Personal Cloud and the Agile Operator Opportunity
Why are Personal Cloud solutions such a powerful retention tool?
Operators and Over-The-Top (OTT) cloud service providers are locked in a battle over who stores and provides access to subscriber content and data through personal cloud solutions. Photos, videos and other content makes up a user’s digital profile and online identity, which remain relatively consistent for long periods of time. It’s because of this that operators hold a distinct advantage over OTT providers – they are responsible for the activation of all new devices and upgrades and, increasingly, for content migration from old to new devices. The ability to manage the personal cloud for users therefore becomes a logical extension of this relationship.
The more access to personal data that operators can enable, across more devices, the more valuable they become to subscribers. Securely porting data and content between multiple devices is a critical factor in the ongoing success of the connected living vision. The personal cloud enables operators to become a central secure depository for this information and a key orchestrator of valuable new consumer services that will drive further engagement and revenue for years to come.
Service agility is as important as product integrity
Delivering this product and service integrity permeates throughout an operator’s relationship with its customer – including through retail environments. Operators own and operate many of their retail channels. Customer facing agents within these retail outlets are a powerful discretionary filter – and control what services are championed to customers and those that are not.
The subscriber and the salesperson behind the counter will gravitate towards sure things that work well. It is therefore critical that the operator wins the confidence of the salespeople within its stores, who often think much like the customer — the personal cloud solution is either “bad or its good.” Hence operators go to great lengths to ensure product integrity – sometimes greater than the over the top, more agile competitors – resulting in longer time to market and fewer iterations on a product.
Launching and maintaining cloud-based services requires agility in terms of rapidly issuing software releases and iterating new upgrades with short cycles for test, development, and quality assurance. The operator’s OTT competitors in this area are accustomed to shorter, more agile software product cycles and are more fluent developing in a cloud environment. They are able to issue a greater number of new products and be ready to drive rapid improvements should they be required. What is interesting is that consumers tend to be forgiving of glitches in early product releases if it delivers an engaging and innovative service.
Historically, fear of these early issues had led to operators being overly cautious and ceding significant advantage to the competition. Operators are forced to bend to unforeseen budget pressures and shifting resources priorities that elongate service product cycles. IT budgets often become frozen to meet more immediate demands of managing a network. Suddenly a project that could have taken six months instead takes over eighteen months. This creates a win for their more nimble OTT competitors, both in terms of the sophistication of the software service itself and in time to market. When taken together, these forces can dramatically impact the relevancy of operator service offerings. Operators have to do things differently to compete in this more agile arena – personal cloud solutions provide this opportunity.
