Sami Tayara

BSS Solution Consulting Services

Introduction: Need for Digital Transformation

The word Transformation has been ringing very loud at Communication Service Providers (CSP) for the last several years. Let us review the reasons why this latest transformation wave started, what it is about, what the major challenges are, and how Huawei is strategically involved in supporting it.

• Disruptive Waves of Innovation

The traditional telecoms industry is facing a perfect storm best described as "digital disruption." Disruptions include the huge success of new devices (smartphones) and digital services (apps/content/convenient shopping) and social media infiltration into our everyday lives, and emerging competitors (OTT) who have successfully created and ridden these waves of digital innovation using new business models such as Freemium and Ad Financed. These combined events have created a deep transformation within society (the CSP customer base) and even heralded a new age in our civilization. They have triggered a significant change in customer behavior and expectation, and put pressure on the traditional telecom business model and revenue.

• Slow Initial Reaction

CSPs have been slow in effectively responding to this paradigm shift due to several organizational and technical reasons. One such reason we will highlight is the ability to transform the mindset, systems, and processes to effectively leverage their rich and rapidly increasing data assets. For CSPs worldwide, undergoing their own transformation to a digital service provider (DSP) to ride the fast-growing wave of digital services is unavoidable. Their customers have already gone through a cultural revolution driven by social media, and we are now looking at a digital-native generation of users who needs to be catered for.

• Consensus to Start Transformation Now

Leading industry analysts and forums such as TMF have been widely supporting this CSP-to-DSP transformation for years. Major CSP partners have also undergone their own transformation. Huawei, for example, has stepped up to the challenge and is now strategically and actively invested in supporting and enabling this transformation through its own wave of innovative solutions. Open digital platforms, business agility solutions, and new customer engagement models are all now available for CSP consideration.

Why Customer Centric?

• Rise of Customer Experience as Competitive Strategy

Customer experience is now in focus as it becomes an efficient weapon in the constant fight for customer mind-share and wallet-share. To counter the challenges of falling revenues from voice services, CSPs need additional business opportunities by providing new digital services to their consumers. However, a CSP brand alone is not enough to keep customers loyal. CSPs need to step-up and also compete on customer experience by means of a customer-centric organizational and technological re-alignment.

• Rise in Customer Expectations

How can we ensure that customers will like and adopt the new digital services offered by their CSP? Customers are known to appreciate a wider selection of services, personalized offers, smooth operation of the services they are using, and pricing transparency.  

• Deep Understanding of Customers is a Key Requirement

One things that CSPs need to do is to leverage the wealth of data that is running through their systems in order to better understand, segment, serve, and delight their customers, thereby generating more loyalty and ensuring more revenue through a full strategic commitment to customer-centricity. The customer should feel the carrier is catering for their specific needs in a way that exceeds their expectations with every new service released, every promotion made, and at each and every interaction thereafter. The risk of not doing so is that they will be out-done by the rising wave of digital competitors, who in the long run will make their business model unsustainable, and vulnerable to future waves of consolidation.

Why Big Data Driven?

• Higher Revenues from Current Services

Transforming your organization to implement and embed big data analytics in its culture and processes is a prerequisite to achieve the desired revenue-boosting customer-centricity. It is estimated that CSPs can achieve 15% more revenue on average by leveraging big data to optimize current services and marketing processes. Some have achieved even more.

• Lower Operation Costs

However, big data–driven organizations can implement big data use cases that yield significant cost-savings necessary to support more competitive business models:

-CAPEX reduction with up to 1,000X lower cost per TB (big data vs. legacy data warehouse)

-OPEX reduction through streamlining current processes by embedding analytics in them (data-driven enterprise), and through new proactive use cases (log analysis to predict and prevent systems down, customer and network analytics to predict incidents and reduce calls to customer service, and so on)

• New Data Products and Services

Once an enterprise has taken control of its data assets and built a platform to efficiently process data to gain insight, it can then move to more innovative areas:

- Offer new data-intensive products such as IoT connectivity and network-edge analytics.

- Provide innovative value-added services for industries and verticals like automotive and health.

- Engage in new ventures around the Smart Home and Smart City concepts.

How can Huawei BES support this transformation to Digital?

