View from the top: Adan Pope of Telcordia

                     
                             
       
        
               
Adan Pope: operators are uncertain about being able to
introduce value added services and fully take advantage of
opportunities for growth
                       
                           
                    
I have an interesting job. As both chief technology officer and chief strategy officer for Telcordia, I am responsible for both collaborating with our lines of business concerning portfolio investments as well as aligning the trajectory of the company with industry trends.
I’ve come to realize how interwoven these two disciplines are becoming.
So, I’ve been dusting off my old business school textbooks, and plotting the communications industry against Porter’s five-forces models and the like.
At first, I did so to take a more clinical look at the “dumb pipe” and “over-the-top” discussions that occupy the speaking and editorial circuits. Are communications service providers in the maturity or decline stages of their evolution? Are they just stuck up against the walls of their sheer mass and barriers to exit? I don’t believe so.
I believe that companies which have been innovating the way we communicate today can use that same innovative drive to secure an essential role in this fragmenting marketplace.
The exploding demand for interaction, community, mobility and personalization that describe our socially networked lifestyles should, in theory, be a big hurrah for providers of communications and connectivity services. So what is holding them back?
Telcordia recently commissioned a survey by Analysys Mason, which found that while CSPs might be optimistic about finding market and operational potential, they are much less bullish about being able to introduce value added services and fully take advantage of opportunities for growth.
One way to instill some confidence back into the business is through a more sweeping automation of the product introduction process. Automation removes a fair amount of the rework, make-work, and guesswork that causes even progressive companies to lean back on their heels a bit. Automation is all about driving the business forward. It serves not only to reduce costs, but greatly enhances the ability to react to customer needs and support new business models.
The communications industry has done a fair job in recent years of automating certain high-volume functions — such as activation for residential services. It was primarily a response to cost cutting, and it has served to free up cash for investment in bringing new products to market.
But the act of bringing new products to market will be less and less of a unilateral and internally focused process. It will require a shift to revenue-driven efficiency through better reuse of service components for customized services and more efficient use of third parties.
To make this happen CSPs will need to make their OSS/BSS more efficient so they can be proactive in building interfaces that will enable them to support a wider range of services and a faster go to market.
CSPs will become more of a telecom “service factory”, where offers can be assembled by players all along the supply chain.
In order for a service factory to be efficient and effective the CSP must swap from pure internal cost cutting and focus on how to deliver revenue more efficiently. The graph below illustrates this inflection point. To be successful will require a mindset of re-use, and an unprecedented level of service to resource abstraction.
Think of abstraction in the way a PC maker would streamline its assembly processes, by componentizing and standardizing the basic building blocks of its products into more manageable and more flexible components on a shelf from which consumers can “build” their specific products.
This abstraction provides a common language of assembly as well as repeatable functions of assembly.
Last year, a typical service provider may have tried to introduce 10 new products in the market. Next year, that number could be 100 or 1,000. To do so, CSPs will need to open the doors to consumers and wholesalers, exposing their assets and processes in a way that is attractive, easy to discover and easy to use by third parties participating in the offer experimentation phenomenon.
A telecom service factory will help service providers compete beyond their current competitive advantages. And it will keep this CTO-meets-CSO busy moving OSS/BSS out of the back office and to the forefront of revenue growth and cost reduction. GTB 

                



A service provider must swap from pure internal cost cutting and focus on how
to deliver revenue more efficiently