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Industry-tested platforms may offer telecoms new opportunities for operational improvement.
Hari Bakhshi, Kraken Technologies Ltd
What telcos can learn about platform innovation from the energy sector
When TalkTalk announced their long term partnership with Kraken Technologies, an Energy focussed software company founded by Octopus Energy, many in the industry did a double take. Why would a major broadband provider choose systems built for utilities rather than telecoms?
A better question is: why wouldn't they?
Telecoms faces an odd contradiction. For a sector built on technology, it has been remarkably slow to adopt it. Try to launch a new product across legacy BSS/OSS systems and you could be quoted twelve to eighteen months. Platform updates? Quarterly, if everything aligns.
Lack of ambition isn't the culprit. The real issue is an architectural hangover from the 1990s—billing, CRM, ordering, provisioning and customer service all in separate silos, held together by increasingly fragile integration layers. Innovation often requires persuading multiple vendors to move in step, each with its own release cycle, testing regime and professional services fees.
Introduce a new bundled offer and it touches billing, provisioning, CRM and the customer portal—four systems, four change processes. Ask service teams to resolve a billing query and they're hopping between interfaces showing different versions of the truth.
Meanwhile, other industries surged ahead. Cloud-native platforms, continuous deployment and genuinely iterative development became the norm. Daily updates replaced quarterly drops. Customer experience became data-led rather than committee-led. Service teams received unified tools with intelligent assistance, resolving issues first time rather than passing customers around.
Telecoms didn't follow because vendors had little incentive to simplify. Their business model relied on waterfall delivery and bespoke integrations that reinforced complexity and lock-in. As the rest of the world adopted continuous delivery, telecoms remained anchored to the very practices that inhibit change.
The energy sector faced a reckoning telecoms have thus far avoided: rapid, unavoidable transformation. Renewables, distributed energy resources and demand flexibility overturned long-standing assumptions. The upgrades were a matter of survival.
Traditional vendors couldn't keep pace. Utilities needed to manage millions of customer-owned assets—solar panels, batteries, EV chargers—without owning them. They needed real-time pricing informed by demand. They required households to become active contributors to system stability, all while navigating tighter regulation and improving customer service.
And they had to reduce operating costs simultaneously.
The breakthrough came when utilities stepped outside their usual vendor circle. Modern cloud platforms could deploy features several times daily and handle extraordinary billing complexity—interval pricing, export payments, virtual power plants—without falling over.
But the real shift was philosophical: rethinking how people and technology work together. Rather than forcing agents through multiple systems and long procedures, these platforms gave them a single view, intelligent prompts and AI assistance suggesting effective next steps based on history, status and proven outcomes. Agents became more capable, not more burdened. Customer satisfaction rose while costs fell—40% reductions while maintaining 4+ star ratings.
Technology didn't replace people. It amplified them. Teams could manage the full customer lifecycle rather than narrow fragments and resolve complex issues in one conversation.
Water companies followed. Portsmouth Water migrated 325,000 customers in ten months and achieved top spot in Ofwat's satisfaction rankings. The transformation wasn't about cutting headcount. It was about giving staff the tools they always needed.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: telecoms' challenges aren't unique.
You have number porting? Energy has inter-utility switching with settlement complexity. You have relationships with Openreach, altnets and aggregators Energy has networks, system operators and wholesale markets. You have bundles of broadband, voice and value-added services? Energy balances time of-use tariffs, export rates and demand-response events.
The complexity, regulation and need for efficiency are the same. But other industries escaped vendor lock-in by embracing platform economics—innovation shared continuously across all clients.
Traditional telecoms vendors optimise for professional services. Every implementation is bespoke. Every change is chargeable. Every upgrade requires consultants. Their business model depends on complexity staying complicated.
And when you want to leave? Your data becomes a hostage negotiation. Legacy systems make extraction painful, formats are proprietary, and integrations break the moment you threaten to switch.
Modern platforms take the opposite approach: your data always belongs to you. Real-time APIs, event streams and Databricks replicas mean you can access everything—customer records, transactions, interactions—whenever you need it, in formats that work anywhere. No extraction projects. No vendor approval. No waiting.
Platform providers optimise for shared improvement. A better way to handle faults? Everyone gets it. AI models that predict issues across millions of interactions? Every service team benefits. New tools that make agents more effective? Rolled out universally.
Look at what this means in practice. When E.ON UK migrated 8.7 million customers, replacing seven systems from eight vendors, it didn't just simplify their IT. It reshaped how their service operation worked.
Agents who once juggled multiple screens now worked from a single interface showing everything they needed. AI offered suggested responses based on account history, sentiment and resolution patterns—but people made the decisions, adding the nuance technology can't.
The results were striking: Trustpilot scores approaching 4.5 stars and a shift from £200 million losses to £100 million operating profit in the migration year. Not despite the technology—because the technology made people better.
Marketing teams can launch campaigns in hours, guided by data-driven insight. Product teams can model new bundles with real-time analytics. Service teams handle faults with AI flagging issues before customers ring, giving agents the context to act.
This isn't about replacing judgement. It's about equipping it.
Now picture telecoms teams with the same support. Broadband faults resolved faster because AI correlates network events and service history. Retention specialists guided by churn predictions and effective offers—but with human agents choosing the right approach.
This isn't about shrinking the workforce. It's about giving staff the tools that make them excellent.
Energy retailers operate numerous tariffs simultaneously, adjusting quickly to wholesale movements and customer behaviour. Commercial teams use self-service tools with AI guidance based on market conditions, competitor activity and uptake patterns—but people make the final calls.
A promotional offer launched on Monday can be refined by Friday. Ideas can be tested on small cohorts before wider rollout. Tools are built for commercial teams rather than developers, with AI adding guardrails and predictions.
Telecoms needs similar agility. As 5G reshapes service possibilities and customer expectations shift, the organisations that experiment and learn fastest will win—not through automation alone, but through teams supported by intelligent systems.
Telecoms doesn't need to discard its domain expertise. Number porting, wholesale relationships and regulatory obligations are real and demanding.
But the architectures that support rapid innovation, operational efficiency and excellent service have already been proven in industries just as complex and regulated.
And the principle is clear: technology should empower people, not constrain them. AI should strengthen service agents, not script them. Automation should free humans for empathy and problem-solving. Business users should have tools that provide freedom with intelligent safeguards.
Traditional telecoms vendors operate on older assumptions—complexity that requires specialists, integrators and consultants.
The real question is: where have problems just like yours already been solved more effectively?
TalkTalk recognised this when they looked beyond telecoms vendors. They chose a platform built around people—customer experience, staff capability and continuous improvement at the centre.
Transformation in telecoms isn't optional. Competitive pressure and rising expectations make it unavoidable. The choice is whether leaders adopt systems that lift their teams or keep models that simply shift bottlenecks.
The energy transition proved that the best technology elevates human capability; telecoms now needs to decide whether it will let history repeat itself —or take the hint.
Kraken Technologies delivers exactly this: a cloud-native platform with a single data model, giving service teams one pane of glass across the customer lifecycle. The same architecture powering energy’s transformation — continuous deployment, AI-assisted operations, data you own — now available to telecoms. Not vendor lock-in. Operational freedom with proven results.
In the end, it’s a simple choice: keep patching old habits, or choose the tools that let your people — and your customers — move forward with confidence.
