The past decade has seen huge shifts on the customer side in the telecoms industry. The whole shape of the market has altered, propelled by changing requirements created by digitalisation.
Previously, there was a clear distinction between carrier and enterprise customers. Wholesale product portfolios were geared towards elements such as leased lines, virtual-private-network services, subsea cables and messaging termination. The focus was often regional, with time-consuming processes used for systems integration and long-term contracts.
Now, customers of all types want to rapidly buy products and services over the internet without commitments, on-demand, globally and with little need for integration. With carriers delivering voice, messaging and other capabilities via APIs, the distinctions are becoming blurred and more structure is starting to be required for these wholesale services.
Easing access
Telcos have commonly targeted B2B customers through portals to give them a one-stop shop for the range of digital services on offer. But this is not the common set-up in wholesale.
However, the more easily wholesale customers can access and adopt these services, the better their own and their customers’ experience will be. As the growth of 5G and IoT generates more demand for rapid integration of services globally, it will also speed things up.
At the same time, the long history of carriers and their many legacy IT systems, internal dependencies and local footprints makes it taxing to create the cloud-like customer experience required. That calls for an internal adjustment of mindsets and upskilling.
Yet that’s exactly the effort that Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier has been prepared to make, aided by learnings from our wider parent group. As the array of APIs and other digital services expands, we have sought to move things forward by launching our new Global Carrier Digital Services Portal. With this all-in-one portal for wholesale customers, we aim to provide more convenience, more choices and more opportunities for our customers.
Using our new service portfolio, carriers, as well as aggregators and hyperscalers, can create a ‘glocal’ approach in which they combine their strengths in the local area with the global reach of our services to give their customers the best of both worlds.
Digital spread
The ability for customers to offer our portal ‘as a service’ on a white-label basis to their own enterprise customers that bundles in the various services on offer makes everything more efficient, helping maximise the spread of digital options for the benefit of all. On top of that, it means enterprises can get a portal with the look and feel of their own brand and wholesale customers can get harmonised descriptions for all digital services in a single place.
At first sight, it might appear that such a portal would directly compete with the cloud and digital offerings of hyperscalers and aggregators. However, the services it includes are in fact complementary because such providers themselves can integrate what we offer to deliver new capabilities. In the future, a hyperscaler could, for example, add a quality-on-demand API for games developers in a way that would not be possible without the network strengths we can provide.
Hyperscalers are also operating on a different, wider scale and have a long track record with digital services. All this means that the potential is there for the offerings of each to function effectively side by side.
Carrier boost
From a carrier perspective, the ability to provide an efficient platform has clear benefits for customers. Carriers provide local footprints that allow well-tailored services and personalised support.
Having their own network also means that B2B customers can buy ‘at source’, while gaining from the unique combination of carrier assets including low-latency edge services, global termination, configurable networks and telco-grade security.
In what will be a long-term journey for the industry into the digital realm, such a portal therefore provides more of everything digital, with all the building blocks to navigate this world. As its capabilities expand in future, it will forge a clear pathway forward to take services to the next level.
Read Deutsche Telekom's special report, titled Wholesale Redefined, by clicking here.
