Interview with Carl Roberts, CCO at Epsilon

digital services

People, Platforms, Partnerships

SUCCESS Becoming global in a single click

digital services

People, Platforms, Partnerships

Carl Roberts Chief Commercial Officer, Epsilon

C

arl Roberts, Chief Commercial Officer at Epsilon, is one of our industry’s most respected executives. Having played an integral role in leading Verizon’s cloud and international wholesale global strategy, he is now positioning Epsilon at the forefront of the digital transformation.

I had the pleasure of exchanging thoughts with him about the future of telecom services in the digital era. He also shared with me how Epsilon is not only making connectivity simple, but also enabling a simpler service transformation for its own customers.

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TRANSFORMING THE WAY CUSTOMERS CONSUME TELECOM

What does service transformation mean to you?

For me, service transformation is a necessary and overdue revolution. It is about completely changing connectivity and the way customers consume networking services. It is very exciting, as it puts the power in the hands of the end-user. Up to recently, our industry was all about long term and rigid contracts.

But now, the “softwarization” of the network translates into a world where telecom, and more particularly connectivity services, can and should be provided using flexible, dynamic and fluid consumption models. Endusers and enterprises have been craving for this for a long time, and today’s technologies enable us to offer it to them.

Although it is an absolute revolution that needs to take place, it is also a considerable challenge for the large network operators.

Firstly, they have significant pre-existing service revenue streams, which they cannot afford to abandon too quickly. In addition, they have huge legacy networks, which means that the transformation of their current assets is a very big lift and one they need to do slowly and deliberately, if they don’t want to create additional business risks. So, it can be a rocky road for some.

At Epsilon, we are lucky not to have that legacy dependency. We are asset light and asset right. We have spent a lot of time over the past 5 years developing a software based application layer across our service portfolio called Infiny; which provides flexible, dynamic

and fluid, friction free way of consuming connectivity services through portals and API’s.

FAIL TO PLAN, PLAN TO FAIL If service providers want to starts its services transformation journey, how should they go about it?

The first thing is to know where you are coming from and where you are going. Even though that sounds naïve, I think defining a clear network and service transformation roadmap is key to your success, as it will be a pretty complex evolution for many.

It will not be an easy road ahead for many operators trying to automate their services, implement new software and launch APIs, all this whilst finding ways to fold in new technologies and protecting their customers service needs and satisfaction levels. Not a small feat and one you need to be well prepared for.

In addition, service transformation is about end-users. So a key step is to define how to best position this service transformation and the benefits it can bring them.

Consequently, having business conversations with the customers who will use your services, and finding how they can best benefit from them to enable their own transformation, should also be an integral part of your roadmap.

At the end of the day, a lot of it is about managing change and understanding how that modifies the business model, not only for you, but also for your customers.

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I think we agree that customers want more control and transparency when it comes to their network services. But what else do they crave?

What many growing companies also want is to become global in a click and to have a simple and straightforward way to dynamically turn-up or down capacity to meet their changing commercial demand.

This in a way is achieved by creating a connectivity fabric delivered through a mixture of simplified billing, one go-to provider for an array of service requirements and global reach with no hassle.

The trick is therefore to make the consumption of the services painless and easy at all levels: from the on-boarding, deployment, billing and payment to the realtime monitoring.

THE EPSILON SERVICE TRANSFORMATION JOURNEY

How did you address service transformation within Epsilon?

Over the past 2 years, we worked on developing our future vision, which is firstly about our people. When you have the right people, you are ready to grow and deliver customer-service excellence.

Secondly, it is about building platforms that allow our partners and their customers to use our services easily in an integrated fashion.

Finally, we have also realised that we must go to market through a partner channel whilst also building up interconnect ecosystem of internet exchanges and cloud service providers.

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So, this translates into our 3 Ps strategy: People, Platforms and Partners. Those are absolutely fundamental to our transformation strategy, as we believe that without any of those three pillars we will not be successful.

This shifts the customer conversation into how on-demand connectivity services help you drive your business in a upward direction while facilitating your growth in the simplest and most cost effective way possible.

That was a really big shift for Epsilon and it required a significant cultural switch, as everything starts with the mind-set of the people who empower this transformation.

This is a journey that everybody needs to take as this is our new reality.

What was your biggest challenge?

We had to rethink and reinvent the whole way we were delivering our services and interacting with our customers. We not only needed to review our product portfolio, but we also had to reinvent how our services were sold, contracted, costed, priced, delivered and billed. It meant a 360 degree transformation of our business, which was challenging enough.

But the biggest task was to get everyone involved, to get everyone from our engineering, to our sales and operations teams to understand what this transformation meant and to get them to embrace it. I think I am only realizing now how big a task it was.

But it was worth it, as now we are in a place where we can, in turn, become an enabler of our own customers’ transformation journey this is very powerful.

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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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