Week 2 of the Digital Transformation World Series zeroes in on the accelerating pace of change.
In the second week of the Digital Transformation World Series, a global event for network and digital service providers and their technology partners from TM Forum, we heard speakers focusing on the acceleration of change. Perhaps just as interesting were the things we didn’t hear—for instance, discussions about maintaining service assurance in a world of open standards and greater partnering as well as about the separation of infrastructure from service. The pace of change is accelerating
As the telecommunications industry grows more confident in its ability to deploy and generate value from new technology, the rate of development, the appetite for new technology, and the changes in the ways we work are all speeding up, reflecting the confidence of an industry that’s getting bolder and braver, a positive outcome from the past 18 months. Mathangi Sandilya, Managing Director of Communications and Media at Accenture, put it well: “Are you experimenting more, innovating more, are you failing enough to take lessons learnt?”
Automation, in particular, is one area in which ambition is growing rapidly. Ida La Spisa, the head of products and production services at Swedish telecom provider Telia, gave a detailed articulation of their automation journey—where they are, where they’re going, and how they focused on efficiency to remain competitive. “We are on a ways-of-working transformation as well, adopting Agile and DevOps across the entire organization,” said Ida.
Across sessions, it became clear that companies are learning a lot of hard lessons but also that they are not afraid to try and fail. There’s some evidence that the industry is shifting to an Agile model in which initiatives that push the boundaries are quickly launched, and whether they succeed or fail, the lessons are absorbed back into the organization, allowing it to learn, pivot, and try again. It’s great news that for an industry that needs to change, no one is standing still, and real change is happening.
"I really believe we're at a stage in development where technology is enabling us to do things we couldn't even dream about a few years ago," said Colman Deegan, CEO at Vodafone Spain.
Going beyond connectivity
The industry seems clearer regarding how to generate value beyond connectivity, with a common understanding that it’s largely about providing horizontal services. “Connectivity is definitely a springboard for E2E [end-to-end] solutions; on the other hand, we also see E2E solutions as a big growth engine for connectivity,” said Sudhir Sarangapany, who specializes in application platforms and E2E solutions as the Head of Digital Services for the IoT Practice at Vodafone Business.
Service assurance
So, how do you guarantee service across multiple horizontal markets? Guaranteeing service levels for a single use case in one market seems controllable—less so when it’s moving across markets.
There was a lot of discussion around partnering—that is, companies teaming up to deliver comprehensive services to customers. But we heard very little around the issue of service assurance: Who do you call when something breaks down? No one appeared to be stepping up to the plate.
At the broader level, the question surrounds how the industry will guarantee service levels within a model that increasingly depends on partner relationships rather than vertical integration by a single provider. What is the revenue model attached to service assurance?
“The biggest challenge we still need to tackle: the need to deploy significant capex every year, while at the same time, getting the associated revenue streams coming through,” said Hugo van Zyl, Chief Technology Officer at South Africa’s Telkom.
O-RAN, the open radio access network, is a good example of this. This newly created multi-supplier ecosystem uses cloud technologies, network virtualization, artificial intelligence and machine learning, open application programming interfaces, and many of the other associated calling cards of 5G and cloud era communications.
At the heart of all this is an industry-wide effort to provide some interoperability standards to allow mobile network operators to open the door to new vendor partners, to cloudify the RAN, and to stimulate solution innovation for future new business opportunities by increasing competition. If O-RAN is like the Linux of the 5G operating system, which vendor or other party will step up to become the Red Hat this time around? Who will be able to provide service accountability and assurance that will help professionalize an open system?
What we didn’t see
We didn’t hear much discussion about the rising importance of infrastructure and how it’s separating from service layers, which increasingly compete on their own. The capital markets are very interested in the opportunities around infrastructure, but it was interesting that the carriers themselves seemed fairly mute on the topic of this disintermediation of the traditional integrated carrier model. Maybe it was just that discussions at the forum focused on other issues, or maybe industry executives haven’t fully accepted the importance of this and are still focused on managing towers, running core networks, and providing services on top of them.
What is certain is that our industry is undergoing a tectonic change in which the integrated carrier model disintermediates into separate service and infrastructure entities.
Herbert Blum is a Bain partner and leads the firm’s Global Telecommunications and Media & Entertainment practices. Nik Willetts is CEO of TM Forum.
As President & CEO of TM Forum, Nik is passionate about the digital revolution and the impact technology and telecommunications can have on business, cultural, societal and environmental issues. Responsible for driving the Forum’s strategy and direction, his ambition is to work closely with the world’s leading executives across our 850+ membership to transform their businesses, accelerate the pace of industry change and support the transformation of the digital economy.