Viewpoint
Huawei has come up with a maturity assessment model containing five phases and five dimensions to help telecom service providers accelerate their digital transformation, so they are able to leverage emerging market opportunities for business growth.
"The five dimensions included in these models are strategic planning, value measurements, organization of processes, digital platform, and organizations and talents. That is to say, this model allows our carrier customers to assess where they are, where they would like to be in the future and how they can achieve their digital transformation goals in these five dimensions," says Jacky Zhou, Vice President,Marketing & Solutions, Huawei.
In addition, Huawei’s portfolio for digital transformation also includes three-layer operation services, including enablement service, adoption service and advisory service. The company hopes to work with TM Forum to make the maturity assessment model containing five phases and five dimensions more comprehensive.
Huawei has recently introduced two new offerings to help service providers accelerate digital services transformation. The first is a cloud-converged billing platform, and the second is a new Customer Engagement Center. The cloud-converged billing platform is a cloud-native, convergent and agile offering, which is increasing the reliability from 99.999% to 99.9999%. Further, it also helps the telcos bring down the Total Cost of Ownership by 30%. It also brings down the time of new software release upgrade for telcos from the previous three months to just seven days now.
On the other hand, the Customer Engagement Center packs intelligence and video capabilities. It comes with the all-channel video capability, so the service that could earlier only be accessed in the offline channel now is available online as well. Further, it uses the Intelligence capabilities to reduce the average cost per call by 30%, improving fault mitigation percentage by 20%, thus reducing downtime.
This model has evolved with Huawei focusing on its own digital transformation, which helped it gain insights into their customers’ key pain points and how they can use digital transformation in creating business value in the new technologies, like 5G and Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. In addition, Huawei’s partnerships with more than 180 carriers worldwide have helped it understand the complexities of digital transformation and then come up with technology solutions to address the challenges.
Why Digital Transformation is No Longer an Option
Digital transformation is crucial for telcos to go beyond offering just basic connectivity services to the subscribers. Further, new technologies like 5G and Industry 4.0 demand more agile, flexible and programmable telco infrastructure and processes. The traditional siloed way of working is not geared to provide a new-age digital experience to the customers and enterprises.
Typically, service providers add a new network layer for every new communications standard. This strategy increases network complexity making it challenging to manage the network. Digital transformation of the telcos is also required to allow carriers to use digital tools to automate the network processes, thus simplifying the network infrastructure and enhancing operational efficiency.
"Huawei has been collaborating with its operator customers, industry organizations and other partners in the industry to encourage the distribution of digital transformation practices. We believe we need to start with the right high-value scenarios. That is to say, we need to review and analyze the entire customer journey, and we hope to increase the agility during the purchase stage and to improve user experience during the youth stage of users. And then, during the O&M stage, we would like to introduce a higher level of intelligence," says Zhou.
Digital transformation also demands a deeper partnership between the service provider and Huawei to achieve business success quickly.
Further, the telcos face stiff competition from Over-the-Top (OTT) players. The service providers have several advantages over OTT players. For instance, they have a larger user base and a strong channel to reach the users. Operators can leverage their larger user base to roll out several digital services, like video ring back tone, FinTech services and New Messaging. Huawei spokesperson shares how FinTech service helped an Africa service provider increase the penetration rate of FinTech subscribersto 80% and improve Average Revenue Per User by an additional $32 annually.
On the other hand, digital transformation can help the service providers enhance customer engagement with businesses in the B2B segment. They can introduce new services to grow their revenue five times higher than the traditional ones.
Telco Digital Transformation in Emerging Markets
Telecom service providers face challenges in emerging markets where the 4G penetration and home broadband network are limited. In this scenario, the service providers need help finding their users and accelerating the process of user migration from 2G and 3G to 4G. However, the service providers cannot do so by relying only on traditional methods.
"In the emerging markets, we believe we will face great opportunities to tap into the digital methods, digital transformation and digital platforms to achieve business success quickly. In some southern and northern African markets, we have deployed data-driven platforms to accelerate the user migration for our customers. These digital methods have helped us speed up the user migration journey faster than traditional methods," elaborates Zhou.
New Offerings to Empower Telcos Address New Market Opportunities
Huawei has introduced Smart series of HUAWEI SmartCare® and i series of AUTIN™ at the OTF Forum this year to help the service providers easily and quickly digitally transform their operations for greater efficiencies. Smart series of HUAWEI SmartCare® is designed for optimizing experience along the entire journey of a network rolled out. It includes several modules, including Smart Planning for improved network planning, Smart Optimization for better network optimization, Smart Experience to proactively address customer experience issues, and Smart DataCube, a converged data engine.
"For AUTIN™, we are rolling out the i series, which includes four different offerings: iFM, iPM, iEM and iStudio. iFM, it’s used to conduct fault management. And P stands for performance, so iPM is used to manage performance. Then iEM is used for event management. Last but not the least, iStudio offerings under AUTIN™ is a local platform designed to facilitate the transformation of talents," explains Zhou. Service providers can opt for one or more modules depending on their requirements.
Huawei is emerging as the partner of choice of the telcos looking to seamlessly execute their digital transformation strategy to take advantage of the market opportunities.
