Tim Spencer is co-founder, president and COO of Sigma Systems, the provider of service order management, provisioning and activation, device provisioning and advanced mediation solutions for broadband IP service offerings. Here, he tells VanillaPlus how CSPs can drive new revenue by immersing themselves in the valueadded and cloud services market place by relentlessly automating service fulfilment processes and creating attractive service bundles. New revenues, added to the operational cost savings, will help alleviate some of the commoditisation pressures CSPs face.
VanillaPlus: What are the key challenges that service providers face today?
Tim Spencer: They face a number of challenges but certainly revenue on core services is being commoditised and growth in many core service provider businesses is stalling. Cable operators, for example, are seeing subscriber growth in the hundreds per month when in the past they saw growth in the tens of thousands. For European mobile operators, 4% total growth is expected this year.
Declining or flat revenue, the need to invest massively in new network technology like FTTH and LTE to remain competitive, and the rise of serious over-the-top competition is a bit of a perfect storm for many operators. Service providers must understand how to generate additional ARPU from their existing customer base with new innovative services to thrive.
VP: Many CSP’s are considering the launch of cloud and value-added services, but can these services really be a differentiator for service providers?
TS: There are hundreds of millions of dollars being poured into the cloud XaaS market by investors. Tapping that innovation successfully can plug the ARPU gap the operators are facing. There’s an opportunity for them to fill their pipes and expand the value added services they offer today. I don’t believe that service providers will necessarily become market place vendors with thousands of applications for consumers and the small and medium business (SMB) market. What they need to do is focus on a set of value added services that take advantage of their network and system investments, which will position them uniquely to their target markets.
The key for service providers is to improve the whole new product introduction cycle from nine months or more, which is common today to just a few weeks or less. To do that they must embrace bundling of OTT services with network services, and to be successful they require platforms that automate core functions in service fulfilment for on-boarding new services.
VP: Can these cloud and value-added services be profitable for service providers?
TS: I believe they can but automation and selfmanagement capabilities for the new services are absolutely critical here, because we’re talking about services that won’t have 40 or 50 or 60% market uptake but 10 or 5% or even less. However, the customer loyalty – or stickiness – that can be created by offering these value added services equates to a higher lifetime value of each customer. Automation is absolutely critical to enable such services to be profitable. Key functions such as single sign-on and simple end user interfaces are needed so service providers can bring services on board efficiently.
There’s a hidden secret here – OTT and SaaS vendors do not have a lot of automation in their own back offices to support channels. We’ve done a lot of work isolating vendors that can provide flow-through fulfilment with no call centres and everything done online. The removal of the ‘integration tax’ required to bring that technology into the service provider’s ecosystem is critical to successful and profitable services, but there’s no reason why small volume services couldn’t be easily adopted with the right level of automation. Service providers can be a trusted advisor to the SMB/SME market in this space and look for opportunities to aggregate applications and services. There are literally thousands of cloud services and applications in the market place, many of which are likely to disappear as the market matures. Service providers will be looking for sets of services that are equivalent in capability and reliability to the services they provide themselves.
VP: Why does OSS play a critical factor in enabling service providers to overcome these challenges?
TS: If service providers want to tap into valueadded services and some of the differentiation they can bring, they need more convergent solutions in their OSS that bring together their network capability along with device management, single sign-on and ordering, as well as capabilities like policy and quality of service. Automation is the key to that. Service providers can’t afford to have quality issues or fall-out, they need to reduce manual steps. We’ve seen companies try to implement cloud service brokerage with an army of call centre representatives and manual processes. That model is flawed and quite expensive – automation is the only efficient way to approach this.
VP: Sigma has customers in both the cable and telecoms markets, how do their challenges differ from one another?
TS: I really don’t think they face different challenges. The move to an all-IP core is closing the gap and the line between types of provider is almost obliterated from my perspective. We’ve just held our annual user conference and the challenges our customers are dealing with are materially very similar. We’re focused from a technological perspective on helping service providers deliver converged broadband – whether that’s over 4G, LTE, FTTH, DOCSIS or Wi-Fi, it doesn’t really matter
VP: So how does Sigma help service providers to manage these new services efficiently?
TS: There are four key aspects to what we bring to the table to help. The first is our extensible platform that automates the order management and service provisioning of core services and new value-added services. The second is our solutions portfolio – we’ve invested in productising configurable solutions relative to the types of services our customers want to offer. The third aspect is our focus on customer enablement and selfsufficiency. We achieve that by providing training and knowledge management with toolkits, development and regional support. Many of our customers have become selfsufficient on our platform which differentiates us from our competitors who often need dozens of engineers to implement the smallest of changes that operators would prefer to be able to handle themselves. Finally, our latest launch, Cloud ServiceBroker, helps to drive the opportunity for service providers to become that market place for a targeted set of SaaS applications. By offering the Cloud ServiceBroker as an extension of our existing OSS fulfillment platform, Sigma has created a way for service providers to rapidly and efficiently realize new revenue opportunities from SaaS applications.
VP: Can you give some examples of service providers that Sigma has helped approach these new opportunities?
TS: We span the globe with customers in 22 countries in all facets of communications and IP services. América Móvil, for example, offers triple play voice, video and data services over cable and we’ve helped with value-added services deployments such as video-on-demand.
In Canada, with TELUS, we’ve helped them through a series of network architecture changes from 2G to 3G to 4G with a library of value-added services over mobile. Also in Canada, we’ve worked with Bell Aliant, as they have rolled out FTTH and IPTV to their customers. In Europe, we’ve worked with Zon in Portugal to automate their quad-play bundle over both cable and fibre networks and another European fixed line operator launch a new LTE service, in addition to a series of OTT value added services on their roadmap.
VP: What are the perils of the lack automation when rolling out services?
TS: The problems are many. McKinsey has found, for example that, when introducing new services over broadband and fibre in particular, up to 33% of FTTH customer orders fail after order entry and only 20% of FTTH installations are incident free. Couple that with tremendous downward pressure on budgets and I see many operators avoiding the issues related to order fall-out. For example, one operator in South Africa I have talked to was experiencing almost 40% order fall-out for IP video. Another in the US required 100% of its orders to have some form of manual intervention for SMB SaaS services. CSPs can’t afford this inefficiency and, more importantly, SMBs will not give them the opportunity to delay, they’ll simply buy elsewhere.
Our focus is on helping CSPs reduce order fallout and bring their order success rate to 99% or greater..
VP: These are all issues that have impacted the industry for years. Why is so much attention being paid to it today?
TS: There are a number of reasons but commoditisation and pressure on pricing is adding significant challenges to the service provider business. Inefficiency could be masked in the past by the higher margins service providers achieved. We really think that this realm of services that are available to service providers to offer will continue to expand but the whole functionality of new product introduction needs an overhaul. Automation and customer self-management is a key element of that.
VP: What keeps your customers awake at night?
TS: The key issue is how service providers drive more revenue via their existing pipes. Costs can continue to be driven lower which will drive profit but the market is mature and pressure on profit will continue to be severe. Helping to deliver value-added services by tapping into the significant innovation we’ve seen and by embracing the OTT-as-a-service concept and the fundamental differentiation a CSP can enable by bundling network and OTT services together will solidify their position in the value chain.
