Mobile is the clear focal point of telecom investments today but a few years down the road, will that still be true? Can communications service providers (CSPs) dominate small cell wireless as thoroughly as they have big tower wireless? And after the handset and content guys have devoured most of the smartphone pie, will the leftovers be enough to satisfy the bellies of hungry telecoms providers, asks Dan Baker
It’s this uncertainty over mobile’s long-term financial contribution that’s fueling big telecom investments in the cloud. And when I say cloud, I refer to the full mix of private and public cloud, managed services, and virtual infrastructure, in short, the bid by CSPs to become full-fledged ICT suppliers to large and medium enterprises.
Opportunities and dangers in the cloud for CSPs
CSPs see riches to be won as enterprise IT chases the cloud. Sadly, the once profitable era of selling CPE boxes and simple connectivity is fast disappearing. That market is now a pure commodity play: the excitement has instead shifted to the much broader field of enterprise clouds and data centre build-outs. Yet other CSPs are not the only competitors in this race to the cloud. They compete just as strongly with cloud providers, such as Amazon, and systems integrators such as IBM and Cap Gemini.
Whenever systems integrators become the prime integrator and control the enterprise account, the CSP is in danger of being relegated to a minor, marginally profitable role. The same goes if the roles are reversed. The race is on to see who gets to own the enterprise customer relationship, for the owner is the one who makes the most money and gets to insert its services and products into the enterprise’s ICT fabric.
How can CSPs gain an edge?
So who will win the battle of the cloud? The richest prizes are likely to go to the CSPs with faster and more efficient sales-to-order workflows. Here a telecoms provider must not only synchronise its sales and engineering teams, it needs to speed infrastructure proposals out the door and reduce design errors to eliminate provisioning troubles and customer stress.
Unfortunately, most CSP teams serving enterprises lack the necessary back office systems to get the job done profitably. For instance:
• Sales lacks access to the design knowledge needed to fully qualify and guide prospects;
• Engineers are slowed by out-of-date product catalogues and design requirements scattered
across many spreadsheets; and
• Senior design experts are overloaded and lack a mechanism to delegate tasks and guide
the work of less-qualified engineers.
The result is that CSPs lose business they should rightly win because their designs: take too long to complete and quote; lack sufficient accuracy and options; and can’t be changed on-the-fly to meet the customer’s price point or last minute requirements.
A collaborative design system for cloud
When you boil it all down, the complexity of cloud solutions and much greater competition in sales-toorder point to the need for a superior collaborative design system that manages complex projects and enables the sales and engineering team to share information and thereby accelerate the number of quality proposals it can deliver to prospects.
So what should CSPs be looking for in a collaborative design system? Well, getting answers to that question is the goal of a new paper I’ve authored entitled, ‘The Data Center and Cloud Infrastructure Boom: Is Your Sales/Engineering Team Equipped to Win its Share of the Business?’. To view the paper visit: www.netformx.com/TRI-Whitepaper
The paper paints a picture of what an ideal collaborative design system should look like, narrowing the requirements down to seven key capabilities and explaining over three dozen specific benefits in a workflow diagram. The paper serves as a guide for telecoms providers arming themselves to fight in the battle for the cloud
