Middle East and Africa is a promising region despite the macro-economic challenges that the region is witnessing. Combined with increasing availability of low cost smartphones and demand for mobile broadband services, we see a fast shift from voice to data. The evolving ICT industry comes with new use cases, new value chains and new ways for operators to capitalize on their network capabilities, which all provide opportunities for revenues from outside their traditional customer base. Through years of experience in operating large networks around the world, we support our customers to improve their share in the ICT value chain.
Transformation is a subject that arouses strong opinions, regardless of a service provider's size or the type of company it may be. Overall, the main goals for transformation are led by the desire to build a truly customer-centric organization that provides more personalized, relevant and flexible products and services to customers anytime, anywhere and on any device.
Today's businesses are operating in a business climate of excessive speed and continuous change. Both Telecom and IT operations are expected to cope with these changing market trends faster and deliver customer value effectively-all while containing costs to be more competitive. This makes it even more important for us to provide security and high-performance for business-critical applications so that they work across all aspects of governance-performance, scale, quality, economics, compliance and security.
Organizations are considering and embracing transformation to realize a sweeping range of goals, from achieving M&A integration, attaining real-time capabilities, simplifying processes, migrating from physical to digital, and building a customer-centric organization to becoming a broader ICT player and full digital service provider. Accomplishing any and all of these goals demands change in a multitude of dimensions.
Networks are changing and so is the way we manage them. Traditional management that separates the network by technology or domain falls short. For us, user experience guides the way and we try to shape a new business reality where content delivery, Machine to Machine (M2M) and enterprise services are offered on a future-ready platform.
Telecommunications infrastructure is a moving target and in a perpetual state of evolution: from TDM to IP telephony, from 3G to 4G/LTE and soon 5G. New technologies can create additional layers of complexity, requiring more than typical, traditional telecom management and service orchestration. Virtualization adds flexibility, but some worry that flexibility can further add complexity.
Companies are making faster business decisions based on data. We support our customers with solutions that will enable them to trust the integrity of their systems, networks, and data while running their internal operations efficiently.
This level of IT agility will allow operators to extract extensive and unforeseen business value from 5G and the Networked Society as it drives new business ecosystems and models. In fact, it will encourage the entire organization to seek out new opportunities and explore profit sources that were not previously available or even imagined. And it will ultimately lead to delivering the right service with the right performance at the right time and cost to a much wider range of consumers and enterprises, even if we aren't fully aware of what those services might be.
Real-time has been the foundation of Ericsson's business for the past 140 years. The in-depth integration of IT and CT brings both sides a wider cooperative space and creates a connected world with endless opportunities to empower freedom, to transform society and to drive solutions. At Ericsson, we integrate the advantages of both sides in key technological areas like cloud computing, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and the Internet of Things (IoT) to provide evolved solutions to customers around the world.
