Telcos’ open architecture: How to find operational efficiencies and a bridge to a digital future

Manish Vyas of Tech Mahindra

Facing high costs and declining margins for key services, telcos are struggling to achieve operational efficiencies and build for future digital services. Here, Manish Vyas, president of Tech Mahindra’s Communications, Media & Entertainment and CEO of Network Services tells VanillaPlus’s Jeremy Cowan about the India-based IT services and consulting company’s current roll out of open architectures in Tier One telcos and plans to do so with others.

Manish Vyas: The way we look at our business, Jeremy, and our place under the sun is really to solve three problems. Put a gun on my head, and ask me to do a fourth one, I’ll say, ‘Pull the trigger. I only do three.’ And my three problems are; one, like you said, efficiency. Two is ‘build a bridge to the future’, which is digital. And third is, imagine a future from a product services, experience, and innovation standpoint. These are the three things we do.

Where we do these things are across the full lifecycle of a telco, from the customer acquisition, all the way to network ops, and anything in back-office ops as well. So, the way we look at ourselves is we essentially possess three skills; high quality integration capability, high quality engineering capability – which is the development of products, devices, applications, and development of platforms – and, of course, operate whether it is BPO (business process outsourcing) service, IT operations, or an AI-driven NOC (network operations centre) capability. That’s really the framework of how we operate.

Jeremy Cowan: And your target audience, is that mainly tier ones or is it across the board?

Manish Vyas: Tier ones and tier twos, because our engagement models vary slightly between the tier ones and tier twos, because tier ones in certain markets operate differently. The top four operators in the top 30 to 40 countries are all Tech Mahindra customers. I have a very small new business development team, our teams are only focused on growing existing relationships.

We’ve been propagating an open architecture for a long time. Now and we are essentially having more and more conversations around the transformation that we are doing for several of the tier one telcos as we speak. It’s all around an open architecture.

And two is we have a brand called Comviva which is a product and IP company. And they have an amazing story in both digital BSS (business support systems) and MarTech (marketing technology). So, we’re talking with a few customers on those two topics.

“We are having more and more conversations around the transformation we are doing for several tier one telcos as we speak. It’s all around an open architecture.”

Jeremy Cowan: And is that where you see the greatest growth opportunity for Tech Mahindra?

Manish Vyas: I guess the growth opportunities are in both, in the Run as well as in the Build, which is in driving greater efficiencies. There is so much more to be done in that space. And the great opportunities are in building this bridge to the future, as I call it, which is the digital world. I think our opportunities are in both.

Jeremy Cowan: Tell me what your product offering is in the Bridge to the future.

Manish Vyas: It is essentially a telco architecture that is built around a simple concept; the speed to build a platform and the speed to deliver services to the customers. That is the underlying theme of building that architecture. Hence it is built with some of our IP (intellectual property) and some of our partners’ IPs to ensure that a new transformed architecture can go live in seven to nine months. Speed is important.

Two, once it goes live, the agility that it provides you – because it is necessarily cloud native, necessarily open, necessarily an agile-based model – it gives you the ability to try and make changes and serve the customers (both enterprise and consumers) at a speed at which the customers work, not the speed at which you work. So, those are the two key differentiators.

Jeremy Cowan: And when you look down the line imagining the future, what are you describing to your customers?

It is essentially a telco architecture that is built around a simple concept; the speed to build a platform and the speed to deliver services to the customers.

Manish Vyas: Two or three things: One, we are redefining the experience layer. We bought a company called Born Group sometime 18 months ago. It’s a New York-based digital agency around which we have built a business called XDS, eXperience Design Services. So, one is we reimagine a telco brand. We see what it means to its two year-old consumer or a 100 year-old enterprise customer, and everything in between.

How do you reimagine the relationship with them? How do you serve them? How do you interface with them? You don’t interface with hundreds and thousands of call centre agents. You’re going to interface them only with the website. You may want to interface them with the metaverse. You may want to interface them with a new design capability that is Amazon-like, for example.

So that’s one part and the other is we are imagining a new world from product and services capabilities. A lot of preliminary work that has happened in this space – whether it is in the enterprise network, enterprise 5G or 5G-related services, whether it is consumer products, for example. This morning, one of our clients Ooredoo Group, won an award at The Loyalty Summit in New York based on a platform that we built for them for loyalty management. Now, many people have historically looked at loyalty management as a cost. Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, IOH as it is called, they looked at it as a differentiator. They said that if they are able to provide loyalty and retain customers, particularly high net worth customers, not only does it pay for itself they actually make more money in the process. So those are the imagination things that we’re doing.

Many people have historically looked at loyalty management as a cost. Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, looked at it as a differentiator.

Jeremy Cowan: That’s interesting. How do you actually make that happen?

Manish Vyas:  IP. It’s on Comviva IP that we’ve build. It’s part of our Martech, a part of a platform called Mobilitics.

Jeremy Cowan: It’s quite an unusual approach that Ooredoo are taking there.

Manish Vyas: It’s very unique. Ooredoo and IoH both, because they belong to the same group.

Jeremy Cowan: When it comes to making changes within the market, are there any aspects such as Open RAN that you are deploying that will enable your customers to make these transitions faster? 

Manish Vyas: Open. I think ‘open’ is the operative word, whether it is Open RAN, open like TM Forum is talking about open digital architecture, ODA. I think anything open is something that will help speed things up from a transformation standpoint. That’s something that we are clearly propagating.

Jeremy Cowan: And what kind of reception does that get from your customers?

Manish Vyas: I think in the digital world, quite well. In the network world also very, very well. The only thing is that it’s not matured yet, O-RAN’s still a work in progress. Yeah. Whereas in the digital world, in the IT space, I think people have pretty much signed up to that concept. So, for open they’re not compromising scale or sturdiness – that’s necessary. But they’re open, from an architecture standpoint to keep it open.

Jeremy Cowan: How far off do you think we are from this being ready?

Manish Vyas: In the IT world, I think we are very ready. What we are hearing everybody say is that they are ready. I haven’t come across anybody who says, ‘I don’t agree with that. Or that, ‘Oh, we need to close this’.

Jeremy Cowan: Finally, how are you able to help your customers in what is a really challenging market, with a growing energy crisis, with rising concerns about inflation, possibly recession? And, therefore, changes likely in ARPUs (Average Revenue Per User)?

Manish Vyas: Two things. One is, I think, with the products and services we have, they all address these three problems. When in recessionary times you need to conserve cash, you need to sell more, and you need to prepare for the future. That’s exactly our promise on ‘Run Build Imagine’. What we’re doing, Jeremy, is we say we are the champions of simplicity. Right? It’s a very much abused simple English word, but it’s a very powerful word. It’s a word that every telco CEO will say, ‘I want to simplify my journeys’.

It’s a very much abused simple English word, but it’s a very powerful word. It’s a word that every telco CEO will say, ‘I want to simplify my journeys’. 

Jeremy Cowan

How do you do it? First by defining the problem into simple building blocks, and not 20 building blocks. The second is we will support them with what our brand also is known for. If you ask any of our customers tell us something about Tech M. I would be surprised if many of them don’t say, if not all, that this is a very flexible company. ‘It’s a company that we like to do business with because they’re flexible.’ And at times like these we’ve got to take a few hits on our chin to support our clients. That’s what we do. For years now, because this is not the first time we will be seeing tough market conditions. We have been in business for 32 years, we have seen plenty of these.

The author is Jeremy Cowan, editorial director and publisher of VanillaPlus and IoT Now.

Comment on this article below or via Twitter: @VanillaPlus OR @jcvplus

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