CSG's Christopher Burton on how telcos can cast their nets strategically
With new business models to monetize and subscriber growth on a plateau telcos must find a way to cast their nets wide but not spread themselves too thin. Christopher Burton, SVP & Head of Revenue Management/Digital Monetization at CSG explains how.
CSG's Christopher Burton on how telcos can cast their nets strategically
Sponsored by: CSG
With new business models to monetize, subscriber growth on a plateau and a growing desire to deliver their own business-to-business services and more, communications service providers (CSPs) must find a way to cast their nets wide but not spread themselves too thin. In other words, they need to keep a close eye on revenue both coming in and going out. Christopher Burton, Senior Vice President and Head of Revenue Management/Digital Monetization at CSG talks about helping operators and enterprises maximize their efforts.
CSG will start 2021 with a new CEO in Brian Shepherd along with some other new blood in the company. How will the strategy at CSG change? Our outgoing CEO Bret Griess and Brian worked closely over the last few years to develop and execute our strategy, formed around bringing more value to the market through cloud-based platforms, increased focus on our customers’ businesses, and aligning our go-to-market efforts with our monetization, customer engagement, and payments solution sets. As such I don’t expect a big change in strategy, but we may see an acceleration as some of those investment ‘seeds’ begin to sprout and grow. What are the biggest challenges and opportunities for CSPs over the next five years and how are you helping them meet those challenges? CSPs are facing stagnant subscriber growth and reduced margins for their core communication offerings. In addition, expensive 5G network buildouts put a strain on their capital with uncertain return. The combination of these factors represents a major challenge to providers. CSG is helping by lowering their cost of operations through software as a service (SaaS), cloud-based monetization solutions and a range of operational managed services. Our customer experience (CX) and self-service solutions are helping both increase customer loyalty and improve the customer experience, thereby driving improved margins. The biggest growth opportunity for CSPs is to directly or indirectly monetize the digital economy through cloud, 5G, and IoT-based business models. The ability for CSPs to power the middle ‘B’ in B2B2X is crucial. Allowing them to bring those services together as vertical offerings — whether for health care, automotive, or education — will be a game changer. To support this, CSG offers a variety of monetization solutions and components, as well as award-winning settlement and mediation capabilities that can help operators benefit from the digitization of business. We have also made investments in our ability to integrate these complex ecosystems. What ecosystems are you a part of and what is your ecosystem strategy? For our Ascendon platform, we have chosen Amazon Web Services (AWS). Unlike many vendors who say they are cloud native, our strategy is to use AWS Advanced Services, which couples our solution tightly to AWS. The trade-off of being bound to AWS is the enormous value in serverless compute, edge compute, and the way their infrastructure is managed on their native side. For our applications that are cloud-hosted through containers and virtual machines, we use both AWS and Azure, and we are the 2020 Microsoft Partner of the Year in Media and Communications. CSG has been recognized for its DevOps efforts, what does that mean to your ability to compete in today’s market? Our heritage with multi-tenant SaaS-based solutions lent itself well to the adoption of DevOps techniques and our engineering team has really risen to that challenge. As CSG incorporates cloud more fully into our offerings it has been natural for us to incorporate DevOps into those parts of our business. DevOps allows us to operate our solutions and deliver new functions in a more nimble and cost-effective way, bringing a higher ‘change velocity’ with reduced operational risk. We feel this is exactly what CSPs need to be more competitive with OTTs or other non-CSP competitors. The days of quarterly releases and semi-annual product upgrades are numbered. I understand there is a strong push to gain more market share in the wireless business. Is that true and if so, what is in your portfolio that will be especially attractive to wireless operators? We see major opportunity in wireless BSS, where operators are looking for platform solutions that are highly scalable, reliable and more flexible than the traditional one-off custom systems. We have two primary solutions for the wireless market. Ascendon is our digital BSS, currently supporting customers looking for a direct path to digital services monetization. Singleview is a proven wireless BSS platform that we’ve continued investment in and provides a more modern platform that scales well across Tier 1 – 3 operator. It has been delivered in as little as 90 days and provides strong consumer and enterprise capability. CSG has had some success with enterprises. What affect does that have on serving CSPs? We believe we have the best solution in the market for enterprise. We see enterprise needs falling into two key categories: revenue management and ecosystems. For revenue management enterprise, CSPs need sophisticated hierarchical reporting and invoicing, aligned with each customer’s business structure, with complex discounting and apportioning of discounts across invoicing points, including whole of business caps. The second scenario is to enable innovation in enterprises – again the middle B in B2B2X. CSPs are looking at multiple paths, from expanding their portfolio of ICT offerings, to enabling ecosystems of solutions, and of course looking at network as a managed service for 5G. How can B2B2C revenue management capabilities help CSPs become the platform providers many of them say they want to become? Our Ascendon BSS platform is designed specifically for this purpose. It is a cloud-based, multi-tenant solution offering everything from the front-ends back to service activation and mediation. This allows an operator to use it to manage clients like MVNOs in one tenant and resell other tenants for those MVNOs to manage their subscribers. Ascendon is a, SaaS offering, which makes the commercial relationship between operators and clients quite simple. Every month, they pay for network bandwidth (or a 5G slice) and access to a full BSS/OSS solution. Do you plan to containerize your solutions? What is the impact on services revenue for vendors? Yes, our solutions will mostly be offered in containers on cloud compute or as fully native cloud applications using a serverless architecture. We are finding that customers still want to customize around our solutions, and that is generating follow-on services revenue. However, CSG makes the most of its revenue from its SaaS offerings. The services we provide in that model are primarily hosting and operations of the solutions on a cloud infrastructure. In the SaaS model, we deliver major upgrades every three months, so there is still a huge value in that included service. Would an open digital architecture that supports multiple vendors and different maturity levels of cloud offerings solve the problem of multi-vendor compatibility? Despite being a supplier, I don’t view open digital architecture through that lens. For me the key benefit of this architecture is that it provides more alternatives for service providers to evolve their BSS to meet their business needs. If they want to introduce a new catalog or a new CRM to all or part of their customer base, they can do so much easier. They will still need help stitching things together and I still think companies with assets like CSG are a better choice for that than pure systems integrators.