Global technology major Ericsson is going beyond the telecom sector to offer managed services solutions to companies in the transport, utilities and public safety segments. Under managed services, technology vendors such as Ericsson take over the entire network and build capacity based on usage and need.
“We take managed services that we use today for telcos, and use the same concepts in other cases. We have cases where we are managing ships at sea, power meters in utility companies and infrastructure or networks for non-telco enterprises that are global in size. We have a lot of activities in several countries on smart cities where we are managing infrastructure,” Jean-Claude Geha, Head of Managed Services, Ericsson, told BusinessLine .
Geha said the move into other vertical markets would diversify its portfolio. “It is a good way to leverage what we have been building. We don’t have to start from zero to produce services or provide platforms to non-Telco’s, we already have those capabilities,” he added.
Ericsson has been offering managed services to telecom companies, including Airtel and Vodafone, for over a decade.
The Swedish telecom equipment maker is also seeing traction from managing IT networks for telcos, which traditionally has been dominated by the likes of IBM.
“Traditionally, IT used a lot of customisation or platforms that were not in the free domain. Over the time several of our customers realised that actually their cost is going back up. Therefore, we can come in and take over that business from incumbents but our approach is we take it, reduce cost and maintain the financial benefits over time,” Geha said.
Even in the telecom space, the idea of managed services is shifting from just managing capacities to understanding customer needs.
“The operators are interested in customer experience. They are trying to focus on the services that end users are using on the network and see how they can improve the end user’s experience on those services. For example, if you know that you can experience an outage on a network because you are modernising, expanding and moving things around and it’s going to impact certain set of users, these users would appreciate a note coming from you on to their mobile saying, “We apologise for the inconvenience for such and such will happen on that date”. And then some operators would take it further and say, “Here is the credit for the inconvenience that we caused you” and that value management actually makes an impact on the end users and helps in retaining them,” Geha said.