How to become a digital service provider unicorn

How to become a digital service provider unicorn

The telecoms industry has been targeting digital service for many years, looking to serve new and existing customers with additional digital offerings. However, until recently the digital service provider has been a unicorn. Now, though, the situation has changed and VMware Telco Cloud explains here how it is turning myth into reality

The challenge

Unicorn Services is a regional telco providing mobile, fixed-line, and broadband internet services for consumer and enterprise customers. The CSP leads its market, but company leaders are ready to take the next step in transforming their business and can feel new competitors nipping at their heels. As they plan out their investments for the next five years, they have some ambitious goals:

  • Converge siloed operations:
    Unicorn Services offers a full range of voice and data services, but it relies on multiple siloed networks to do it. As it prepares to update the voice network for 5G, it finds itself at a crossroads. Should it double downon legacy IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) or adopt a more forward-looking approach?
  • Enable consistent cloud-based service delivery:
    Unicorn has been using third-party cloud services for years, both internally and as part of various enterprise offerings. Within the last year though, the company’s cloud portfolio had grown highly complex, with a dozen different public, private and hybrid clouds in use. It wants to consolidate everything – core, edge, radio access network (RAN) and public clouds – onto a converged multi-cloud platform, so a centralised team can control all resources and clouds with a single operational model.
  • Capitalise on new edge opportunities:
    Unicorn leaders want to use new 5G and edge capabilities to offer targeted Internet of Things (IoT) solutions for the public sector. To do it, Unicorn needs a solution that’s powerful at the edge but easy to control centrally. At the same time, the company doesn’t want to get locked into one use case; any investments should support multiple edge offerings to meet diverse customer needs.
  • Modernise the RAN:
    Unicorn plans to reimagine the radio access network (RAN) to increase scale and density. Critically though, the company wants to adopt an Open RAN (O-RAN) framework, where it will have the freedom to use best-of-breed RAN technologies from any standards- aligned vendor.

Unify the network

As the first step in its journey, Unicorn needed to lay the foundation for converging voice and data services. The goal: a single, unified services platform that extends from core to cloud to customer, with a single, consistent operational model.

Unicorn’s network vendors offered to help it define an IMS evolution strategy, but it looked a lot like the old one: a siloed platform with integrated software. If Unicorn went that route, it would still need dedicated tools and processes for voice services. The company would also be at the mercy of its vendors for new features and pricing. If Unicorn intends to stand out in the coming years, it will need the freedom to continually bring new converged capabilities to customers – in its own way, on its own schedule.

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What’s in this issue?

  • How CSPs can drive profits by enabling communication platforms as a service
  • 10-page analyst report on data-driven telecoms
  • The use cases that will enable 5G monetisation
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