Preparing telcos for the opportunities of the future

How do the challenges of the past differ from what you’re seeing today for your telco clients? 

Let’s face it. Telcos are always in a state of evolution, and that will never end. But we still have the age-old problem - that of decreasing revenue and at the same time increasing costs. The big difference today is that there is a completely new class of OTT competition that Telcos face and that were never anticipated even just a few years ago. 

I see that some of the biggest changes that Telcos are facing are around servicing super high customer expectations. Business, residential, retail and wholesale consumers demand high speed, ubiquitous connectivity, supporting many more devices and sensors. They want prioritization, personalization and greater reliability with less redundancy and ultra-low power consumption. 

As such, Telcos are seeing an increase in “softwarization” of network while they engage in building programs that help deliver experiences to homes and businesses through large towers, antennas and even shoe box sized cells on lampposts.

In your view, what’s the single most important thing a telco can do to address these new challenges?

Preparation is key, hands down. As they say, fail to prepare, prepare to fail!  

The choices Telcos make now about how and who they will serve in the future will shape their business success in fundamentally different way in a very short time. But there are ways to navigate and I believe in fact that there is a continuum of choices.

What I mean by this is that where you start and where you end up as an organization depends on many factors and there’s not a set, correct answer for every company. So Accenture is focused on helping our Telco clients be as fully prepared as possible for reorienting their businesses, helping them create new digital experiences that delight customers, redefine and re-design the operations and the technology platforms that underpin the customer experience. We also help them maintain and unlock value from existing businesses while they are launching the new digital initiatives.

Let’s talk about that. How is it possible to maintain the safety and security of the legacy business while rotating to the new way of doing and delivering digital experiences and services?

This rotation is only really possible if we can create multiple speeds of fundamental digital operations where we continuously develop multi sided platforms to launch and manage agile products while still gracefully managing the current business. This is what we called “Multi-speed IT”. 

We’re all familiar with what the traditional platforms look like (highly verticalized and monolithic) 

And we see that these are being increasingly depleted and diminished as the “wave of digital” crashes in with its vastly differing customer channels and gateways for B2B and B2C

For the underlying architectures to cope with this unprecedented surge of customer expectation (data speed channel personalization) we are starting to see “design led thinking” around developing abstraction API that can truly decouple channels from the systems and of course the fact that we start to see application based functions 

I would say that probably the most important area of development now is the creation of the pervasive orchestration capability within a telco organization that spans resources, services, and infrastructure while also providing the all-important “bridge” to the current architecture. 

The move towards SDN/NFV means of course that the orchestration an organization selects needs to be supported by a suite virtual network function management solutions.

The new architecture in any successful Telco will rely on analytics like never before and will really leverage a data driven infrastructure supported by a dynamic real time federated inventory that can complete the bridge from the current business to the new business.

Hear more from George Nazi at the Total Telecom Congress on the 31 October - 1 November 2017, where Accenture are Founding Partner. Book your place HERE