BCSG: Tim Marsden's 2015 Trends

2015 Trends

Details: Tim Marsden; Category: 2015 Trends; 14 January 2015; 8822 views

From our perspective, through many recent engagements with Service Providers and Industry events it is clear that both Africa and Asia are really accelerating when it comes to the level of focus on digital-based services that complement their core telco offerings.

There are a couple of reasons for this; firstly there are a lot of 4G deployments happening in emerging markets, especially in the more developed African countries such as South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya, enhancing the existing 3G coverage. In Asia, there are also some very developed countries such as Japan, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Malaysia who have had the technical capability for a number of years but up until now have focussed on growing their mobile data businesses.

Africa and Asia have consequently lagged behind Western Europe and the USA, with regards to the adoption of new digital services such as Cloud infrastructure and business applications. However this has meant that they’ve been able to observe the US and Western Europe and the adoption challenges they have faced such as security and education of their customer base on the benefits of the cloud. Western Europe and the US have effectively ‘blazed the trail’ for the emerging markets so the adoption in those regions is now accelerating at a much faster rate.

This opens up a great opportunity for Service Providers to enhance their telco value propositions through complementary cloud applications such as device security, data backup, collaboration and vertical apps that help grow their businesses; especially within the small and medium customer segment (SMB). Although SMBs see the business benefits of adopting cloud applications they typically lack the expertise and time needed to select and use the right cloud services for their businesses. This is where service providers fit as they are very well positioned to become trusted advisors to help SMBs find and use new digital services, whilst providing very competitive pricing when packaged with other telco services.

Many telcos now recognise this huge opportunity; however they do not have the specialist expertise or capabilities to deliver, sell and support these new cloud business applications to realise the full business growth potential. These would include a cloud service brokerage platform and an integrated business apps portfolio to deliver the core cloud services and also extensive expertise in business planning, value proposition creation; Go-to-market and sales channel enablement and end-customer support.

Partnerships with specialised cloud marketplace providers are key to ensuring both fast time to market and commercial success. When selecting a provider it is critical that in addition to a leading cloud brokerage platform and apps portfolio they have extensive experience selling business apps to SMBs with partners, which is integral to their service offering. They should take a true partnership approach becoming deeply invested in the success of their partners and provide critical areas such as sales training and an end-customer help desk. In addition, their full service platform should enable the partner to get to market quickly; performing key service functions, such as billing and CRM, for launch and it should be modular to enable these functions to be brought in-house by the partner as required going forward.

The stars seem to have aligned for Service Providers with SMB customers fast adopting cloud services in emerging markets and the availability of 4G and 3G networks providing enough data coverage to support this. Telcos are actively looking for the differentiation and added value that cloud business apps can bring to their offerings. Having been in the telco cloud business apps space for the past 6 years with HP and then Telefonica I see a real tipping point now and a fantastic opportunity for both SMBs and telcos. I am very much looking forward to the exciting year ahead.

Tim Marsden is the Director of Service Providers at BCSG.