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Comverse Whitepaper Final
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Introduction
ABOUT INFORMA TELECOMS & MEDIA Informa Telecoms & Media is the leading provider of business intelligence and strategic marketing solutions to global telecoms and media markets. Driven by constant first-hand contact with the industry, our 60 analysts and researchers produce a range of intelligence services including news and analytical products, in-depth market reports and datasets focused on technology, strategy and content. Informa Telecoms & Media Head Office Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street London W1T 3JH, UK www.informatandm.com
ABOUT COMVERSE Comverse is the worlds leading provider of software and systems enabling converged billing and active customer management, mobile Internet, value-added and managed services. Comverses extensive customer base spans more than 125 countries and covers over 450 communication service providers serving more than two billion subscribers. The companys innovative product portfolio enables communication service providers to unleash the value of the network for their customers by making their networks smarter. Comverses solutions support flexible deployment models, including in-network, cloud, hosted and managed services. Comverse, which ranked number 55 in PwCs Global 100 Software Leaders based on research by Pierre Audoin Consultants, is a subsidiary of Comverse Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq:CMVT). For more information, visit www.comverse.com
Key points
Changing telecoms market conditions are influencing more CSPs to consider the managedservices route as a way of ensuring continued growth. Key drivers for managed services include the need for CSPs to seize new revenue opportunities, gain access to best practice and achieve a faster time to market. CSPs need to align their technology with the requirement to improve overall customer experience. In turn this means there is a key requirement for an efficient interface between CSP business processes and their applications development and operations. There is a also need for greater connectivity between CSP existing services and the mobile Internet in order to allow better monetization. Managed-services business models are also evolving in response to greater sophistication among CSPs and a trend towards longer-term engagements. There are significant value-add benefits from working with a managed-services provider on a longer-term basis, in terms of independent consulting expertise, access to best of breed support, and monetization of CSP assets.
Overview
Market evolution
The telecoms market today is changing as a result of increased competition from new players and the increasing complexity of service offerings. This is influencing more and more communications services providers (CSPs) to consider the managed-service route as a way of ensuring their continued growth and focusing more on core competencies. The need to open up new sectors, gain access to best practice, and achieve a faster time to market with reduced risk and predictable costs are all powerful drivers in the emerging managed-business-services arena, as distinct from network and technology-led approaches.
Market evolution
Survival of the fittest
The telecoms market for CSPs today is highly competitive both in terms of ever more disruption from competitors and the increasing complexity of service offerings. The need for CSPs to focus on their core competencies is now vital and it is this that is influencing the rise in the number of CSPs using the managed-service route as a way of ensuring continued growth and staying ahead of their competition. Faced with these challenges, CSPs are looking to achieve growth through a rigorous examination of their core business processes, and even areas such as marketing and sales are no longer offlimits in the search for greater competitive effectiveness.
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Smartphones have proved to be the single most successful and consistent device in driving growth, both in terms of volume (for example, from video) and of operator revenue. However, the ability of smartphone users to access IP-based over the top (OTT) communication services as well as those on a mobile network could ultimately erode operators core voice and messaging services, so, in response, the operators business models will need to evolve in order to meet this potential threat. Without such an evolution, operators will lose business to these OTT players and they will also fail to capture new revenue opportunities in areas such as cloud-based apps, video-ondemand or services targeted at enterprise verticals. At the same time, CSPs should develop new domains and capabilities (like M2M) and position themselves as service enablers. The issues are largely the same whether an operator is mobile, fixed or a converged player pursuing a multiplay strategy. CSPs have evolved as stovepipe organizations with organizational structures, assets and processes that do not allow them to make best use of their strengths.
