Accelerating digital transformation with the "Surge"​platform

Sponsored by: Tecnotree

Most of the research conducted on digital transformation projects over the years show a gloomy picture – many such projects aim for a one try, ‘big-bang’ style transformation, and fail to deliver on the promise. This kind of project failure has become a huge topic of discussion, reducing CXO confidence in taking up similarly large transformation projects. They would do well to remember that digital transformation is not a project - it’s a continuous journey without a defined end stage. We shall look at the key facets of this journey in this article. Please also watch the video above for further insight.

Customer care There is a ‘new generation’ of consumers and employee, and this new generation is growing fast. This generation’s expectations about good customer experience is defined by the likes of Facebook, Whatsapp, Google and Netflix and much more, and this keeps on evolving as technology evolves. In the retail consumer market, even as far as six to eight years back, omnichannel, omnidevice experiences were mandatory from the very beginning for many retailers, but operators even today are struggling to create and maintain this experience, particularly those with ingrained legacy systems. Operators playing catch-up will be kept busy with these constantly emerging new experiences, and a long roadmap to implement them.

Business focus All changes and priorities should be business driven - there is no point in changing technology for the sake of it! Tecnotree is a pioneer in using open source technologies for telecom IT products, but that did not happen by chance - we had a business problem that evolved from global geopolitical situations, and in dealing with it, we realized the advantages of moving to open source to reduce our overall total cost of ownership.

Evolving through agility Often the biggest problem that operators face today is the lack of agility and speed in their IT systems, especially in terms of introducing something new - be it onboarding a new partner or a new bundle offer, or even simply capturing new subscriber information in the CRM system. While the Facebooks of the world are rolling out new features daily and doing A/B testing to understand consumer behavior, the operators are a league behind with age-old IT systems. Operators need state-of-the-art agile technology that can help them to fast understand consumer behaviors, and support continuous incremental product/service/feature releases. In 2017, we decided to help our telco customers try to overcome their agility challenges, so we focused on delivering containerized software comprising all the tech they needed to run applications, without them having to launch entire virtual machines from scratch.

Process power Of course, the telecoms industry is mandated to follow government regulations whichever country they are in, and burden of aligning their processes with these regulations can become too much compared to OTT players. As such telcos should consider simplifying their processes and making it agile for themselves to be able to make such changes.

Go for growth Last, but most crucial for providers is to focus on growing revenue through an ecosystem of partners, taking advantage of their innovations to enable operators’ own offerings, or innovating with them. Today’s method of building partnerships, signing contracts, onboarding partner offers, and finally multi-party settlements are too slow and a deterrent to creating topline impact fast enough.

Tecnotree supporting transformation

With all of these in mind, we launched our Digital Business Support Systems Suite 5 in February this year in Mobile World Congress, Barcelona. Since then we have engaged with customers to traverse their transformation journey using the Digital BSS Suite 5. However, we also realized that many operators want to take smaller steps towards their transformation, as opposed to the ‘big-bang’ approach. The market we service inspired us to create a platform for accelerating digitalization while reusing legacy as much as possible. We have worked with one of our customers in the Latin American market to go- live with a few new services on top of our platform. With this experience and keeping in mind the market needs, today, in AfricaCom, Cape Town, South Africa, we are launching a new product set… “Surge”.

Surging forward

Built with open-source technologies, ‘Surge’ is an innovative and modern age offering that empowers operators to fast-track digital transformation by bridging the legacy services in the existing environment, thereby, ensuring business continuity. ‘Surge’ comes in three different solution packages to suit the business needs of operators of all sizes:

1 - ‘Surge Services’ – a digital microservices accelerator: A low-code platform that allows operators to design processes, manage process flows and identify process bottlenecks. It also comes with a set of common platform services like Rules Engine, Notification, SSO and ID management. The package fast-tracks digital transformation by wrapping existing legacy services with Open APIs. This package orchestrates microservices, and allows the creation of new APIs, also exposing and monetizing any metered APIs through an API Gateway.

2- ‘Surge Xperience’ – a digital experience accelerator: Created on top of the Digital Microservices Accelerator, it includes two out-of-the-box enablers: 1 - ‘Customer 360’ for a 360-degree view of subscribers across all business lines connecting; 2 – ‘Omnichannel’ helping operators develop a robust omnichannel customer experience. This package also includes a state-of-the-art self-care application, helping to reduces the cost of customer care.

3- ‘Surge Revenue’ - a digital revenue accelerator: Created on top of the Digital Microservices Accelerator, it includes an out-of-the-box enabler - the ‘Digital Partner Relationship Manager’, which empowers operators to open new monetization opportunities by creating a partner ecosystem. Operators can rapidly onboard new partners, aggregate, bundle and sell partner offerings, and manage complex multi-party settlements.

The complete package of offerings in Surge will help operators to improve customer experience, create new services fast and boost revenue opportunities. This all comes with a very attractive low total-cost-of-ownership, and is complemented with DevOps process automation practices, as well as support services to help operators track process flows, make low-code changes to the processes, and create new services through microservice development. We believe this unique offering will resolve the pain points faced by many operators today who are indecisive about when and what to tackle with regards to digital transformation due to the inherent risks involved. We intend to keep learning from the market, and through industry interaction and feedback. As, always, we are committed to solving operator the challenges, whatever it takes…

Visit https://www.tecnotree.com/surge/ for more information.