Huawei hosted a Digital Operations Transformation Summit at Mobile World Congress 2016. During the Summit, a strategic roundtable discussion brought together a panel of industry leaders and experts representing telecom operators, consulting and analyst firms, vendors, and industry bodies, to jointly tackle the challenges in telco’s digital transformation.
With the theme of "Digital Operations Transformation – The Challenge, Strategy and Roadmap," the discussion focused on a series of critical challenges that will face carriers on their digital transformation journey. Over 70 C-level executives from top-tier telecommunications companies around the world were in attendance, including AT&T, Deutsche Telecom, China Mobile, Vodafone, Verizon, Orange, Telecom Italy, MTN, STC, America Movil, Bharti Airtel, Turkcell, Liberty Global, Telenor, Tata communications, Telmex, Dialog, Indosat, ETB, MCCI etc, as well as partners such as Accenture, Deloitte, Forrester, IDC, Ovum, Amdocs, IBM and Microsoft.
Clear agenda
"Digital operations are clearly on the agenda for operators around the world," said Heavy Reading principal analyst Caroline Chappell, who moderated the summit’s panel discussion. "Our recent survey shows that their implementation is strongly linked to network virtualization initiatives, which will turn network capabilities into cloud-hosted digital services alongside IT-based digital services. Operators see digital operations as critically delivering the speed and user experience they need to compete effectively in the digital services economy."
“The pace of change is accelerating at an unprecedented rate and future opportunities for carriers and enterprises will depend on understanding the true value of transforming their operations in the digital age. This event provided the inspiration and knowledge for key players to continue to transform and take advantage of digital technology and strategies to deliver engaging customer experiences," said Peter Sany, President and Chief Executive Officer of TM Forum.
"Over the past ten years, the forces that have placed us in the age of the customer have stimulated a rise in novel behavior among consumers," says James McQuivey, VP and principal analyst at Forrester Research. "The next ten years will far exceed the past ten years in new activities, leading to a powerful new stage in consumers' behavior that we are calling ‘hyperadoption’. Thanks to hyperadoption, the customers will eagerly embrace new behaviors that we previously would have had difficulty imagining. The telecom providers who want to survive into the future must also join these consumers, giving them the digital services, tools, and devices that they are so ready to accept."
“In the process of digitalization, either as a telecom carrier that drives the physical world to the digital world, or as an OTT that provides a variety of applications for users, the ultimate goal is to provide users with a better experience. But what is a better experience? Huawei defines it with ‘ROADS’, which means real-time, on-demand, all-online, DIY, and social, " said Ken Wang, President of Global Marketing and Solution Sales at Huawei. “When we look at the business model from the viewpoint of end-user experience and user behavior, you will find that the IT system (OSS/BSS) cannot not simply be an internal support system, it has to be a production and enabling system that serves customer needs directly. More importantly, it will be critical to build a digital business enabling ecosystem, provide turnkey services for customers, and realize win-win business value between carriers and partners.”
Making DX work for you
Speaking on the theme of "Thriving in a Digital Transformation (DX) Economy: The Telecom Industry", Crawford Del Prete, Executive Vice President and Chief Research Officer for research firm IDC, described DX as a “customer-centric business strategy."
Digital transformation will change many aspects of how customers are engaged and business processes are defines.
"Successful Digital Transformation efforts need to start with leaders who make it a company-wide priority," Del Prete said.
Del Prete listed the three top priorities for DX, noting that the first three are the COO’s direct responsibilities:
- Master operations – driving down critical process cycle times
- Master information – increasing revenue from new sources uncovered through better information capture
- Master customer relationships- Focus on tangible ways to delight customers in unexpected ways through the use of innovative technologies. Measure it through easy to understand metrics such as a net promoter score
"Internal ops and alignment is a DX must-do for success," said Del Prete.
“It is vital they (telecom operators) reinvent their business model, and provide new services for the digital age, delivered in partnership,” said Dong Sun, Ph.D., Chief Architect of Digital Transformation at Huawei. “The old model, where they’re in charge of the end-to-end delivery, is obsolete. Operators must leverage their unique position to optimise their role within new digital business ecosystem.”
“It wasn’t just a Huawei meeting, but we’d rather position it as an industry event which is intended to promote open and collaborative partnerships for win-win outcomes,” explains Dr Sun. “We’re calling on industry leaders, from telecoms and beyond, to work towards an alliance that fosters digital innovation and drives digital businesses.”
For additional information on The Digital Operations Transformation Summit, visit http://www.huawei.com/en/mwc2016/summit/digital-operations-transformation.
Huawei is moving to establish an industry alliance to foster innovation and drive digital businesses. How do you envision this alliance in terms of participation, goals, etc?
The transformation to digital business is non-trivial. It is crucial to collaborate with partners to win the future. The alliance should be open to all business partners, including CSPs, vendors, application developers and technology innovators such as open source communities, third-party service providers and OTT players. The main objective of this alliance is to foster a healthy, win-win business partnership to help the telco industry and other enterprises to transform their business models, operation models, architectures and organizations to become lean, agile digital enterprises, and enable an open digital business-enabling ecosystem for developing innovative digital services and providing the best digital experience to all users including consumers, enterprise, partners and operators.
What would be the benefits of such an alliance?
The alliance will benefit from the diversity of business needs and technology capabilities to maximize business opportunities and lower costs. For example, it can leverage competence from multiple types of industries to build up core capabilities, collaborate on business application development to roll out innovative digital services, discover new business models to monetize the core assets of partners, and lower costs through open-source technologies and shorten time-to-market of new features
What are the core areas that telcos should be focused on to ensure smooth and successful digital transformation?
The main goal of digital transformation is new flexible business models. To achieve this, the key enabler of a successful digital business is to transform legacy operations into agile digital operations, which will enable digital services such as big data, IoT and cloud, deliver omni-user engagement and a digital user experience, and enable infrastructure automation, which is backed up by an open operations architecture and flat organization, as well as competence of personnel.
Alliances aside, what is Huawei’s main strategy to enable digital operations transformation for telcos?
As the largest ICT solution provider in the telco industry, Huawei likes to establish long term strategic partnerships, work as a primary systems integration partner, provide best-of-breed solutions and supporting operational services in collaboration with leading IT and CT companies, and share the risks to build up a digital ecosystem and win the future together. For example, Huawei has been a major contributor to open-source communities such as OpenStack. Huawei has established a developer community with more than 4,000 members. And Huawei is collaborating with Accenture, IBM and SAP in the enterprise market. Also, Huawei set up our Open NFV lab in 10s locations that has more than 600 partners working on IoT, cloud and mobile broadband applications.
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