Leaving a Legacy: Telcos in the Digital Partnership Era
There’s nothing wrong with leaving a legacy—after all, it often means that something great was accomplished. Yet, the term legacy is not future-facing and refers to a feat accomplished in the past. For companies in the telecommunications industry, it’s time to look to the future—something that requires moving beyond legacy systems.
Innovations such as 5G, IoT and cloud are introducing new challenges such as network slicing, hyper-scalability and edge computing. However, these innovations also present many new opportunities with new use cases like AR gaming, autonomous vehicles and smart cities; and great revenue potential from monetizing new B2B2X business models. These new, game-changing innovations will bring together a spectrum of players into a sprawling, evolving digital ecosystem.
In response, CSPs are looking to move beyond connectivity by offering a variety of value-added services to their customers. Unfortunately, outdated and siloed legacy systems will inhibit CSPs from making the most out of this ecosystem of partners.
There are several ways telcos can set themselves up for success in the era of digital partnerships:
Embrace business model diversity —When it comes to business models, many companies are finding themselves at a bit of a crossroads. Gartner found that about 70 percent of boards of directors have accelerated their digital business initiatives with more than half anticipating a change in their organizations’ business model. While some will reduce costs now to retain customers, others will invest in innovative digital services to attract new customers, and still others will adopt a hybrid model. Finding the ideal business model now will pay dividends down the road.
Building strong, trusted ecosystem partnerships —5G will require telcos to collaborate with old and new parties, including other telcos, cloud providers and integrated software vendors (ISVs). Success in the 5G era requires an active and collaborative ecosystem to fuel innovation and produce valuable outcomes. As the ecosystem thrives, so too do its participants.
Create an architecture capable of supporting digital partnerships —For the partner ecosystem to operate smoothly, companies need to ensure that their systems are integrated. When it comes to infrastructure, the days when systems needed to be upgraded every few years are long gone. The systems of today require at least quarterly updates, if not monthly. Cloud, SaaS solutions allow telcos to implement changes as soon as they’re ready, without any manual effort. The ability to interoperate with other companies’ clouds is essential for a successful, long-lasting partnership.