Collaboration Impact on Telcos

Tech & Business Trends 2015

By Karan Puri

Telecom Operators are confronted by radical changes to their business environment and while they have been largely working to create lean operations, the mechanics of doing business has changed in the past three years, leading to transformations in business model in terms of their ability to drive improved connectedness with its ecosystem as well as to be far more agile in their ability to compete with nimble and emerging digital OTT Players.

The world is moving into the age of Wikinomics and this means that tomorrow’s world is all about Mashup – which means collaborative working and not the sort of Siloed business environment of the past 10 years.

Openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally will increasingly define how 21st century corporations compete because tomorrow’s world is about collaborative innovation, open source, open and collaborative service creation, open and collaborative work place, and business.

Mass Collaboration: The Way Ahead

Telecom operators need to identify and open up their platforms to enable mass collaboration. That platform may be a product (eg voice), a software module (eg Google Maps), a transaction engine (eg Amazon), a data set (eg Customer Profile), and countless other things.

The convergence of IT and networks is opening doors in all services strategies of operators – whether it is about complementing traditional telecom services with cloud services addressing the needs of Enterprises, or influencing service execution by Increasing decoupling of Network Intelligence and placing it within the control of business policies.

The emergence of OTT providers have shown us that services development has shifted from the traditional networks to devices and applications. Clearly, IT is becoming the way even traditional services will be modelled and operationalized.

Users are evolving from mere consumers to active participants.

For operators to succeed in the future they will have to participate in every transaction that involves communication and collaboration. That is only possible if their assets are broken down as a service and made available for third parties to consume. The future revenue model is a two sided revenue model – from innovators consuming operator assets (as services) to produce Mashup and services and from consumers using those Mashup and services.

The telecoms sector now need to examine how they could move their value chain from networks to IT services to devices to smart applications and work on a number of new dimensions that underpin the changing telecom business including building new IT Technology and skill sets around:

• Carrier grade Open Source software engineering technologies to meet Network Virtualization needs.
• New age Analytics that can derive insights from the humungous activity across Network & Social.
• Digitalization of customer facing operations to transform the customer engagement experience.
• Real-time and carrier grade software architecture integrating Networks, Business, Devices & Environment.
• Crowd sourcing development that will accelerate service innovation, capability build, and business agility.
• Security Strategies that works to integrated online business environment.
• Protecting IPR without losing the richness of incremental distributed innovation.

There is a lot coming in the future, no doubt this telecom industry will be at the forefront of technology driven innovation.

(The author, Karan Puri, is Corporate Vice-President, Consumer Service Sales, HCL Technologies)