Over the Top (OTT) players such as Google might be a CSP’s natural predators, but they can also offer valuable lessons in terms of business development as telcos embrace digital transformation in order to survive.
For a CSP to become a digital service provider (DSP), it would do well to emulate the strategies of the OTTs, primarily by adopting cloud-native architectures.
Virtual, modular, scalable, responsive… BSS/OSS supported by software-powered cloud-native networks brings many benefits, and the OTTs know this. They understand that automation, focus on high availability and “continuous everything” are all vital; they implement stateless software for operation distribution and process decomposition; they modularize for scaling, and containerize to close the loop by facilitating still greater automation.
For OTTs, every aspect of customer interaction is a total digital experience. This means omnichannel, with a well-layered IT architecture to store workflows, processes, data models and logic, and expose them to all interaction channels via standardized open APIs. A centralized product catalog reduces offer complexity and accelerates development and deployment, while a recommendation engine powered by an AI algorithm will deliver personalized offers using big data analytics built into the cloud BSS/OSS stack implementing open digital architecture (ODA).
There’s another benefit of moving to the cloud, too: OTTs don’t pay for monolithic hardware that lies redundant much of the time. Instead, they employ cloud-based solutions that not only cut costs, but also allow them to configure everything quickly and easily, build, test and launch services in fail-fast mode, innovate more and automate practically everything.