CSPs continue to strive to serve users’ ever-increasing expectations for instant gratification. Consumers and enterprises alike want a wider range of personalised services concurrent with higher speeds, greater capacity and improved coverage, and CPSs are doubly challenged by the need to solidify their role in the digital v chain. Continued focus on improving service agility will address large parts of the challenge, along with systems that help to manage new lines of business, Per Borgklint, senior vice president and head of Business Unit Support Solutions at Ericsson tells VanillaPlus
VanillaPlus: What are your CSP customers around the world seeing as the trends in mobility?
Per Borgklint: Fantastic growth in mobile broadband and the continued enormous growth of OTT services into new markets and third world countries is creating demand for services both in high and low ARPU countries. The speed of movement is also incredible in terms of how individuals’ requirements are changing. Agility and time to market are becoming key requirements that service providers must meet.
What is shaping this but is not necessarily seen is that mobile devices and infrastructure are going from a single or dual solution to a multi-solution environment to one with very broad service agility. OTT services will not only be over-the-top but through-the-top and we will see the mobile phone as a very broad service enablement environment.
The device will be the ultimate personal thing that connects users. This creates complexity and requirements on the solutions and systems that make it possible for me as an individual to have services rendered in a way that I want – and that will be different to what my wife, my children, my friends and my colleagues choose for themselves.
The expectation is that everything I do happens immediately. This only continues to become more complex as people are becoming more and more obsessed with their mobile phones. Research from Ericsson Consumer Lab has found that users are bringing their own broadband device to work and that city dwellers and women are relentlessly driving the smartphone market. These are just some of the trends that are shaping the always-on mobile market in which instant gratification is the expectation.
For individuals to have services rendered in a way that they want, CSPs must respond to the new and complex demands on their solutions and systems. With competition coming from every angle, CSPs are very concerned about their ability to meet these demands.
VP: What are the biggest most challenging implications for CSPs in the face of these trends?
Per Borgklint: Experience, efficiency and innovation. Being able to meet timeto-market expectations can only be accomplished with the right people and efficient processes. That’s critical to achieving CSP agility in the networked society’s hyper-competitive, ultrademanding yet decreasingly loyal market.
CSPs need to become more agile in order to compete across multiple service layers. They have to be able to package services for convenience and then deliver an experience that is quick and efficient at a cost that users are willing to pay.
What we are seeing, working with our customers, is that more and more they require automated, configurable, simple, straightforward solutions that achieve fast time-to-market to enable them to be competitive and meet new market demands. It doesn’t matter if a solution is on the network, service or customer side, it needs to be seamless on all sides and fully address CSP opex and capex constraints.
They must first achieve network agility. In the network there is the requirement to accelerate the planning, roll-out, integration and optimisation of new and existing networks. That increases both the technological and organisational complexity from planning to provisioning.
Service agility is definitely one of the areas where CSPs can personalise the experience they offer and go from idea to implementation via an automated, seamless process. It is possible to roll-out and create service features in minutes that users will be able to see on their phones.
We support our customers with automated product lifecycle management – from development of the initial product concept, selection of technology, updating systems and processes, and the creation of a roll-out plan for any new offer, through to phasing it out. Our solutions automate a wide range of processes, from lead to cash, to greatly reduce cost and decrease time to revenue. Our agile system allows a CSP to generate and manage sales leads. This extends from receiving a customer order to delivering the service for use, including activation and policy allocation. Our customers have achieved very high throughput and have minimised manual touch points to lower delivery costs with substantially reduced order errors and associated handling costs.
Our systems also allow CSPs to manage financial services in realtime, including capturing use of a service and the associated events and converting them into monetised or chargeable items. Ericsson’s solutions let CSPs reduce revenue leakage and increase customer satisfaction, by cutting time-to-market for new service plans and accurately charging and billing customers for service use.
VP: What are the biggest, most challenging implications for OSS/BSS?
