Telecom Cloud Services

I was invited as a guest speaker at Telecom Cloud Services Summit this year at London. It was a nice event with a lot of Telco professionals around world and I had an opportunity to share my view on the topic.

I think the Cloud is an opportunity for Telecom operators if they invest and understand the ICT business correctly. Application driven customer acqusition and the drive for 4G data are two very crucial topics for Telcos to work on. The value of the sim-card is shrinking days in and out. I think the Telcos should understand their customers’ business much better and should be able to speak the language of ICT business instead of device, price plans and quick sales.

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Telecom Trends 2013

Trends and buzzwords are everywhere. On the other hand the core business of Telcos is shrinking. In such an environment, it is hard to find new revenue sources and keep the revenue figures green. In my world a telco should drive the core business with 100% focus on sales, cost consciousness and internal efficiency however look for alternative revenue sources for the future. In the presentation below, I try to tease you a bit on what might be those alternative revenue sources for Telcos. If you have any questions or comments feel free to contact me. I hope you enjoy it!

How to train your sales team efficiently

I have been training lots of sales teams on products that are newly launched or already on the market. I have met with real good sales people as well as regular ones. The only thing that was all same for any sales rep was the good results coming from the methodologies that I have applied at the beginning of the session. I will not go into the ways and methodologies I am using in this post but just wanted to share a lessons learned with you.

What Does Convergence Mean?

I was thinking about the meaning of convergence in Telecom context this morning. I have came up to see this nice graph developed by VisionMobile. So what do you think are the vision, focal point and the compete based on will look like by 2015?

My guess is vision: connected devices, focal point: software/apps and compete based on: quality of content.

Is Mobile Device Management an Opportunity for Telcos?

If you ask CTOs what are they looking to do to secure personal devices used at work, they generally talk about data encryption or MDM. Since data encryption is already widely used I think the real interesting thing is to understand what they are looking for in an MDM solution?

I think there the confusion starts. Should we then consider a mobile device managent, or mobile security solution or maybe a mobile application/data management tool?

LTE First Impressions

I would like to share few things around LTE development in Sweden. First of all 4G has been adopted much faster than 3G. Remember that for the first years after introducing 3G, in most markets, there was hardly any data usage. Contrary to that, just like two years after the launch of LTE in Sweden, we are at the data usage level we were at with 3G at 10 years post-launch. I can clearly say we have already skipped the pre-maturity phase entirely.

Ericsson launches Telco Data Center Build and Cloud

I was reading my emails after a long summer vacation at my office on Tuesday and just realized a pfd attachment; Ericsson goes into data center business to be a stronger ICT player. I think this is a smart move since a lot of Telecom companies are nowadays looking into providing some IT services as well. Being a close partner to Telco players, Ericsson needed to evolve as well and they did it. Ericsson’s Data Center Build and Data Center optimization offering will meet increased demand for cloud-based services as enterprises seek to become increasingly mobile. With this offering, Ericsson enters the market for data centers and strengthens its position as an ICT player.

I liked this news and found it a very important and strategic move. I think the future is bright for evolving and developing companies such as Ericsson.

Cloud, M2M and Big Data for Telcos

One petabyte a day: That’s how much data BMW’s Connected Drive cars will generate by 2017 reckons BMW Group IT infrastructure chief Mario Müller.

I took out this note while listening BMW group’s Cloud presentation at Telecom Cloud Services Summit at Berlin this year. M2M data will need a lot of IT capacity and the data produced by machines will be a real source of revenue. I realized that a lot of Telcos are still confused when it comes to M2M and Cloud business models. Many invested heavily into the infrastructure and getting ready for a big fight against global giants such as Amazon. Well, sure they can differentiate based on their local market demans but I am a bit sceptical to IaaS, except storage, at all.

I realized that when Telcos talk about M2M it was all about providing connectivity and mainly about infrastructure when it comes to the Cloud. None of the CSPs really talked about Big Data yet. I believe enterprises need more than basic connectivity and infrastructure. I think they need a solution, which will help them create business intelligence and value for them. I think big data analytics and ICT business solutions are the future for CSPs.

Around sixty percent of CSPs fear they’ll be bit-pipe providers in the M2M and Cloud market. To avoid this, they must have the ambition to take some more risk and be more innovative. I do not agree at all – as one Telco professional stated on the panel- “telcos are expected to be evolutionary not revolutionary”. Telcos need to better understand the business value of their offers and be more a complete ICT providers, extracting intelligence from the pipe – instead of simply delivering connection from A to B.

So you want to be a Cloud provider?

What do you need to be a Cloud provider? You could be a Telco or an IT Reseller. Once you decided that you will provide Cloud services you need these capabilities.

1. A Cloud enabled data center

2. Platforms (app store, SSO, aggregation platform and so on…) to provide cloud

3. Monetize your services

4. Business development capabilities.

I think yet another important questions that you need to answer are;

1. What do we have internally today? (Because a lot of the things listed above can be outsourced as well)

2. Your ability to handle an ecosystem.

3. Your sales channels and capabilities

4. What will make you different? (Easy to do business with, price, quality, or what else…)

5. Applications and Infrastructure is commodity now, so you need to focus on business models and content instead.

Sit and think twice before you make any move towards Cloud. Make a good business case and take meaningful risks. Because the market is still emerging and Cloud is still “nice to have” not “must to have” at the moment.

Today’s Networks and Next Generation Networks

Yesterday at Kista sience tower, where is the sillicon valley of Sweden, we had a meeting with a vendor to discuss next generation switching, cloud, M2M and IMS. I think today’s network is quite lagacy and complex. IMS is coming but nothing big will happen in couple of years. Yet another interesting topic was  the interoperability of new network systems with the old, legacy ones up and running at the core today. Cloud and M2M are thightly related to each other and it is really up to a telco to position itself from connection only to solution provider in this journey. Do you have any experience on telco cloud services or IMS, what are your thinking around these topics?