By
Keith Willetts
Unless you've been on a desert island with no way to reach the outside world, you've likely noticed that the communications industry isn't the same as just a few years ago. Since deregulation reared its head more than 20 years ago, the cable providers started joining the game and with more recent developments, such as the rise of mobile providers and new media companies, communications has grown infinitely more complex as consumers demand more simplicity with their service bundles, bills, and customer service.
It's definitely not an easy time to be in this market for anyone. Revenues are declining from traditional services and profit margins are tightening as these services get cheaper. Competition is facing providers from all directions, and their reaction has been to reduce the cost base of their business, develop new revenue-based services faster, innovate better than they've ever done before, and through all this keep the customers they've got through improved customer care.
The new fly in the ointment here is that providers are starting to realize that they can't get to this wonderful goal of lower costs, more revenues, and a better customer experience with their existing infrastructure. So, while the first step was to cut costs – many times by downsizing – providers are now looking to full-blown transformation to a much simpler networking platform and a simplified operational back office.
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The new fly in the ointment here is that providers are starting to realize that they can't get to this wonderful goal of lower costs, more revenues, and a better customer experience with their existing infrastructure. |
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price of the content, not on developing a really slick and low cost delivery chain. The costs of handling issues such as order handling, customer care, problem resolution, payments /settlements manually across multiple trading boundaries will kill the margins on any service. As long as customer volumes of services are quite low, maybe people can get away with it. However, as the services scale, meltdown will quickly follow. A business plan that relies on the service not selling in order to keep costs under control isn't much of a plan!
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But even as they take the complexity out of their operations, providers are also dealing with the fact that the next-generation of communications services will rely heavily on outside partners, meaning more cooks in the kitchen to deliver the services.
Right now loads of communications companies are doing deals with loads of media providers with a lot of various intermediaries in the picture, too. Mostly these are "hand crafted" deals with the emphasis being put on the
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Adapt and Survive
So we at TM Forum have recognized this shift from the telcos and other providers controlling everything to realizing there are many other players out there who want a piece of the pie and deserve a seat at the table. To that end, our membership is growing to the tune of 700 members in 75 countries. We're not leaving behind our telco roots; rather, we're taking that and extending it out to companies that are involved in the creation of services and the creation of content for those services.
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