Telecomasia.net: What are the biggest challenges operators face right now?
SAP Mobile Services president John Sims: Each region is at a different stage, but overall operators’ traditional revenues are either under pressure or starting to decline. They all have a desire to find new ways to generate new revenue sources, and many of them are looking at the cloud as a potential opportunity that leverages a lot of their skills and fits their way of selling to the enterprise because a lot of them, when they sell to the enterprise, they call on the CIO organization. So in selling cloud services they can still call on the CIO organization.
I think where they struggle is moving beyond that, starting to call on the other lines of business within the enterprise, whether that’s the marketing line of business or for some of the cloud-based apps for different application areas such as finance, manufacturing, etc.
They have a tough time with that, so they tend to stick with things like cloud storage and cloud capacity, as opposed to getting into the application space. Although many of them have a desire to move there.
Some have started with things like mobile device management and mobile security. In fact, SAP partners with a number of them, where they take our mobile device management, mobile device security products, host them in the cloud then resell them to enterprises.
What are enterprises looking for from telcos?
We’ve been spending time talking to enterprises, which say they know their customers, or in the case of the public sector their citizens, are spending more of their lives on a mobile device, and yet they kind of feel like they’re in the dark about what they really do, how they do it, when the do it. So if the operators can help them get a better handle on that, they could be a lot more effective, and in the end the consumer or the citizen should find it more convenient, relevant engagement from these organizations.
Enterprises are asking for help in better understanding the mobile world. They’re trying to understand patterns of movement by time of day, demographics, location, and so on.