VCS 2.0
A unified network spirit and vision
SUCCESS Our strategy starts with the customer
VCS 2.0 A unified network spirit and vision Brian Fitzpatrick, CEO Vodafone Carrier Services
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rian Fitzpatrick, CEO of Vodafone Carrier Services (VCS), is a man who needs no introduction. With 25+ years of wholesale experience, and having completed some of the most disruptive deals in the industry, he has been successfully spearheading Vodafone’s Carrier Services group since its inception five years ago. He is now putting the strategy in place to lead his team towards another five years of success and transformation. He recently shared with me his group’s greatest challenges, achievements and how they plan to continue to disrupt the industry for the next five years. The best is definitely yet to come!
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IT HAS BEEN A FANTASTIC RIDE!
As you were building your team, what was the main challenge you encountered? As you can imagine, Vodafone is a pretty complex organisation that has been very successful at operating independently. The Carrier Services team therefore had to instil a strategy that we call 26 +1. What this means is that we brought together the 26 Vodafone entities, plus Cable and Wireless Worldwide. Each has its own P&L, sets of dynamics, complexities and culture. With a lot of hard work, we were very successful at putting this ecosystem together, but it took some time. A considerable number of conversations had to be had and a great deal of air miles spent so we could sit with each and every executive team in the Vodafone Operating Companies to explain to them why it would be better for them to operate in one centralized unit versus a diversified team. We were able to slowly bring them together and show them the dividends and returns we could bring, as a centralized entity, to each of their organizations. We had to prove our value country by country and Operating Company by Operating Company. Now we see the result of all our hard work, as the reverse is actually happening, with the Operating Companies looking to us to do things for them faster and faster – which is great!
I am sure the last five years have gone in a flash, but what are you the most proud of?
I would say the thing I am the proudest of is the culture we have created inside of Vodafone. We are one of the very few true global organizations that it operates. VCS is one of the few entities that cuts across all the Vodafone borders and it was quite an achievement to create a unified team and spirit which is able to take advantage of the depth and breadth of all the assets that our group can bring to market. I can say that we have put together the best carrier team in the world in each of the areas that we operate in: International voice, Messaging and Connectivity. We have not only brought together the best in the industry, but we have created a team with synergy that truly gets along, which is really powerful. This means that we were able to work together as a team to overcome some pretty significant challenges. This is definitely something to be proud of. THE BEST RIDE IS YET TO COME…
Looking at the next five years, what is on your roadmap to continue to grow? If you think of it as a concentric circle, our strategy has always been the same. We start by looking at the customer, then the Vodafone assets that we have, and from there we define if we can commercialize them differently and at a larger scale. I don’t see this changing, as it gives us a very unique advantage that no one else in the industry has in terms of scale and reach. Also, over the next couple of years, as we
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have set ourselves up in International voice, Connectivity and Messaging, you can expect to see a fourth and a fifth area we will focus on. These will come from our core, from activities that we do today. We will most probably leverage something that we do on the retail side to expand the innovative services we offer and address the wholesale market more aggressively.
If all your dreams became reality and we talk again in five years’ time, what do you think VCS will have achieved or have become? In five years, I think that 50% of our business will be generated by things other than our current services. On top of the more traditional business, that we will continue to support, you will probably see us involved in areas such as identity authentication, SDN and VoLTE enabled innovations. We are investing billions in our Operating Companies to meet the standards that they need in their own markets. We are lucky to have the opportunity to partner with them to create something new and we will.
More specifically, do you have any plans when it comes to capacity in the future? We are probably one of the few communication companies that is still aggressively looking at investing in cables themselves. We are actively looking at different regions of the world in which to expand and in the coming months you should see some of these announcements. In the last five years, we have taken positions in five or six subsea cables and I don’t see
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this stopping. Our growth requirements will continue to speed-up, at the same speed as the OTTs. We will be very active investors, and will leverage the considerable investment Vodafone is making in Gigabit ultrafast fibre and cable broadband services. RIDING THE INDUSTRY’S TRENDS
Now looking outside of Vodafone, what do you think will be the main challenges and opportunities in our industry over the next five years? Without a doubt, it is the large content players and the OTTs. I think we must understand and appreciate their business models because we are not going to slow them down – that ship has sailed. More importantly, there are tremendous opportunities for us to be part of their journey and to enable the future with them. For example, in the capacity space, there is an opportunity for large organizations such as ourselves, that have the necessary infrastructure, to partner with them to provide that capacity or to partner with them to build it. We can even consider complementing each other, for example in the authentication and identity services, to create new types of business models to the benefit of both parties.
I know that automation is an important topic within VCS, having successfully created your voice routing platform, but do you see the automation trend picking-up speed in the wholesale industry going forward?
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Absolutely! At Vodafone, we have a massive global initiative which is called ‘Digital Vodafone’, this with the aim of automating every key process in the business.
One key part of that is our automated routing platform, which in essence is the automation of all that was taking place in our 26 entities within one centralized all IP platform.
Our objective with this initiative is to ensure efficiency, and better quality interfaces and services for our Vodafone customers and our Carrier customers.
This will be the foundation for a whole range of new services that haven’t been created yet.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Isabelle Paradis President HOT TELECOM
Isabelle is President and Founder of HOT TELECOM, one of the most innovative and creative telecom research and consulting companies in the industry. More recently, Isabelle has been working with many of the world’s telecom service providers to help them define their transformation strategy. She has published several articles and reports on the subject and has spoken at numerous conferences around the world to share her views on the future of the international telecoms business.
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