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Telcos of all sizes are improving their IPTV offerings, which will only make their product portfolios that much more attractive to customers and potential customers. However, the cable companies are slowly starting to find that the small and medium enterprises are just as open to buying voice and data services from cable companies as they are from telcos. This is being helped greatly by the maturity and acceptance of voice over IP (VoIP) services, but whether cable will succeed in capturing significant telco market share depends heavily on the perception of customer service, the partnerships the MSOs can force with outside partners, and the management of devices.

In the residential environment, telcos traditionally have had a perceived advantage in terms of customer relationships and loyalty, as telcos could boast robust billing & CRM systems and data repositories of valuable customer data. However, the MSOs have a crucial advantage in that they are seen to be more flexible – lacking the huge inflexible legacy systems which haunt and restrict the telcos. This absence of heavily monolithic systems built decades ago for voice and analog services might be an advantage for MSOs, allowing them to readily leapfrog ahead to accommodate the QoS and personalization demands of digital services.

The other key disadvantage MSO’s have in selling to enterprises is their strict geographic limitations. Apart from the smallest enterprises, who are very often single office businesses operating in a single town, many small and medium businesses operate out of multiple locations. For these customers it is a lottery as to whether the cable company can offer them services in all their locations. Experience has shown that most enterprises prefer the convenience of a single stop shop for their communications needs, and this seriously disadvantages the cable offering. The MSOs are countering this issue by partnering with each other to deliver a pseudo one-stop-shop offering - but its unclear as to how successful this is being received.

Using Standards as Part of the Winning Formula

From a TM Forum perspective, we tend to view the changing business environment as a

the areas of QoS, process automation, service level agreements, and revenue assurance. More recently, we’ve seen a strong trend for cable/MSO companies to pick up and apply these frameworks to achieve similar business results.

In the end, it will come down to who more deftly manages the customer experience, and who shows the greatest flexibility and responsiveness to an ever-changing business landscape. And that’s where TM Forum can help make a difference. In the past year we’ve launched several activities focused on bridging this gap. Examples of these projects will be demonstrated throughout Management World Nice this year and include measuring customer experience across the increasingly complicated value chain.

Although these initiatives are strongly driven by a substantial telco following, the resulting work and evolving standards are not telco-centric. Improved execution of the business processes benefits all, and enables both telcos and cable companies to reduce cost, operate more efficiently, improve customer responsiveness, and reduce revenue leakage.

There are no crystal balls here, but it’s a fairly safe bet to say that MSO’s will continue to make in-roads into the SME market, and in doing so drive more innovation into the telco space to enable them to compete effectively. And the only guaranteed winner in this battle is the consumer!