Digital transformation is becoming more popular. Some telcos are beginning to see that they need to change the way they interact with customers – and that means new apps and processes need to be developed. They now look for better ways to build products and services to win market share.
We spoke to Bart Weijermars, CEO of Pareteum Corp to find out how telcos are changing the ways they’re working; to compete in a sector where differentiation is becoming increasingly important. With a wealth of experience in telecoms, Bart is the perfect person to help us dig further into the struggles of telcos and how the cloud is changing the game.
“Telcos look for scalable, reliable, and managed services at the most affordable price. Where they have gone wrong though is that they feel the need to manage those factors where others have entered the market that can do that much better than the telcos can do themselves. Their focus needs to be on creating better services because that’s where they make their money.”
Bart Weijermars, CEO, Pareteum Corporation.
State of Play
Offering better services to customers is something that the telecoms industry has struggled with until recently – choosing instead to focus on the operational requirements of those services rather than the end-user and this has resulted in poor net promoter scores across the industry.
End users don’t want one size fits all, and because of that, there’s always room in the market for multiple brands because they can address the wide range of customer requirements. Building new services can help offer differentiation for telcos and therefore address more customers with a variety of solutions and in turn increase their market share.
The cloud enables telcos to more effectively create their own mobile services, quickly and at scale and that could be anything from managing their mobile network components, sending invoices, or establishing products and services – whatever is going to give their customers a better experience.
The Detail
Those deployment benefits such as speed and scale are the common things listed for switching to the cloud. They’re definitely important but when it comes to telcos, what specifically does the cloud offer them?
- The White label aspect is important because you can try new things, experiment under a new label and if it works you can expand it into your main brand. It allows software developers the opportunity to try new things with the platform and not have to go through lots of complex corporate processes to test those ideas.
- Software developers want private cloud environments so that they can trust that their IP is protected. Some no longer feel comfortable storing it on public clouds and that means a private and dedicated cloud is a big win.
- Providing telcos with their own private cloud so they don’t have to work with standard and overpriced hyperscalers. In that way things can be done in a bespoke way i.e. they can pay for what they actually use – not a bloated package. In this, there are real cost savings to be made.
If telcos want to differentiate then strategically they need to find where there is more value in the market. That’s going to start with building services that customers actually want. The best way to do that is to focus on the customer and let experts handle the managed services. In particular, smaller specialists are able to give the flexibility big businesses need to create products at better margins and develop a relationship of joint success.
Need better solutions to deliver on customer requirements? The cloud is a great place to start – speak to whitesky.cloud today.
