Imagine the Possibilities

Tim Manahan, VP Consulting Services, Telcordia

As Head of Consulting at Telcordia, my job is to help service providers think through all kinds of possibilities for their businesses, operations and strategies. While this always starts with a particular problem to solve (e.g., how do we reduce cost? improve speed? differentiate?), the range of possibilities today for responding is wider than ever before.

Our brave new telecom world is even bigger and more complex than anyone really predicted, which points to greater possibilities – but also new threats. The speed with which businesses can change, or at which new markets are emerging and growing, has meant that the range of creativity and expertise required for progress is broadening all the time.

To take one example, in just a decade and a half, revenue from online advertising, measured per internet user has risen from $9 to $46. But that’s at the same time as the number of internet users has shot up from 6 million to 1.2 billion. This isn’t just a growth curve, it’s a seismic impact across multiple industries that demands a totally new and creative response. 

Today our clients need continuous imagination, rolling into implementation right away to accelerate benefit realization. The issues they are facing are affecting their businesses quarter on quarter, and no company is immune to the changes going on around them.

The rise of broadband has shattered previous frames of reference for telecom operations, and makes us significantly broaden our horizons when thinking about even the near future. Service providers are now routinely setting out a 100Mbit/s access world, which costs 70% less to run than copper networks, but strains the capital budget. They’re imagining how to continue to make money when voice revenues from fixed line services approach zero.

However, the nature of the changes required is often challenging. Organizational change, merging groups, re-engineering operations and information systems are no less painful to face than they ever were, but the need to embrace rapid and ongoing changes en route to the benefits is now critical to staying in business. Telcordia helps customers by sharing what we know about what’s truly possible, by leveraging lessons learned and by guiding managers through the change process. We know that total automation is possible in certain areas of the business and are constantly looking to help customers find the path to peak performance.

Imagination at work

I wanted to highlight a few examples of imagination that I think represent some really interesting responses to not only a problem, but also reflect the expanded horizons of “the industry formerly known as telecom.”

Deutsche Telekom recently presented to its shareholders a dramatic new telling of its future strategy. It has imagined itself as an integral part of solving problems within industry verticals – Energy Health, Media and Automotive. What’s new here is that DT has not simply regarded sales of its services into these verticals, but has gone right into these industries to understand how they work, and figured a strategy (within each) for how to monetize their support for real business problems. And that leads to new structures within those verticals.

To take another example, Starbucks is now rolling out an app in which a barcode displayed on a smartphone screen can be redeemed for coffee, and unlock 2 hours of free Wifi from AT&T. The combination of technology, commercial partnering, customer experience and expertise indicates the degree of imagination now being applied to sell something as ordinary as a cup of coffee. If that’s the level of thinking going into a commodity item, we get a sense just how far and fast things are moving, and how broadly companies are thinking in response to business challenges.

Closer to home, one final example of the kind of imagination I’m talking about is Telcordia’s Total Perspective Planning solution. Our team imagined what would happen if a network designer had ALL the information needed to create the best designs. Not just the technical data, but commercial information, customer and prospect data, marketing program coverage, rainfall or weather data, demographics, you name it. You could create the perfect network design. The one that meets current customer needs, and puts network resources just where it makes most sense for the customers who are great prospects for a new service. Or vice versa – imagine if sales and marketing teams really did know the location of the most cost-effective-to-connect customers.. That leads to a much smarter, tighter cycle of spend and fulfillment, and a more profitable business. 

That’s just one area. Other fields that Telcordia is engaged in are exploring many new avenues of possibilities for service providers and their partners: micropayments, advertising-based revenue models, mobile messaging, dynamic pricing of calls based on network traffic load, bandwidth management, device management and more.

In imagining what’s next, service providers should be considering their role in more directly improving lives and businesses, perhaps more than they are doing today and not limiting their creativity only to new pricing schemes or access technologies. Imagine truly high capacity broadband - whether fixed or mobile - and commercial ecosystems where applications, content and business models open new revenue streams. It’s the future platform for service provider success. And it’s still just the beginning of realizing the potential of telecom.

For more information, please contact Tim Manahan, VP of Consulting Services, Telcordia at manahant@telcordia.com.  Tim leads a team of experts that have helped plan, design and build the world's largest, most complex telecom networks for nearly three decades. That experience gives Telcordia a unique perspective on the challenges you face, so you can avoid common pitfalls, seize opportunities quickly, and realize the potential of telecom.