Openserve’s wholesale approach to transformation

Very few communications service providers (CSPs) worldwide have functionally separated their wholesale and retail businesses. South African operator Telkom, which functionally split off Openserve as a wholesale arm in 2015, remains one of the exceptions.

Telkom is now going a step further and is in the process of preparing a legal, structural separation of Openserve. Both functional and structural separation are complex undertakings. However, Telkom sees it as an important means to unlock value, on the grounds that the sum of the parts of its business amount to more than the market capitalization of the entire company. At the same time, it is looking to increase the value – and customer experience – of Openserve’s wholesale services through investment in new access, aggregation and core networks, new customer services and more efficient and cost-effective operations.

Indeed, Althon Beukes, CEO of Openserve, has made Openserve’s transformation the biggest priority for its leadership team. Encouraged to fail fast, learn and execute and to take a holistic view of the organization, Openserve’s senior leaders are prioritizing the redesign of internal processes and the refreshing of IT building blocks so that its customers can offer new services such as gaming and OTT services and future 5G capabilities. All while playing to Openserve’s network strengths.

Pushkar Gokhale, Chief Digital & Strategy Officer at Openserve, has played a key role in architecting and implementing its digital IT transformation, so that Openserve can radically change how it interacts with partners and customers, improve customer experience, deliver new services and reduce costs.

This includes creating a digital platform using platform-as-a-service technologies, on which new services for its partners and end-customers are being created, including an innovative app for use by both ISPs and their residential and business customers.

For example, “upgrading our fiber nodes not only allow us a greater reach to homes and allow us to connect premises faster, they also position us to provide edge services which include hosting content and enabling convergence to come alive,” says Gokhale.

Hyperscale partnerships

In addition to focusing on making it easier for its wholesale customers to partner, Openserve has built its own technology partnerships with hyperscalers, and in particular with Microsoft Azure, to accelerate and resource its digital transformation.

“It’s important to be able to leverage [hyperscalers’] global skill sets, their experience and what they’ve done with other partners. That has been a really critical activity for us and a learning experience for both parties,” explains Gokhale.

In particular, says Gokhale, “hyperscaler partnerships have allowed us to use cloud-native services [extensively] and drive the microservices and front-end technologies to decouple and define the user experience. At the same time, we are using on-premise private cloud…for example, with Oracle in the backend…to allow us to leverage cloud benefit while being on premise,” he says. “Doing this with hyperscalers reduces time and complexity.”

Efficiency and cost effectiveness are important considerations in the highly competitive South African access market, where Openserve has reduced its headcount from around 12,000 employees in 2015 to approximately 5,700 today, while rolling out new infrastructure and services. However, Gokhale’s calculation goes beyond greater efficiency and cost reduction; it is also a recognition of a new global reality.

“I’ve never seen an industry thrive if you become defensive. It’s very, very important to understand how you can leverage the other players that are coming into the market. Are [hyperscalers] coming into the telco world? Yes. But I think what’s important is they are co-creating, and they are allowing us a larger opportunity to look at multiple different technologies out there. So, typically with the network, a few OEMs would play in that layer. Now with hyperscalers supporting and enabling these services and combining with the cloud infrastructure, it creates a much larger ecosystem and provides flexibility and new opportunities to all.”

TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA) has also played a critical role in supporting Openserve’s IT transformation strategy.

“A digital strategy and enterprise architecture based on [the] Open Digital Architecture blueprint was very important for us. TM Forum ODA helped provided the framework for us to build.”

Gokhale stresses the importance of planning how to architect and build ecosystems around the capabilities that a CSP wants to take to market. “This allows us the flexibility to choose the right technology.”

In addition, “putting that middleware layer down in the API gateway on a private cloud allows that decoupling and exposes TM Forum APIs and legacy APIs, which enables our customers to consume them directly. That enablement is extremely important, because then you can have the power to understand your network and make it easier for your customers to understand.”

Customer experience

Customer and partner experience is Openserve’s primary benchmark of success, explains Gokhale. And one of Openserve’s biggest customer experience innovations is its Openserve Connect app.

The Openserve Connect App allows ISP’s consumer and enterprise customers to view network faults in their area, log tickets for faults, track their ticket status, perform line tests, place and track fiber orders and reschedule appointments with technicians, and access a range of self-help articles and guides. With Openserve accelerating fiber access rollout, increasing the number of homes passed with fiber by around 54% to approximately 707,000, according to interim results for the period 30 September 2021, such innovations to be able to give customers self-help capabilities become even more crucial.

The app is designed to benefit Openserve’s ISP customer base, which in turn bolsters Openreach’s wholesale brand in the competitive South African broadband access market. It also points to the growing importance of diverse partnerships to Openserve’s business model.

“A lot of our ISPs now utilize the app in their contact centers, in IVR [interactive voice response] and they promote it to their end-customers [to] give you a lot of self-service capabilities,” says Gokhale. “This has a direct opportunity to reduce [our ISP partners’] costs and provide a greater customer experience for their customers.”

Previously, if the network went down, the ISP would log a ticket with Openserve, which would draw on its tier-one or two support teams to resolve the issue.

“Now we proactively log network fault tickets which allows for faster resolution while the tier-one checks are given to the consumer directly” through the app, explains Gokhale. “That allows our tier-one support [teams] to reskill…and really concentrate on issues that are network oriented.”

Again, Openserve’s hyperscaler relationships have played an important role.

“Our wholesale app is the first of its kind, and the only reason it was, is because we drove that innovation really fast, working very closely with our key partners such as Microsoft and Falcorp, a local South African digital player ,” according to Gokhale.

The Openserve Connect app is only one element of Openserve’s partnering model.

“When we built the app, the modular concept and [the development of] a partner ecosystem was very, very clear for us. We allow partners to connect to their customer premises and [different] partners to bring services on top of that connectivity,” explains Gokhale. These could be security services, or in the future entirely new services such as energy provisioning.

“The ecosystem is changing, and adjacent markets are becoming relevant to everyone. It’s about Openserve positioning itself as the connectivity provider of choice,” says Gokhale. “As we look to the future, we are creating an ecosystem that allows us to create new products including creating pre-paid value propositions as well as white-labeled products.

“The concept is of creating an aggregation layer where customers will buy through our partners, while we provide a white label solution to them in the background – that’s the innovation that we’re trying to bring. And that flexibility can be seen through the architectural choices we are making such as choosing an open-source CMS [content management system] while creating these new platforms”

In March Openserve launched the first phase of its unified partner platform, which allows its [network, OEM and IT] partners to market their products on its websites. Putting the unified platform in place has involved aggregating legacy portals in areas such as fulfillment assurance and customer experience. Such platforms will also us to “share updated network rollout information using our GIS maps…so that they can target their marketing, advertising and commercialization,” says Gokhale.

“Using native cloud services, , we’ve created a common layer that can be leveraged across multiple platforms,” says Gokhale. “The legacy APIs didn’t have a platform where we could create an API management layer. Now we are creating a trading ecosystem for partners…and we never had that. are we still doing a legacy transformation? Yes. But what the digital transformation allows us to do is to decouple the transformation that’s happening behind the scenes and enable new products to come to market and give that experience that drives revenue growth,” explains Gokhale.

“It’s about how you leverage your core asset, which for us is our network,” adds Gokhale. “And this is exactly my passion: being able to see something new flourish while holding on to our core competencies.”