To delight customers, real-time analytics and closed loop actions become a necessity. Insights gained from analytics trigger automated actions into the network (e.g., changing capacity or re-configuring a function) or to the customer (e.g., a personalized promotion), or to customer care so the care agent immediately knows the customer’s problem, its root cause, and the best action to resolve it.

Legacy networks merge with IT to become elastic infrastructures that are lightweight, programmable and endlessly adaptable. Horizontal systems cut across the business, analyzing inventory and customer experience to put capacity where and when it’s needed.

Convergent charging and billing systems enable real-time usage and invoicing across all services. These improve customer experiences as well as streamline processes and operations for rapid monetization of new services.

Yet, operators can’t make this transformation journey alone. Innovation is driven through an ecosystem of IoT and other companies, partners, suppliers, and application developers. This requires an IT environment that enables agility in service creation, delivery and management, with fast launch of a broad range of innovative products, including those from partners and towards partner channels. Successful partnering is crucial in IoT, especially since, according to Gartner, by 2017, 50 percent of IoT solutions will originate in startups that are less than three years old₂.

Through transformative IT, operators can monetize and support both commodity core and innovative new businesses at the same time, fully leveraging investments while supporting business efficiency, speed, and flexibility.

The connected society inflection point has been crossed

The digitalization explosion has only just begun. But already, the pace of technological change is unprecedented with 5G, cloud, IoT communications and a rapidly evolving world of devices and apps. Meanwhile, customer expectations of total mobility, ever-faster connectivity, personalized services and perfect, instantaneous delivery seem to be growing as quickly as their data usage.

Software has changed nearly every aspect of modern life. Now, if the industry is to realize the full value of the Networked Society, it must turn to IT to transform the nature of telecom. Transformative IT can help operators profitably support legacy services and networks, manage the complexity of change, speed the adoption of new technologies, and add intelligence to the end result. It can give operators the agility needed to weightlessly address new technologies and delivery models. It can transform operators from service providers to digital experience providers.

To stake a claim in this industry revolution already underway, operators need to think holistically and focus on how to add value instead of on specific network technologies. This calls for an entirely new level of performance: real-time, efficient, innovative and agile. But achieving it will take massive transformations in nearly every aspect of the operator’s business. Network and IT (OSS and BSS) need to work in harmony or operators will not successfully monetize investments and drive new revenue streams.