ODA and APIs help M1 transform into cloud native DSP

Who: M1

What: Holistic transformation project to become a cloud native digital service provider with elastic cost structure, value-added employee roles and partnerships to enable hyper-personalized, tailored services

How: Leveraged TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture and Open APIs for smoother integration of software partners into the ecosystem

Results: Self-service transactions up from 15-20% to almost 90%; 85% reduction in human touch for order provisioning process.

Singapore’s second-largest network operator, M1, has ambitions to transform itself into a flexible and nimble player that monetizes its vast wealth of data and rapidly creates hyper-personalized services for customers.

M1 decided the best way to achieve its ambition was to go greenfield and become 100% cloud native.

“The idea is how do you create an asset light model and use the data you have collected over many years and monetize that data,” said Manjot Singh Mann, CEO of M1, in conversation with the TM Forum. “Most telcos cannot get there because the infrastructure they have is legacy infrastructure.”

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M1 is capitalizing on its fast and low latency network and using a software defined approach to take a holistic approach to its digital transformation strategy and change its digital experience.

M1’s transformation involves not only full adoption of the cloud and a complete redesign of its cost structure, but also transforming all employee roles into value creators and making M1 a partner of choice.

The decision to take the holistic transformation road came in September 2019, after M1 had identified over 100 initiatives it needed to take to be able to take its business to the next level in terms of costs, revenue generation, diversification and more. According to Nathan Bell, Chief Digital Officer, M1, the problem was that undertaking all of these initiatives was going to create even more complexity and challenges.

“I agreed with the CEO and number of our heads of department that actually what we were really trying to achieve was a holistic digital transformation,” Bell says. “So, we started looking at those hundred initiatives and what we’re going to prioritize, and we came up with the goal of becoming a cloud-enabled digital services provider.”

Transformation plan

That vision incorporated four basic aspects, starting with leveraging the cloud to enable holistic self-service for customers. Indeed, the central goal of the project wasn’t simply digital transformation for its own sake, efficiency gains or competitive agility, but the ability to offer instant, hyper-personalized, made-to-measure services for customers.

“Customers are getting more and more digital. They are looking for services,” said Mann. “We have fantastic relationships with customers built over many decades. We have information, so why shouldn’t we be the ones providing those services to customers and building relationships further with hyper-personalized services?”

This meant shifting almost everything in M1’s backend system (apart from the physical network assets) in the cloud – the first such shift of its kind in the telco world, Bell says. Prior to the shift, around 10-15% of M1’s business processes were in the cloud. Now, M1 is 90% cloud native.

M1 partnered with Infosys in early 2020 to deliver the transformation program. Together they successfully implemented the company-wide, technology-enabled transformation against the challenging backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Infosys’s strategy for the telecommunications industry focuses on four elements: cost take-out, digitization, reimagination and top-line growth, explains Raja Shah, SVP and Industry Head, Global Markets, Infosys.

“Cost take-out is extremely important with huge legacy [systems]. It touches on infrastructure, applications, network, people, experience, processes,” explains Shah. “In M1 we consolidated the entire legacy assets to a single hyper cloud to sweat out the investment in legacy and drive ongoing efficiencies.”

By going all-in on cloud, M1 could enable customers to do everything from paying bills and shopping for new devices to adding new services to their service bundle and delegating services to family members – all of this holistically and in real time, rather than waiting days for services to be provisioned.

“The sort of hyperpersonalization we built on our website means we can technically have six million combinations of combinations of plans that can be built with the slide of a finger,” said Mann. “Technically we can have a plan for each Singaporean. And we haven’t even yet started on other services we plan to build onto this platform to give a far more holistic experience to customers going forward.”

The second aspect was to enable the team to add value in every task they perform. This means enabling them to talk to each other rather than being the traditional “glue” between siloed systems, and giving them the ability to deal with challenges that M1’s systems haven’t yet been designed to support. Part of the strategy here is not just to make employee jobs easier and more meaningful, but also to enable M1 to attract new talent.

