The business models adopted by many of today’s operators are under threat. Consumers demand more data and services at faster speeds, but they are unwilling to pay increased premiums for better services. Competition increases every day throughout the communications services sector and in all geographies around the world.
To fuel top- and bottom-line health, operators require agents of innovation that can support more scalable, agile, and flexible ways of doing business. To set the stage for successful long-term growth, they need to adapt to changing consumer demands, which requires developing an ecosystem of trusted partnerships. They need to create platforms fit for innovation—platforms that support both value creation and cost reduction. They need a network of third-party providers that can plug-and-play easily in a variety of environments and geographies.
Put simply, they need an innovation framework. Less enterprise and more cloud, whether public or private. Here’s why:
1. The next generation of cloud-services companies will build framework architectures to serve customers better. Cloud architectures will evolve to become integrators of functionality that enable different cloud application suites to work together more naturally and seamlessly.
2. Mashups will become more viable and platform-like. Enterprises tend to be good at integrating silos, but true integration requires more flexible and adaptable implementations. Organisations will have to adopt innovation frameworks to integrate a variety of third-party tools capable of supporting collaboration from the outside-in.
3. Innovation frameworks will allow providers to leapfrog the revenue stagnation and margin decline prevalent in the telecoms industry by creating service aggregation businesses that utilise offerings across their partner networks and third-party technologies.
4. Innovation frameworks will present more opportunities to generate revenue from traffic and content, speed time-to-market for new services, and discern actionable insight from vast amounts of consumer data.
5. The opaque pipeline, lengthy development cycles, and complex integration projects will face extinction as companies utilise innovation frameworks.
6. Efficiencies supported by innovation frameworks will enable companies to offer dynamic bundled services, support creative and flexible pricing models, and integrate directly into peer or partner IT systems.
7. Innovation frameworks will provide a speed-to-profit engine that allows companies to capitalise on consumer trends as they happen by supporting the applications and capabilities consumers expect.
Making platforms lighter, more open, and easier to access is of utmost importance. Providers that can develop and support innovation frameworks built upon the combination of existing core assets, cloud-based delivery, aggregated services, and a strong partner network will garner significant competitive advantage. They will be in the best position to harness the flexibility and responsiveness required to lead the market as the digital economy evolves.