Consumer cloud
Corporate VPN
Enterprise cloud
Consumer M2M
Video on demand
Business M2M
By drawing on a CSPs inherent knowledge of its customer base, and exploiting its network and IT assets, service packages can be designed that are relevant to each of the CSPs target audiences, and, by adopting a customer life-cycle strategy, CSP offerings can be matched to the needs of both the existing and new customers. The importance of CEM to CSPs was illustrated in a recent Informa industry survey, where almost 40% of CSPs identified CEM as the single most important area of focus for 2012, exceeding by some margin the importance of network deployment and developments (see fig. 3).
Fig. 3: Informa Industry Outlook Survey, 2011 Q: What will be the single most important area to focus for operators in 2012?
Partnership with other operators and Internet players 8% Efficiencies, cost control and best practice 16%
New digital service developments (digital service) 10% Network deployments and developments (NGN and LTE) 29%
Maintenance, repair or construction Training/education Customer servicing/support Transmission network operations Access network operations Applications/content hosting Integration including consultancy and FMC support Supply chain/logistics BSS/OSS IP network operations Technical/ operational management Core network operations Technical/ operational planning Partner management Business planning Other 0
*Respondents who replied "very likely" or "likely" Source: Informa Telecoms & Media
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Respondents (%)
Until now, much of the focus of managed services in a network operations context has been on radio-access outsourcing, but in future there will be greater willingness to make use of outsourcing in the service layer, in BSS/OSS systems and in business transformation. For example, just over 50% of the operators surveyed expected BSS/OSS to be one of the areas that would be outsourced in three years time.
Managed-services drivers
Managed-services drivers comprise: The need for CSPs to align complex existing systems with a new business focus The requirement for greater connectivity between CSPs existing services and the mobile Internet in order to allow better monetization The ongoing shift from network-led services to apps/business support services Managed-services business models are also evolving in response to greater sophistication among CSPs: there is a trend to extend build-operate-transfer (BOT) engagements towards longer-term engagements.
Apps layer
Network/IT layer
In critical areas such as real-time billing and business information, service providers are increasingly stressing the advantages of user-friendly on demand interfaces, which allow stakeholders within the CSP organization to access customer data in different formats according to whether they are viewing from a marketing customer care or network/IT management perspective. There is also a new emphasis on a granular customer focus. Key performance indicators (KPIs) and key quality indicators (KQIs) are increasingly being mapped to an individual level as well as being linked to other business indicators in order to generate actionable insights rather than just generalized information. Applications are starting to be built in the network, with IT helping to blur the dividing lines between those applications and the network infrastructure. The convergence of network, IT and apps platforms is also going to drive organizational and structural changes, with a greater role likely to be played by dynamic service or experience packages that enhance operator platforms. In this scenario, the network itself becomes a platform, with a full range of functionalities offered as part of a service-delivery process. While infrastructure as a pure technical enabler is reaching its limits, infrastructure as a service seems set to offer plenty of new opportunities. In the managed BSS/OSS sector, even more than in network and IT managed services, there is a requirement to combine and simplify solutions while still maintaining the robustness of a proven delivery platform. In these circumstances, the supplier can assist a CSP to meet client expectations by managing the complexity of multiple-point solutions.
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The overall message ... is that telecoms software support systems are no longer back office. They are now mainstream so far as the industry is concerned and, while new handsets and operating systems may grab the headlines from time to time, it is the means of supporting those devices and mitigating their effects on mobile broadband networks that is occupying the attention of the telecoms industry right now.
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Apps management Portfolio design Configuration management Legacy migration Asset management
Source: Informa Telecoms & Media
Apps operational services Service delivery management SLA management Vendor management
Time-to-market savings
A key area of business focus is on time to market, as CSPs strive to bring new services on stream to meet the competitive challenges outlined earlier. One example of ensuring that applications and services are designed right first time is the ability of the managed-services provider to roll out new services or necessary changes to configuration faster. Fig. 7 illustrates the kind of time-to-market savings that can be achieved; for example, time savings of 20% across the overwhelming majority of the products functionality, and higher savings of 30% in a narrower range of cases.
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20% 30% time-saving Proportion of BSS service developments impacted 80% 20% time-saving
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