“We are not going digital as a cosmetic change. A lot of ways of working need to change,” explained Mann. “From a people perspective it is huge. We are now thinking digital. The products and services are so customer centric that we don’t [think about] what we can do from a technology perspective, we think of the customer first.”

The third aspect involves redesigning M1’s cost structure from the traditional capex model to an opex (or elastic) business model – not just in terms of customer enablement, but also for network rollouts (particularly 5G), with operations moving to elastic software network management so that M1 can dynamically scale bandwidth up or down according to demand.

Finally, there’s the fourth aspect of creating a partnership model in which value flows both ways. M1’s ambition is to become a partner that not only extracts value from other partners in its digital ecosystem, but also provides value back.

For example, says Bell, “If you’re a content partner, a gaming partner or an e-commerce partner, I can give you access to real-time analytics, or the results of hyper-personalization marketing initiatives, and use that so we can direct the right campaign and the right engagement to them.”

Out of the box

With the vision laid out, M1’s next move was to launch an RFP with over 50 software partners and five systems integrators over a period of two and a half months. As partners were contracted, a key part of the process was leveraging TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture and Open APIs to ensure that all partners were on the same page in terms of interfaces, configurations and so forth, and could offer something out of the box that would comply with Forum standards and guidelines, rather than M1 having to customize it all.

“As all telcos have learned the hard way, you can have lots of nodding heads in an RFP process, but when you actually get boots on the ground, it becomes all ‘Ooooh, that’s the interface you wanted’, or ‘that’s the configuration you wanted, well then it’s not going to work’,” Bell says. “So we really looked to leverage the ODA and Open APIs to be able to go and pre-define their standards, leverage standard integration, and make sure we’ve got a blueprint that we can use to hold our software partners accountable to as we embark on our journey.”

Meanwhile, M1 opted for a greenfield strategy in going cloud native – it has built a brand-new house next to the existing house, and has outsourced all of its legacy software to Infosys, so that M1 can focus on building its new digital platform in the cloud, from the apps down to rating, charging and the network-as-a-service layer. Bell says there are 25 components all built into the cloud.

COVID-19 and other challenges

Work on the transformation project began in earnest in January 2020. Not unexpectedly, there have been bumps along the transformation road –not the least of which was the emergence of COVID-19 that led to the disruptive “circuit-breaker” shutdown in Singapore. Bell says the pandemic did have an impact on the project timetable, as it required a level of collaboration that’s harder to do via remote working compared to everyone being in the office. Despite the hiccups, the team managed to push through and successfully launched and announced its new brand and digital transformation in early 2021.

The pandemic aside, key challenges included ensuring that all components are designed for future use cases (as opposed to simply replicating what M1 already has) and keeping all software partners aligned and working together rather than competing with each other.

Another key challenge has been ensuring that all of M1’s integrated flows work end-to-end. Part of that challenge is the hidden complexity of enabling customer self-service. When the idea is to enable customers to put together their own bespoke package of minutes, data caps, value added services and devices – as well as enable them to take advantage of specific hyper-personalized promotions that vary by how long they’ve been a customer – the result is millions of possible combinations that the backend has to support end-to-end in real time.

“Stitching all of that together and making sure that the whole thing works real time, end to end is the biggest challenge of the lot,” Bell says.

As for how M1 plans to measure the success of its reinvention as a cloud native DSP, Bell says they will initially look at two key metrics: One other expected benefit M1 is banking on is gaining an edge over the competition in a market that’s already been disrupted by mobile virtual network operators and over-the-top players.

• Percentage of self-service transactions:M1 expects this to grow from 15-20% now (all of which happens in stores or the call center) to close to 90%.
• Zero human touch:M1 is automating the complex order provisioning process, and estimates an 85% reduction in human touch. “That means our teams can focus more on fallout management, as opposed to getting into the repetitive, uninteresting tasks of cranking the handle for every single order in every single way.”

“Our ability to be much more dynamic, to evolve with the needs of our customers, and the ability to keep adding on to this digital platform, is going to cause a positive disruption as we get more into an ecosystem play,” says Bell.