At this time of year, there is no shortage of predictions on how 2011 will unfold and what we, as an industry, can expect. I am always amused by the pundits’ ‘crystal ball gazing’ and wonder why they put us through the agony of being wrong so often. I’m certainly not going to put anyone through that, but I have spent some time asking others what they realistically see coming in 2011.
My colleague, and head of our revenue management initiative, Steve Cotton, is certainly no dreamer and feels that as major world economies dig their way out of debt and spending holes, it will be better if CSPs are prepared to hitch their wagon to these recoveries rather than chasing growth with the hobbles of outmoded business models and management practices. He believes that heightened emphasis on data analytics to ensure customer satisfaction and to attract the right partners is the starting point.
Steve is a great believer in the use of best practices from Lean Value Stream Management to deliver the seamless customer experience necessary for achieving customer satisfaction, and adding high growth/high-margin new revenue streams is the heavy lifting management will have to embrace to reach the goal.
This ties in nicely with some announcements we will be making at Team Action Week in Paris this month with regard to the TM Forum’s BSS strategy, or should I say BSS/OSS integration strategy, but more on that in the next issue of this newsletter.
Of course, cloud services will continue to be on every CSP’s agenda as will monetizing bandwidth, providing more services to their customer base and working out how to live with the myriad of over-the-top (OTT) players using their networks but contributing little to their maintenance. Nothing new there, right? But there is another sector seeing massive and almost uncontrolled growth, and it is one that relies on the CSPs and their networks for their success and survival. Here I speak of social networking.
Towards the end of 2010, it was revealed that Facebook had generated more hits than the mighty Google! It seems that everyone is using Facebook for almost everything, and businesses are jumping on the social networking revolution hoping to benefit. If you can’t get the customers to come to your corporate website, then why not go to them?