Today’s telco should deliver 'personalized' pizza
Most end consumers think 5G means faster internet, but it will also usher in an era of personalization for all kinds of applications.
12 Sep 2018
Today’s telco should deliver 'personalized' pizza
Telcos are an integral part of our daily life, and if you’re like most people, your smartphone is never more than an arm's length away, 24 hours a day. We demand a lot from communications service providers (CSPs): great service, fast internet, uninterrupted streaming of our favorite videos on Netflix and a lot more. But lurking beneath the surface is the struggle of today’s operators to identify new business opportunities and capture new revenues.
If they get it right, telcos will no longer simply be the world’s connectivity providers, but will grow into becoming digital platform companies that connect suppliers with consumers for everyday things like banking, healthcare, transportation, insurance or even the delivery of your pizza!
If they get it right, telcos will no longer simply be the world’s connectivity providers, but will grow into becoming digital platform companies that connect suppliers with consumers for everyday things like banking, healthcare, transportation, insurance or even the delivery of your pizza!
We have heard lot of discussion around 5G. When asked, most end consumers think it means faster internet, higher bandwidth and low latency, but the industry wiz are betting 5G will bring a new era. This Industry 4.0 will make connected cars and personalized healthcare a reality, and introduce applications and services we have not yet even imagined.
CSPs are undergoing major disruption. In this period of transformation, they understand the importance of adopting the application program interface (API) culture. Jeff Bezos transformed Amazon with his vision to expose everything as APIs, changing Amazon from an online book store to the world's largest online retail store. This journey would not have been possible without the foundation of APIs.
APIs allow businesses to connect, forge profitable partnerships and come up with new business models. In 2016, TM Forum launched its Open API Program, which was collaboratively developed by service providers to be used internally to transform IT, increase operational agility and improve customer centricity, and externally to deliver a practical approach to seamless end-to-end management of complex digital services.
Telcos are constantly trying to understand 5G use cases and revenue generation models. In the coming years, there has to be lot of innovation – both in technology and strategy – for applications to leverage the power of 5G, and more importantly, for operators to open up their infrastructure as a service and create a platform ecosystem. It will require changing their rigid networks, the digital customer experience and creating an ecosystem of marketplaces – like Amazon, which started with selling books online in 1995 and rose from a $15 million company to $150 billion company today.
From selling books to networks, why can’t telcos transform and go from providing networks to delivering your favorite pizza? CSPs need to create dynamic personalized services and deliver them on demand to their customers. This will be a marketplace where startups and enterprises provide applications that telcos will deliver to end users for a commission.
Let us re-imagine how telcos could deliver personalized pizza (and other new revenue streams), using and extending TM Forum and MEF standard APIs.
The diagram below shows how Open APIs can be applied to deliver pizza. The three key areas the TM Forum Open APIs focus on are the Customer Management API Suite (used to onboard the customer and enable their journey), Network as a Service (NaaS) API Suite (used to enable network customers) and the IoT API Suite (used to enable IoT partners). TM Forum members are collaborating on these APIs as part of a Catalyst proof-of-concept project on drone APIs.
Think APIs
CSPs are undergoing major disruption. In this period of transformation, they understand the importance of adopting the application program interface (API) culture. Jeff Bezos transformed Amazon with his vision to expose everything as APIs, changing Amazon from an online book store to the world's largest online retail store. This journey would not have been possible without the foundation of APIs.
APIs allow businesses to connect, forge profitable partnerships and come up with new business models. In 2016, TM Forum launched its Open API Program, which was collaboratively developed by service providers to be used internally to transform IT, increase operational agility and improve customer centricity, and externally to deliver a practical approach to seamless end-to-end management of complex digital services.
Create a platform marketplace
Telcos are constantly trying to understand 5G use cases and revenue generation models. In the coming years, there has to be lot of innovation – both in technology and strategy – for applications to leverage the power of 5G, and more importantly, for operators to open up their infrastructure as a service and create a platform ecosystem. It will require changing their rigid networks, the digital customer experience and creating an ecosystem of marketplaces – like Amazon, which started with selling books online in 1995 and rose from a $15 million company to $150 billion company today.
From selling books to networks, why can’t telcos transform and go from providing networks to delivering your favorite pizza? CSPs need to create dynamic personalized services and deliver them on demand to their customers. This will be a marketplace where startups and enterprises provide applications that telcos will deliver to end users for a commission.
Call for innovation
Let us re-imagine how telcos could deliver personalized pizza (and other new revenue streams), using and extending TM Forum and MEF standard APIs.
The diagram below shows how Open APIs can be applied to deliver pizza. The three key areas the TM Forum Open APIs focus on are the Customer Management API Suite (used to onboard the customer and enable their journey), Network as a Service (NaaS) API Suite (used to enable network customers) and the IoT API Suite (used to enable IoT partners). TM Forum members are collaborating on these APIs as part of a Catalyst proof-of-concept project on drone APIs.
Join us and collborate
At Digital Transformation North America in Dallas later this month, we will be running a hands on lab showcasing how to leverage the power of Open APIs, microservices, containers and cloud platforms and AI.
The Open Digital Lab is hosted on IBM Cloud and provides open source tools. The lab, which was created by IBM and TM Forum, is a starter sandbox for Catalyst projects and developers. It provides a pre-configured container with open source software including Node.js, Node-RED, OpenWhisk, Kafka, MQTT and MongoDB hosted on free version of IBM Cloud. The goal is to collaborate, re-use and share this platform building TMForum API's based Microservices and exposing via API Connect.
We would like to invite all industry thought leaders to join the Open Digital Lab Initiative to co-create, co-invent and reshape telecoms' digital era.
