Alen Muslić is the chief strategy officer of ZIRA and leads the company’s thinking on trends that are impacting the future of telecoms and adjacent industries. Here he describes the trends that are having the greatest impact on telecoms and how these are enabling CSPs to broaden their horizons.
1. The ecosystems evolution: Looking back on the past few years we see that CSPs have been exploring options for digitalising their ecosystem and searching for what may be best for them. We believe that evolution will expand to establishing partner ecosystems that will result in co-creating new offerings.
2. Monetising 5G continues: In previous years the focus was on faster 5G network rollout. This year will see CSPs launching relevant services aggressively to monetise these investments and gain first-mover advantage.
3. Telco cloud: 5G, edge computing, network slicing and IoT services will see an increased uptake in this year, making use of a network cloud. This year will see a faster cloudification of network services by CSPs. We believe this will see CSPs joining hands with leading public cloud service providers, such AWS, Google and Azure.
The ecosystems evolution enables CSPs to shift to establishing partner ecosystems and co-creating new offerings. Converging and remixing entertainment experiences, healthcare, EV charging, connected home, energy management, smart manufacturing and connected mobility are the few areas that will take the lead.
2022 will be the year of launching relevant services aggressively. Offerings in B2C may be primarily focused on faster connectivity, entertainment, and connectivity, while for B2B we can expect a lot of innovative and bundled services derived from new partners’ business models.
Although it looks like CSPs are the underdog in digital experience compared to various over-the-top (OTT) players, many of them are strategizing to take charge from the front by becoming a super aggregator of third-party OTT services by providing a single discovery, authentication and billing interface across the devices with consideration on loyalty and self-care.
To be able to innovate on a continual basis ZIRA must maintain awareness of the relevant developments in the global ecosystem. Such system needs to be studied in close cooperation with its users in order to gain knowledge needed not only to understand the requirements of users, but also to predict future needs and implications for business. Innovation, defined in this way, represents the leading edge of any business, and so I see three key areas that we will focus on in 2022:
• Further evolution of digital experience for our products. We will continue to enable robust functionalities that enable CSPs to deliver rich experiences and support customers and partners.
• We also see the need to focus on security and even more security as what the last two years have taught us is to ensure that robust security practices are in place and security by design is a default setting for the industry.
• Artificial intelligence (AI) represents key area to focus on industry-wide in the short and long term. The shift that AI will bring about is a gamechanger, introducing not only new capabilities and automation, but also change to the very core of technological and business environments. In our domain, AI-induced changes will place additional emphasis on network-operated and zero touch services, mandating new system and product architecture.
In general terms, the future is not only about billing for new services delivered by multiple parties correctly. It’s about enabling CSPs to play a more central role in the digital experience and by doing so enhancing 5G monetisation. Our previous years of experience have given us the heritage to understand CSPs’ operations but the next few years is where we will see the true transformation of telecoms.
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