Activating Quality of Experience KPIs in Your Network

By: Alexander Havang

Analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and 5G were all the rage at Mobile World Congress this year. Each, in its own way, is a critical network enabler, with analytics and AI already having impact and 5G appearing to be the future endgame. With the transition to 5G just ahead, how do we evolve our current networks, operations, and investments to make this shift more seamless?   The answer is that we need to focus on the business “first principles” that will continue to be fundamental in both the 4G and 5G eras…

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Getting Digital Transformation Right

By: Stephen Pappas

Digital transformation is more than applying digital technology to create incremental operational efficiencies. A company can digitize a previously manual process to make an existing process better—but that is incremental improvement. Digital transformation is a larger, bet-your-business proposition. For one thing, digital transformation efforts are intertwined with customer experience (CX) and CX improvement is done using digital technologies. A new survey from Altimeter Group on the State of Digital Transformation finds 54 percent of companies are fast-tracking efforts to improve and integrate omnichannel CX…

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The importance of interoperability in unlocking value from the IoT

By: Wojciech Martyniak

According to the GSMA, the global Internet of Things (IoT) market is expected to be worth more than $1 trillion in revenue by 2025 as the number of IoT connections across the world surpasses 25 billion. If they don’t already, businesses across all industries will have a strategy in place for using IoT technology as a means of unlocking innovation and new revenue streams, and operators will play a key role. Despite being the most fundamental of an operator’s offerings, connectivity, however, is only expected to represent around five percent of the overall IoT market…

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Fueling Transformation with Automation

By: John Locke

As a topic, digital transformation has been fodder for many articles, especially the aspects of how important it is and will be for organizations that seek to keep pace with the rising demand for greater service quality and faster delivery at manageable cost. Digital transformation projects cover a wide range of initiatives, from basic and small-step process improvements to wholesale technology changes. The common factor in all of these projects is the need to drive business value—whether by improving operational efficiency through automation or implementing new intelligent integrations between applications…

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Enabling Value-driven Business Transformation

By: Balan Balakrishnan

Digital transformation is mandatory to enable traditional businesses to compete with digital natives that are reshaping the business world and industry lines. Most companies, however, struggle to drive this transformation—or even launch it effectively—for a variety of reasons. These may include: products and value propositions not always aligned with expectations of digitally savvy consumers or competitive with offerings from new players; cumbersome historic or legacy processes, systems, and data environments; lack of clarity around the true definition of digital transformation; and gaps in executives’ understanding of the capabilities (and limits) of digital and data technologies…

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Tips for Facing the 5G Revolution

By: Dheeraj Remella

From the humble beginnings of the World Wide Web to today’s advances, we are now on the verge of reaching a wireless digital utopia where connectivity and new information are as simple as the proverbial touch of a fingertip. Some people believe, and will argue, that we are already there — with the fourth-generation broadband cellular network technology, more commonly known as 4G, reaching its maturity in market and consumer use. Innovation in technological advancement marches on, however, bannered by the highly anticipated 5G network…

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Overcoming Cloud Challenges with Multi-tenant Data Centers

By: Jeff Uphues

As IT executives develop the blueprints and architecture needed to deliver on their digital transformation initiatives, the growing challenge of connecting to a myriad of partners, providers and platforms looms. Digital infrastructure is becoming increasingly distributed and local communications providers from a company-owned data center may not be able to meet the bandwidth, latency, location and cost requirements necessary to realize their digital goals. Many IT organizations have leveraged the cloud to deploy scalable infrastructure and are now looking to the cloud to address their growing connectivity needs…

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Letter from the Editor

By: Scott St. John - Pipeline

In the last issue of Pipeline, we explored why enriching the customer experience—through the application of technology—is critical to success. This month we look at how it can be accomplished. "Digital transformation" is a term that has been thrown around for the last few years, but it wasn't tied to anything specifically. That is, until now. Today, digital transformation means something real and tangible. Actual methodologies and technologies are being deployed to help companies transform…

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Telecom Industry News

By: Scott St. John - Pipeline

This month's telecom industry news included an array of innovation stories, from the first satellite deployment on a sportfishing yacht to a new app to block texting while driving. News of network expansion, planned 5G rollouts and efforts to bridge the ‘digital divide’ in various places around the globe also rolled in. Research on the growth of chatbot use, on the considerations of optimizing 5G for indoor environments, and security for mobile wallets also came in this month.   The top telecom industry news stories from the month are summarized below…

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