Per Borgklint: The whole way that OSS/BSS has been put together has been based on a workflow established in 1885 at the dawn of the industry. That workflow is charge per minute or per use and send an invoice to the customer. When mobile emerged in the early 1990s, all that happened was the cable was cut, but the CSP acted in the same way.
Then bundles came in and evolved into OTT services and suddenly, service agility becomes essential. Consumers are consuming very different things – they might be viewed as data but they are really purchasing experiences not data. The data itself is not the service, it’s an enabler of the service.
The challenge therefore is to make sure the customer experience remains very solid across any touchpoint. Data needs to be accessed by both the CSP and the customer to create a foundation so both get the right experience.
The catalysts for the networked society – universal mobility, cloud computing and broadband – require new emphasis on customer experience, new levels of operating efficiency, and new business models.
We believe that OSS/BSS has an increasing role to play in enabling new business models either through the ability to manage bundles of complex products that contain partner-supported components, or by enabling the provision of cloud-based services that combine network, IT and service quality considerations. OSS/BSS must deliver not only efficiency within processes, but economies of scale across the planning, building and operation of multi-technology, multi-vendor networks and services.
VP: How is Ericsson addressing these challenges?
Per Borgklint: Our vision is to provide process-oriented OSS/BSS suites and an integrated operations and real-time platform based on a modern convergent architecture that is open, modular and cloud-enabled to support new value chains. In that vision, we are trying to encapsulate the end-to-end experience where the end user is the ultimate decision maker.
The end user should be able to open, run and execute based on their individual needs and that means the OSS/BSS needs to be an integrated platform so the value chains can be captured and created around specific services in what is a constantly moving environment.
Our strategic focus is on service agility, service enablement, customer experience, cloud management, big data analytics and automation and optimisation. These are the ingredients CSPs need.
Service agility describes an environment that allows CSPs to create, launch, deliver and manage services efficiently to allow for rapid development of new product offerings. This is quickly becoming table stakes but, to markedly grow revenue, they must expose this environment to an expanded ecosystem of partners, suppliers, and developers to provide a wide range of creative new product offers.
Our response is to assemble a number of our OSS/BSS and service enablement products into a pre-packaged service agility solution that is accessible to CSP business partners with more revenue for all parties.
Our vision in service enablement is to bridge the gap between a commoditised core business and a fast moving, innovative and disruptive marketplace with a proven software platform with out-of -the-box commercialised business solutions. This includes personalisation, capability wholesaling, and M2M advancements.
To support the customer experience our vision is to offer a comprehensive portfolio of software offerings for analysing, preparing, delivering and measuring customer experience throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
Our goal to aid CSPs’ cloud management offerings is to develop software solutions that allow them to offer cloud services with endto-end control of service quality. We will do this by merging the network with the IT domain and managing cloud services as either via pre-defined offerings or completely new offerings created from a catalogue of reusable components.
In the connected devices market, our plan is to create new value propositions and business ecosystems with partners and other industries by turning machine data into valuable information for new applications and services including smart metering, smart grid, smart home and connected vehicles.
By combining real-time network, service, usage, and device data with unstructured data, we will provide CSPs with actionable insights from big data and analytics that accelerate and optimise business.
Finally, our vision is that what can be automated will be automated, and networks and processes should run at their best, automatically.
VP: Why are CSPs choosing Ericsson?
Per Borgklint: There is no doubt that a fierce competition is going on and time -to-market drives all decision making. There is now no room for faulty or low performing software. Our customers trust us to provide business critical systems. It’s critical to choose a vendor who VanillaPlus CEO Supplement C7 can be a strategic partner and has that experience. You do need to be a large scale business with a history of proven success. We can truly meet those needs. We walk both sides of the street in telecoms – Ericsson, with more than 100 years in the industry, is the only vendor that is also the world’s largest CSP servicing more than 2.5 billion subscriptions. When we talk of the challenges CSPs face and the ways to overcome them it is that experience that separates us.
