This article covers the Headliner session on November 11 entitled 'The EMEA debate – transformation in action' at TM Forum's Digital Transformation World Series (DTWS).If telcos are going to turn to enterprises for growth, they can’t just sell the same old connectivity services – they must evolve to offer solutions and outcomes. To do that, they need organizational agility, dedication to customer experience and a whole lot of automation and orchestration. And they need it right now.
That was the message from a Headliner session at
Digital Transformation World Series 2020 that promised a debate on transformation in action in Europe, Middle East and Africa. However, it wasn’t a debate so much as a consensus that telcos must
move beyond connectivity in their portfolios, mindsets and business models to have a hope of cashing in on an enterprise revenue opportunity that Ericsson estimates will grow to $700 billion by 2026.
Not there yet
It’s an opportunity that telcos still haven’t fully embraced. Jan Karlsson, Senior VP and Head of Business Area Digital Services at Ericsson, said that over 70% of enterprises are keen to engage with communications service providers (CSPs), especially when it comes to 5G. Yet CSPs are only engaged with a fifth of potential enterprise prospects for 5G.
“That is super scary,” he said. “Big opportunities are unfolding, but CSPs aren’t active enough to capture them.” Whatever strategies telcos embrace to add value to connectivity, they’d better do it now, Karlsson added.
“The opportunity is here – it's about today, not tomorrow,” he continued. “A competitive landscape is evolving super fast, new competitors are emerging, and they're bringing with them new capabilities. So action needs to be taken today in order to protect the revenue that operators have today.”
Nik Willetts, CEO, TM Forum, agreed that CSPs that don't evolve their core connectivity products are opening themselves up to disintermediation. “You've got to remember the same customer who's buying your connectivity product is very happily buying a hyperscale cloud product, and the difference in experience, ease of access and elastic pricing of the whole offering makes telco offerings feel like the Dark Ages.”
Harnessing tech
Fotis Karonis, CTIO, BT Enterprise, said that operators needed to harness the power of technologies like cloud, AI, and others to add value to connectivity by becoming digital transformation enablers for enterprises.
“As telcos, we need to be prepared to understand how we bring these together, use them appropriately, and therefore provide added value,” he said. “It's the outcome that is more and more important.”
Karonis said BT Enterprise has made it a priority to digitalize its products and provide sufficient automation and service orchestration to simplify customer journeys across the different segments. It is also categorizing products in ways that make them reusable and repeatable.
“We have a long-term strategy of horizontal repeatability, which means you can reuse the applications or the collaboration of the partnerships in potentially many sectors, so that you don't have one-shots or one standalone solutions that don't apply somewhere else,” he explained.
Walking with customers
Antje Williams, Senior Vice President 5G Campus Networks, Deutsche Telekom, said that it’s essential to take the time to understand customers’ needs, to walk with them, find out what they need, and figure out how an operator’s network assets can help deliver them.
“We should be honest about it – for us as a telecommunication operator, it's kind of a new field to sell network solutions,” she said. “As a telco we need to learn the language of the industries we are targeting, [understand] what kind of devices can we connect, and we need to work with different ecosystem partners.”
Hany Mokhtar, SVP, Mobily, said that agility is his company’s cornerstone capability to target the enterprise opportunity. “When we speak about agility, we have to pivot on three dimensions: The operating model, the systems, and most important, culture and people,” he stated
Mokhtar added that customer experience should be the key priority in all projects, as opposed to past practices where operators often prioritized projects in terms of revenue generation versus customer experience, but not both.
He added that Covid-19 has raised awareness that customer experience and revenue generation are not either/or propositions, but that customer experience is what enables revenue generation.
“Now there is no contradiction – it's now more obvious for every organization that if you want to really deliver sustainable revenue, then you've got to make fulfilling customer needs a priority,” he concluded.
John C. Tanner
