At Mobile World Congress 2015, CSG International will announce an inno vative digital commerce platform that will help CSPs to capitalise on the next generation of digital services and digital ser vice provision. Here, Chad Dunavant tells VanillaPlus about the new CSG proposition and approach
A cross the industry mobile operators are becoming media companies, and cable companies are becoming mobile providers and providers of content. They’ve become partners rather than rivals with over-the-top (OTT) providers and it’s not just communications service providers (CSPs) that want to win a slice of the digital services value chain.
That makes it hard to pin down what digital services and digital service providers (DSPs) are. Digital services are not defined by, or necessarily integrated with physical networks. A DSP doesn’t need to own a physical network to deliver its service – anyone with a service or product that is defined and delivered digitally can be a DSP.
So why is CSG International, with its extensive heritage serving telecoms operators and cable providers, targeting this emerging market with a new proposition?
“We’ve seen a steady untethering of the way content is being delivered to consumers,” explains Chad Dunavant, the vice president of product management at CSG International. “Cable providers, for example, have needed to enable access to content across a number of devices, not just the set top box. Services have to be delivered to different devices and different members of the household, maintaining a level of device ubiquity and access that is unmatched by OTT rivals.”
The customer experience has to compete with those offered by web companies and CSG has been working to help all types of organisation rise to that challenge. What they’ve come up with is an enabling platform for a new breed of DSP rather than an upgraded idea of a traditional CSP’s back office.
“It’s not just about the traditional service offering or traditional service providers any more,” confirms Dunavant. “We’re seeing business transformations happen across all industries. For example, we’ve worked with the Cineplex chain of movie theatres to help them transform the experience users have. For their customers, going to watch a movie is no longer just a one-time experience. You go to the theatre but when the movie is released to buy, you can download it and access additional content.”
Dunavant says the experience enables the theatre chain to extend the relationship with its customers beyond the one-time event. “It’s not just about capturing the long tail though, it’s about defending the existing business,” he adds. “For people that might have waited until the movie was released to download it, and not gone to the theatre at all, there’s now another option as today’s theatre ticket becomes tomorrow’s redemption token.”
He adds that CSG has more than 20 tangible examples of helping companies in many different industries become digital service providers. A lot of that functionality is applicable to CSG’s traditional customer base. For instance, a cable operator that wants to provide customers with the opportunity to buy content instead of rent it. However, the relevance extends far beyond CSPs.
CSG’s new proposition, which will be unveiled at MWC 2015, encapsulates the concept of a digital commerce platform – bringing together a new digital back office and a consumer monetisation strategy – and draws some of its functionality from its widely used billing, charging and settlement products. However, this is far from a repurposing or a marketing wrap for the company’s telecoms systems.
“That will be clear when we launch the solution at the show” says Dunavant. “We’re not rebranding Singleview, this is a new platform we’ve been building and executing on over the last five years. We’ve now added it to our BSS assets to create a new proposition.”
“We recognised that it can’t always be about full-scale BSS transformation so we created the concept of an integrated digital overlay to an organisation’s existing systems,” adds Dunavant. “This lets DSPs experiment with many new services easily and, as important, see them succeed or fail quickly, unencumbered by the need to invest for two years in developing billing for that unproven new service.”
For CSPs and others, CSG is bringing a tactical proposition which has long-term strategic potential. CSPs can initially invest in an overlay to their existing systems that will include subscriber portals, a federated e-wallet that can integrate into existing order and billing platforms, functionality to support new device ecosystems, and an identity and rights management model, all delivered as a service from the cloud, and use this new platform to grow their digital businesses. They can avoid the cost, delay and upheaval of customising existing systems and enter new markets rapidly with the potential to extend their investment for future services and businesses. “The challenge facing CSPs is how to monetise the digital experience and highly variable new digital services” explains Dunavant. “If you go back to a traditional billing approach, it could take six to 12 months of customisation work to address each new service. That’s too slow.”
With the CSP market splitting into two groups, Dunavant sees great potential ahead. “It’s clear that there are two paths open to CSPs,” he says. “They can become a utility and, if a CSP wants to go that way, we’ve got great technology to help them run leanly and efficiently.
“With our new proposition, though, we’re focused on the rest of the market,” he explains. “CSPs that want to take an alternative path and monetise a new suite of products and services will need a more nimble approach. We believe we can help them gain access to that DSP tier and we’re looking forward to sharing our ideas at Mobile World Congress 2015.”
