The telecom industry is navigating multi-dimensional disruption. From emerging technologies, markets and competitors to a pandemic that has accelerated the reinvention of telecom monetization. Where will we find ourselves this time next year? Here are five trends I believe will shape our industry over the next 12 months.
#1: MVNOs and digital brands re-emerge as market a catalyst - create and deliver new value propositions, cloud TCO and reshape BSS
Because the growth of new market segments and customer experience are integral to the success of 5G, MVNOs will play a pivotal role in 2022. As they have with every G, MVNOs will serve as a vehicle for creating digital brands and offering cost-effective new revenue opportunities.
On average, operators spend 40% of their Opex to attract new customers. MVNOs can narrow the focus of their brand to target specific customer segments and quickly deliver relevant, innovative offers to capture new customers. The MVNO re-emergence will also cause a shift in how BSS platforms are expected to deliver.
As a result, BSS “business as usual” will not suffice in 2022. Instead, we will see its continued evolution. The demands by MVNOs will push BSS to achieve increased agility, flexibility, faster time to launch and benefit, accelerated business velocity and superior customer experience.
#2: Cloud is picking up speed and will be the preferred platform for reimagining BSS and revenue models
To seize growth opportunities, nearly every telecom operator will move or finalize their plans to move to public, private or hybrid clouds. Cloud will become the platform of choice for BSS as operators increasingly need more ease and agility to configure BSS in real-time. Further, they will want that capability without heavy customizations or diverting their IT teams.
With adaptability at the heart of success in 2022, telecom operators will move quickly toward cloudification. Since not all operators have the ability, knowledge and resources to drive this change, they can lean on vendors that bring new delivery models and tooling to overcome challenges and accelerate their journey. Because cloud adoption can also yield significant cost savings for maintenance and support services, especially for legacy equipment, the stakes are high. As a result, what is set in motion in 2022 has the potential to impact an operator's performance into the coming decade.
Cloud-based BSS will create the means for operators to orchestrate 5G use-case customer engagements and deliver future emerging services. This includes leveraging cloud-based technologies and methodologies such as microservices, CI/CD, DevOps, automation-driven testing frameworks and AI.
#3: Telecom sees beyond traditional revenue (and beyond 5G with its sights on 6G)
To thrive in 2022, the top telecom contenders will embrace non-traditional market segments, partners and ecosystems. They will move fast to leverage 5G and IoT use cases and monetize new business and commercial models from over-the-top (OTT) to B2B2x. They will be willing to part with tradition, disrupt and flip the monetization script.
Lessons learned during the pandemic will continue to influence them - from cost reductions and running leaner operations to accelerating reinvention and innovation. During the pandemic, the change in customer and enterprise behaviors, needs and demands and operators' responsiveness was unprecedented. A dramatic shift and increase in society's digital lifestyle, from telehealth and virtual learning to work-from-home and online grocery shopping, exploded in an instant.
This change, necessary especially with growing competition from hyperscalers, established a new role for telecom operators — a role and mindset that savvy operators will apply as a framework in 2022 to seize monetization opportunities beyond traditional telecom and propel their growth trajectories. Likewise, 5G will continue to be a significant part of that narrative. However, as 5G fails to fulfill its promise and meet challenges, 2022 will end with increasing 6G research and conversations, the shaping of its technical standards and features and signs of new power struggles emerging.
#4: Full-scale, process-heavy digital transformation mindset is so yesterday
The pandemic has pushed the overused “digital transformation” trope closer to its death. Its slowness, costliness and inadequacies have been magnified, and the need for speed - to research, innovate, create, and develop - in a condensed timeline over the past 24 months has been intense.
Now and moving forward, operators need to explore and experiment quickly. It is vital to learn fast, fail fast, launch, and re-launch rapidly. 2022 calls for lowering business risk and making it affordable to test new and differentiated offerings and services to meet customers’ ongoing and evolving needs and usage behaviors. Further, this need is growing more critical as Capex and Opex become challenged, and the means to protect ARPU and increase subscribers becomes paramount.
The new competitive advantage will be introducing new offerings, increasing service velocity and going to market quickly and cost-effectively. Thus, the days of traditional digital transformation are over. The sandbox, an essential cloud tool, will speed up product cycles, allowing operators to reimagine delivering new functionality and service capability at a fraction of traditional timelines and resource costs.
The approach is especially effective for ideation work - preparing for future opportunities, technology, and requirements — and having the capability to roll out new functionalities and pods rapidly with cloud automation, testing and tools.
#5: A catalyst to accelerating business success - smart automation will deliver measurable competitive edge as it becomes the norm
A dominant theme in BSS and technology, in general, is automation. As cloud adoption increases, the combination of a cloud-native services-based architecture with a CI/CD approach will change the way services are managed and rolled out. These will include single versions of products across all installations, the automated rollout of new features fast to the market, automation for testing and operations and standard implementation with installation and launch in weeks instead of months.
Also, an automated test framework approach will afford operators more complete and real-time visibility into their projects. Thus, delivery will become more transparent and predictable, fostering increased collaboration between operators and their partner vendors. Automation will help support and enable market challengers like MVNOs. It will help operators more fully benefit and realize the ROI of cloud technology. Automation will be integral to the industry, tapping into non-traditional markets and revenue streams with the fast capability to explore, experiment, test, fail and launch its new future — sustainably and successfully in 2022 and beyond.
