How to excel and innovate through agile business and open IT: Huawei Digital Business Enabling System

Beyond the hype: a new breed of business enabling systems is transforming the Telco opera ting model

To compete in the digital economy, operators need to transform their business operations by deploying a new generation of business enabling systems that replace traditional platforms focused on network services with open and agile digital platforms focused on enabling new business models, services and customer engagement models.  To address these challenges and help operators on their digital transformation journey, Huawei has developed a suite of services and solutions called BES, Business Enabling System.

Leveraging a fully integrated stack of modularized components, BES provides a Business Enabler as a Service platform that delivers against  the key business drivers, shaping the future of the telecoms and digital service landscape where success will be defined by the following core capabilities:

– Channel: Supporting multi-channel customer journeys with all online marketing, sales and service while enabling  cross-channel collaboration

– Customer engagement: Delivering on proactive care strategies to drive customer value optimization through a consistent  anytime, anywhere and any-channel customer experience 

– Business model: Exploiting new revenue streams through an open digital ecosystem based on partner aggregation and enablement

– Infrastructure: Reducing TCO through Cloud based and componentized solutions

Remaining Relevant – Survival of the Fittest through Digital Transformation

In an increasingly commoditized market where OTT substitution and exponential growth in MBB traffic is placing pressure on operator revenues and margins, transformation from traditional Telco business operations, based on monolithic architectures and network centric products, to new agile and open digital platforms and services is not only a matter of thriving but one of surviving.  Some of the key challenges facing operators are summarized below where the focus is on how to reduce costs through operational efficiency and automation on the one hand, whilst capitalizing on new revenue streams and driving differentiation through customer experience and value management on the other:

– Addressing erosion of traditional voice and messaging revenues through introduction of new digital applications, content and services

– Combating OTT substitution through adoption of new business models in an open ecosystem built on a value fabric with optimized partner onboarding

– Overcoming the limitations of costly and inflexible siloed BSS architectures through modularized business enabling platforms built on open SOA principles and cloud based infrastructure to drive agility, flexibility and shorten time-to-market

– Reducing cost of sales, supporting precise marketing and driving proactive customer engagement management by transitioning to online service channels and leveraging the power of Big Data and analytics

To be successful however, digital transformation programmes must align people, processes and platforms in a holistic approach to change.  Likewise, from a delivery perspective, selecting a solution that offers flexibility in terms of deployment model is critical. Whether a phased or big bang approach is adopted, a clear roadmap is required to deliver a convergent front end IT stack, digital partner aggregation capabilities and gradual IT backend transformation. 

The Key to Success – Unlock innovative digital capabilities through an open and agile architecture

To support operators on their digital transformation journeys, Huawei has developed a new generation of business support systems called BES, Business Enabling System. Built on a layered architecture that is based on SOA principles, BES offers a fully integrated and modularized set of digital solutions that deliver against  the core business drivers shaping the future of Telco operations as summarized in the diagram below.

From an architectural perspective, BES has been designed from the bottom up on digital business requirements and represents a true evolution in how operators interact with their customers and partners. From supporting event driven contextual awareness through embedded real time analytics to highly automated and customer centric process design through a business process orchestration engine, BES leverages cloud based technologies to provide a new digital customer engagement and service delivery platform that is innovative, highly scalable and cost effective. Key features include:

– Online customer channels: Support for millions of customer interactions online

– High performance IT: Support for millions of transactions at the same time

– Real-time analytics based on Big Data: Data flow analytics improved from 1TB to 10+ PB

– Business enabling as a Service:  Enablement of an all digital service operation, making it easy to introduce new products and new services from third parties or even from end users

– Cloud based architecture: Virtual and elastic infrastructure means operation costs reduced by up to 70%.

The shift in emphasis from support to enablement in the above architecture is key, as it represents not only a transition to an agile delivery model but also an embedded focus on driving new business capabilities and services:

– Exposure of data assets to third parties via APIs to grow partner base, enable B2B2X models, transition to internet model of service delivery and innovation (defined by speed and diversity of product introductions).

– Monetisation of mobile broadband assets as part of the move from dumb pipe to smart pipe capabilities.

– Leveraging of real time decision and analytics engines to drive:

    > Precision marketing and real time campaign management to support event ba sed promotions 

    > Customer value management though personalized engagement using tools such as Next Best Action and Next Best Offer that build on contextual awareness to optimize returns across the full customer lifecycle

    > Multi-dimensional insights at the customer, network, product and device level to enrich customer profiling/ segmentation and  support optimization of business operations

    > Data as an asset to enable new revenue streams from mobile advertising, data brokerage services

    > Integration with smart policy tools to provide intelligent and dynamic resource optimization, charging functions, service delivery and customer interactions

Digital Business Blueprinting – Tick list of next generation BES capabilities

Based on its experience of developing and deploying next generation BSS solutions for a global client base, Huawei has identified a number of critical success factors that should be factored into designing a digital transformation programme. The list below is not exhaustive as digital business readiness requires an architecture that builds upon a core foundation laye r of business operations capabilities. It focuses instead on the key design principles that underpin the transition to a new digitalized IT stack.

1. Enabling “ROADS” customer experience capabilities

   a. Real-time interaction and fulfillment.

   b. On-Demand product and service delivery.

   c. All-online customer engagement management.

   d. Do It Yourself (DIY)  customer care and service management

   e. Social media integration 

2. Enabling digital partner engagement capabilities

   a. Flexible settlement and revenue sharing model

   b. Rapid partner on-boarding

   c. Multi-national partner and multi-tenant support

   d. Exposure of data, IT and BSS assets to partners though open platforms

3. Enabling agile business capabilities

   a. Ease of integration using open standards to support interoperability.

   b. Process automation and optimisation.

   c. Ease of change and configuration flexibility/ adaptability. 

   d. Real time analytics and decision management.

4. Enabling digital services capabilities

   a. Support for a diverse product portfolio including telco services, digital apps/ media and  M2M. 

   b. Flexible product configuration.

   c. Fast Time to Market for product launches.

   d. Resource and API openness. 

5. Enabling new technologies capabilities

   a. Elastic scaling 

   b. Smooth Expansion

   c. Efficient Operations & Maintenance

   d. High performance IT

Huawei is pioneering a new breed of business enabling systems that address the needs of a changing ecosystem where new business and operating models are driving new sources of value creation. To be successful therefore, operators must leverage upon their core network, customer and data assets to drive competitive differentiation in established markets and position for a key role in the emerging digital economy which extends beyond traditional telco boundaries to embrace new markets and industries. This, along with the transformation of the customer engagement model from passive and reactive interaction via traditional offline channels to proactive and dynamic self-service enablement via online and social channels, are the cornerstones of the concept behind business enablement.

Huawei is participating in the Mobile W orld Congress 2015 in Barcelona, Spain. For more information, please visit: http://www.huawei.com/minisite/mwc2015/en/index.html