Telecom Today: Innovation, Integration, Intensity

By Charlie Thomas

Today’s telecom marketplace is an environment of unprecedented challenge and opportunity. As a communications provider, you are contending, among other things, with hypercompetitive pricing and margin pressure, rapidly evolving technologies, pressure to roll out new services and technologies quickly and efficiently, and challenges in maintaining BSS/OSS to keep pace with the changes. There also is the volume and complexity of third-party deals with a growing ecosystem of companies and the new norms of all things being social and mobile.

These factors coupled with ceaseless innovation, global competition, and over-the-top (OTT) services shine a spotlight on the shortcomings of existing back-office and order-to-cash systems and business processes. This means that a business-as-usual mentality will result in extinction.

The Wall Street Journal recently listed wireline telecom as the fastest dying business. The price in lost revenue is too steep for Status Quo. In order to seize on the new opportunities and guard against complacency and extinction, new business models and new approaches are a must.

New Technologies Are Not Enough

The capital efficiencies from ubiquitous broadband, mobility and the cloud have leveled the playing field and significantly reduced the barrier to entry for new players. The days of massive capex investments needed to gain critical mass are gone. Social and mobile have made new apps and over-the-top (OTT) services faster and easier to deploy than ever.

In order to compete, communications providers must leverage their assets and infrastructure more effectively and more efficiently than ever. How?

• Leveraging both customer and network intelligence are essential.
• Speed and nimbleness in rolling out new services, adjusting marketing promotions and removing wasted expense are things that new global communications leaders will do better than their competitors.
• With the rapidly growing and evolving ecosystem of suppliers and partners, communications providers must be easy to deal with and able to seamlessly add new services to their product bundles.
• Managing margins with precision will differentiate the global leaders from the also rans.

The new world order in communications requires three key competencies for service providers to win big:

• Speed and agility
• Creativity
• Differentiation through use of business intelligence and analytics

You can no longer afford to do everything with internal systems and staff, and homegrown applications. Waiting for a 12-month development cycle for a critical billing, provisioning, reporting or customer intelligence system may be too late. 

Combining flexible, agile cloud-based business and network intelligence tools could be the business partnership that enables the speed and differentiation you need in the new, hyper-fast, globally competitive marketplace. Cloud-based tools and third-party experts, coupled with your staff, network and technology assets creates a powerful combination that drives winning results.  More so than ever before, it's essential that Communications Service Providers operate efficiently and with low latency in responding to rapid shifts in the marketplace. 

The success and rapid growth of operators in Asia and India provide strong evidence of this approach. Identifying partners and working closely together to deliver solutions seamlessly which combine internal and external teams, business processes and systems are essential to gaining the speed and nimbleness to win in the new communications market.

**Editor's Note: Razorsight's strategy and success are a component of the B/OSS Report " Embracing the Eureka Moment of Granular Margin Management." Click here to download the report.**

Charlie Thomas is the CEO of Razorsight, a software company that provides cloud-based financial assurance and analytics to communications providers. Razorsight is celebrating its 10th year of business.