Forward-looking service providers are leveraging agile, cloud-based SaaS platforms to lower infrastructure, middleware and operating costs that consume capital expenditures, while enabling them to transform into “lean" CSPs capable of operational excellence. Today's accelerated pace of change absolutely requires software-driven and programmable environments in which CSPs can offer predictability, speed-to-market and agility — all necessary to winning the overall digital transformation race. 

A cloud-based overlay to existing technologies enables providers to redefine customer-centric services by shifting from reactive approaches to managing transactions, to proactively taking consumers on their digital journeys. 

The capabilities of lean CSPs will empower them to capture, analyze, and act upon consumer preferences, habits and history, and deliver the digitized, automated, seamless experience that consumers crave. 

Leveraging a single federated identity for each customer ensures that regardless of the services used in the past — or those services to be used in the future — the provider has full visibility into customer preferences across all content, device, and billing offerings. 

Innovation Follows Transformation

Lean CSPs are equipped to meet, exceed, and stay ahead of the customer offerings that once seemed unattainable. Putting digital offers, traditional offers, or a combination of both in front of customers at the right time builds brand loyalty, while fomenting profitability and revenue gains. 

Lean CSPs can look toward flexible catalogs that support both digital and traditional services, and they can bundle those services as a single, yet individualized customer offering centered around preferences, habits, and history.

The agility of cloud-based infrastructures alleviates the need for IT experts to set up new offers or configure new products and services, which in turn gives non-IT functions across the organization the flexibility to quickly launch new products and services. 

Finally, to accommodate the industry-disrupting phenomenon of co-opetition among OTT and Pay-TV players —where Netflix is once again positioned to lead — paired with the ever-blurring lines between Pay-TV and mobile offerings, innovative providers are able to manage the complex ecosystem of products and services sourced from numerous third-parties across the digital services marketplace. 

Finding Your Place On the Path to Transformation

The weaknesses of back-office systems are no longer an excuse for not capitalizing on and monetizing the opportunities that the digital era presents to the market. To innovate, service providers can augment their back-offices with a complimentary SaaS, cloud-based Digital BSS platform that bridges the traditional and digital services gap. 

CSPs have the option to evolve into Lean CSPs, and integrate functionalities into their existing infrastructures to deliver a winning digital services program.

In the digital transformation race, CSPs must stay ahead to stay afloat. Innovative, forward-looking providers are going to leverage the cloud to transform for digital and to overcome everyday operational hurdles along the way.