Indranil das, Head of Digital Services, Ericsson Middle East and Africa has outlined a comprehensive 5-step framework that is specifically designed to enable communication service providers to prosper in the ‘digital economy’.
The future is digital, and digital service providers will lead the way. From enhancing the way you engage with your customers to automating operations, service providers reach new levels of programmability, access and agility – levels that digital natives call home.What does it mean to become a digital service provider?
Here is a 5-step framework that can help service providers prosper in the digital economy:
Step 1: Build your Cloud Infrastructure:
Cloud infrastructure is the foundation for 5G & IoT. The scale and performance requirements of 5G and IoT demand a different approach to digital infrastructure. Increase speed, efficiency, and agility in offering new services while reducing risk and shortening lead time while you transform the network.
With an open and pre-integrated NFVI solution which can be deployed both at central and distributed sites and organizations will be better prepared to manage all workloads.
Step 2: Quick Time to Market with VoLTE:
Whether you are a service provider with millions of customers or just thousands of users, you have your own cloud datacenter, or you want a full-stack solution for VoLTE services, there is an industrialized solution that will suit your requirements.
The same is true if you are an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) or mission-critical service provider looking for an easy way to get both mobile broadband and voice services over LTE and Wi-Fi ready in your network in one step. You can deploy VoLTE in weeks now allowing a quicker time to market.
Step 3: Boost revenue with digital BSS:
Digital business support systems are critical to uncovering new revenue streams. Customer experience is vital for a successful transformation to a digital business, and digital business support systems are in the center of this change.
Businesses cannot deliver an agile digital customer experience with the transformation of the ‘front-end’ experience alone – it needs to be a complete business transition – to put in place the end to end tools and processes to make real the goal of delivering a truly digital, simple, ‘one-click’ business.
Customers experience simplicity and ease in administering their accounts through the ability to find information online, compare offerings, make online purchases, and get fast and automated deliveries. This results in real, measurable business improvements from simplification including much faster time-to-market and better customer experience.
Step 4: Explore new revenue streams via network slicing:
The IoT era has the potential to transform industry and society, and with 5G on the horizon, countless new business models become a possibility. IoT services come with their own complex connectivity and performance-related challenges.
As such, operators must invest in technologies to meet efficiency and flexibility demands of these new services – making an alternative approach necessary in order to maximize revenue generation. That’s where network slicing comes in – providing the capability to enable new business models across a broad industry spectrum.
Network slicing is a powerful virtualization capability and one of the key capabilities that will enable flexibility. This solution allows operators to segment the network to support particular services and deploy multiple logical networks for different service types over one common infrastructure.
Step 5: Embrace cloud native design principles:
In the next few years all telecom applications will be cloud natively designed so as to increase efficiency and utilization of the cloud infrastructure. Benefits include increased speed of software upgrades and releases plus improved granularity, and enhanced automation through already embedded features in the NFVi layer (Cloud infrastructure for NFV).
Adapted software architecture makes much better use of cloud data center resources. In the case of 5G, the new ETSI standardized 5G Core functions will be cloud native and container based. This is expected to start during 2019.
Ericsson’s digital services blueprint will equip organizations with the tools needed for today’s technological landscape. By finding the right blueprint for their businesses, they can reach new heights of agility, access and automation.