Huawei as a leading worldwide innovator and supplier in the telecom space has risen to this challenge in many ways to support the CSP industry, including the launch of a new generation of digital BSS, named Business Enabling System (BES), designed to be a foundation for CSP digital transformation.

There are various ways to show how BES can support the CSP digital transformation. We will list a few perspectives here to give you an idea how innovative BES is, and how it will fit your particular strategy.

• Must-Have Business Capabilities Perspective

Huawei BES is designed to meet head-on business challenges in the digital age and ensure that new business models are supported and new business targets are met. BES adheres to three digital provider topics of TMF and provides five key capabilities that are foundations for digital business success.

- Operations efficiency: Enables large increases in the number and variety of products offered with much shorter TTM, including non-Telco products

- Customer experience: Delivers a much improved user experience called ROADS, which stands for Real-time, On-demand, All-online, Do-it-yourself, and Social to a larger variety of Telco and non-Telco pan customers.

- Value chain: Enables B2B and B2B2C business models, expedited by Huawei partner aggregation services.

- Scalable operations: Ensures operational scalability and performance with the SaaS delivery model in elastic cloud architecture.

- Required new technologies: Significantly reduces the cost and TTM for technologies such as Cloud, NFV, and Big Data that are essential for competitiveness and new services.

• Cloud or As-a-Service Agile Perspective

On the technology and infrastructure side, CSPs need a way to quickly convert their costly and inflexible legacy systems to the same type of technology that their digital competitors are using to great advantage. There is an urgent need to have the matching "guns" to help level the playing field.

The consensus is that CSPs should leverage ICT convergence, cloud architecture and virtualization-everything technologies to gain infrastructure agility, and use a new generation of customer-oriented applications designed to thrill the customers, and to promote innovation in products and services. In addition, to make it all affordable (both CAPEX and OPEX reduction) and to cover any gaps in people and process readiness, CSPs are increasingly considering managed services options.

Huawei BES architecture follows all these design best practices:

- Agile business: simplification and automation

- Software architecture: componentized, modularized, and hierarchical decoupling

- Frontend and backend separation

- Big data analytics as a built-in foundation element used across the whole stack

- Technology evolution, for example, cloud and elastic scaling

Furthermore, Huawei has plans to introduce DevOps agile delivery methodologies and offer parts of BES As-a-Service so they can start reaping the benefits much sooner than any attempt at upgrading and fixing their legacy systems piecemeal.

• Transformation Strategy Perspective

When it comes to solutions for CSP-to-DSP transformation, no one-size-fits-all approach can be used. We have to allow for variations in CSP specific situations, which lead to differences in strategy.

Huawei global consultants can provide as-is assessment and transformation roadmap advice. For CSPs who choose to introduce new digital BSS capabilities gradually, BES has several deployment options that can fit each CSP without disruption to existing business.

However, some CSPs are exploring bolder and more effective strategies that can accelerate the transformation process to gain a competitive advantage as a digital leader. Huawei BES is designed and positioned to fully support CSPs who choose any path of transformation, from green field approaches (parallel operations from scratch) to step-by-step add-on, as well as end-to-end comprehensive transformation of all legacy systems.

In short, BES is an innovative technological basis for successful CSP digital transformation enabling a clear path to new business models, revenue streams, and industry leadership. 

Previous waves of business and technology innovation in telecom focused on efficiency and simplification around traditional themes such as fixed and mobile services convergence. The current digital disruption has called for yet another significantly re-designed generation of telecom business and operational models, and systems to enable them. After a slow initial reaction by CSPs, industry leaders have started defining and executing new transformation strategies to cope with the disruption to emerge as winners.

Huawei as a leading innovator in the telecom space has heavily stepped up to the challenge of supporting service providers. It has invested in a complete overhaul of its BSS solutions, and named this new digital age solution BES.

BES is a comprehensive suite of digital business enablement solutions rich in new features and capabilities yet designed for simplicity and efficiency. BES is designed to raise the bar on customer experience, support marketing of digital products, and reduce operational costs.  One key technique BES uses to achieve these goals is to embed in its foundation a Big Data operations platform so valuable insight is readily available for use at every customer touch-point, and it also enables smarter more automated data-driven processes and operations.

Moreover, BES offers multiple deployment options, all cloud-based, and some as-a-service, that match a range of digital transformation strategies. Each CSP can find a compelling solution and a right way to move forward with Huawei BES.