New lines of biz for telecom cos

One of the presentations at the ‘Real-Time Charging Summit,' during the recent Amdocs InTouch Business Forum held in Singapore, was of Dan Hod, Line of Business Director and Amdocs Partner Settlement Manager. To telecom companies (telcos), advanced monetisation models can offer a flexible structure for taking the building blocks, tying a connection between them, and also creating innovative business models, he said, during a brief interaction with Business Line , post presentation. “This is the time to ensure that you have the comprehensive partner relationship management solution to support you in building those models.” We continue our conversation over email.

Excerpts from the interview.

Can you outline some of the technology developments driving totally new lines of business for telcos?

As the market moves to an always connected existence, service providers need to change and transform to meet the demands of an always connected world where communications, entertainment and the Internet will act as the primary tool in our daily lives to deliver the applications and information we want to consume.

The communications industry is changing, and at a rapid pace. And, the pressure is on for service providers to keep pace and meet the tough demands of an always connected lifestyle where communications, entertainment and leisure converge and are accessible across any device.

Over the top (OTT) service and content providers, such as Facebook and Google, continue to successfully penetrate the market and are challenging the traditional consumer-service provider relationship. These players, who will grow in number and diversify, are also presenting a strong positioning with high popularity and promotional power.

This presents new challenges to the relationship between service providers and their consumers as well as the need to create new business models and partnership with the increasing number of new players in the market.

This shift creates new challenges, but also provides service providers with interesting opportunities.

In order to successfully take advantage of these opportunities, service providers will need more than just new services and devices to compete in this fast-evolving terra firma.

They must introduce innovative business models and optimise monetisation capabilities with partners and new entrants.

Service providers should look at obtaining flexible, integrated and converged platform capabilities to maintain their competitive edge.

A need for optimising monetisation capabilities is introduced in every aspect of the partnerships' lines of business: Over the top players which are mainly the content providers, application developers' community, application stores, mobile payments players and of course the world of machine-to-machine (M2M).

One system that supports all those lines of business in one operation, provides 360-degree view of partners from partner on-boarding to financial settlements, will handle those new challenges efficiently and will truly provide the innovative monetisation capabilities.

Does ‘free' service coexist with other revenue-earning services of telcos?

‘Free' services are provided with no charge to the end customer. As we are all familiar with the free ‘1-800' call offering, we are now seeing the introduction of ‘1-800'- data services.

These ‘zero' charge services are offered mainly as promotional and public relationship campaigns to the end user by content players.

The end user enjoys ‘free' of charge data services while the monetisation settlements are negotiated between the service provider and the content provider partner.

The partner purchases a bulk of data package from the service provider and introduces attractive service to the end user in order to promote his campaign/service/ brand.

In the same time, other types of services, even from the same content provider, can be offered to the end user with diverse pricing models — so the answer is yes, ‘free' services coexist with other revenue earning services and it is just a matter of the market force to decide which services can be priced.

How can telcos monetise relationships with partners, innovatively?

A new and constantly connected world is emerging. It requires brand new ways of thinking, enabling operations and doing business.

There is a massive opportunity for service providers to transform from purveyors of access and distributors of content, to the enablers of our new everyday lifestyle.

All the services that connect and enrich our lives rely on the service provider network.

More than ever, it will be essential to have the ability to deliver the best possible customer experience.

The various business models that are emerging will enable service providers to not only deliver on customer expectations, but gain a competitive advantage: introducing a new type of services, make it more attractive with special bundles and, in a world of data, provide the Quality of Service (QoS) expected for each service.

As the expectations from the end-user customer are on the rise, so too are the additional chain of partners, on the same race, requiring service provider to take special care of the partner experience side, managing complex agreements, and sophisticated revenue models, along with the need to provide them self-service capabilities to create business models flexibly.

> dmurali@thehindu.co.in

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