Telecommunications is in a dynamic new growth market and companies are continually fighting to increase their share of this market. With a static pool of billable customers, these companies must find increasingly ingenious methods of achieving new business growth according to Ted Wood, a telecoms portfolio executive in the Systems and Technology division at Unisys Africa.
Key issues driving telco businesses today are: growing and defending core markets; developing convergence technologies and opportunities; operational and capital efficiencies; improving the customer experience; and investing in their people as a key asset.
These drivers have not changed much in recent years, and it is in the service diversification and value-add initiatives that these companies bring to bear that they differentiate themselves. Telcos today see opportunities to expand their current market share and share of customer wallet through product or service customisation; for example through introducing pre-paid calling options versus the traditional, post-paid, end-of-month account, telcos tap into a market that cannot obtain credit but can put cash on the table, up-front.
The measure a telco will use to determine business growth is through an increase in the average revenue per user, or share of a customer's wallet. They commonly achieve through value-added services and products, resulting in a reduction in subscriber churn or an increase in new revenue streams. This brings into play the role of IT. Telco IT departments have changed from being operational infrastructure cost centres responsible for running business applications, to service-based organisations, providing just-in-time quality-assured application delivery services to internal and external customers.
Driving trends behind this shift are:
* Infrastructure consolidation, beginning with: storage, data consolidation into storage area networks; and application and server consolidation.
* System standardisation driving operational efficiencies.
* System rationalisation, reducing the sure number of independent systems requiring support.
More recently, mixed workloads have been introduced to reduce spare or redundant system capacity, and companies that have implemented this see significant savings in both capital and operational expenditure. But companies need to be aware that in mixed workload consolidated environments, best operational practices are critical to ensure acceptable service levels.
Policy-based computing is the most recently envisaged trend to hit the ICT industry and although it sounds like a whole new way of doing business, it is really just a new name for IT commoditising services and defining delivery in a business manner. Policy-based computing rolls necessary business requirements into a service level agreement, thus allowing IT to deliver against the core business drivers and objectives by provisioning services incrementally on a pay-on-demand model.
While other trends are emerging in the industry, these are the most significant and are having the most significant impact on the industry today. Future trends to look for include convergence, next-generation networks and their merging with IT, consolidation of network operations and IT business application discrete data centres within telcos.
Ultimately, the topic of future trends in telcos is broad and debatable due to innovation playing such a key role in its definition. The business model will remain service-based, applying across the organisation where IT provides a service to the business which in turn services the consumer.
For more information contact Ted Wood, Unisys Africa, +27 (0)11 233 4000, [email protected]
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