I think CSPs are in the best place of anyone in the entire ecosystem to use the data to deliver proactive, superior customer experiences
VanillaPlus: What do you see as the key cloud offerings that CSPs are moving towards offering? Charlie Thomas: They have already migrated to some offerings. They have some B2B offerings, especially in the data centre market, and enterprises are all moving to VoIP and hosted PBXs as well as looking to move their own IT infrastructure to the cloud – often provided by CSPs. Some have dabbled in apps by putting up app stores but I don’t think they’ve been very successful. They could be in a very good place to play in the security market. We now hear of security breaches and hacking that has jeopardised consumer and enterprise data. With mobility and cloud becoming ever more ubiquitous, I see security and protection, such as proactive fraud monitoring, being the sorts of applications that CSPs will be in a unique position to offer. The chief executives of CSPs are thinking beyond participating in cloud-based delivery toward providing turnkey services and solutions. For example, certain applications – such as healthcare and financial – require constant network quality so quality of service for delivery becomes extremely important with far greater consequences for failure. VP: What do CSPs need to be successful in offering cloud services?
VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I JUNE / JULY 2015
VP: To what extent are CSPs in a unique position to capture, collect, analyse and react in real-time to rapidly shifting consumer and business demands and desires? CT: I think CSPs are in the best place of anyone in the entire ecosystem to use the data to deliver proactive, superior customer experiences. They’ll be in a better position even than Google, although Google is now moving into some aspects of the network, and of course controls the operating system in the majority of mobile devices. CSP’s ownership of the network and access to the data that passes through networks, provides a substantial opportunity to benefit from being at the epicentre of all the data. They can use that data to understand consumption patterns and become much more proactive. They’re in a better position than anyone when it comes to location data. However, thus far, CSPs have yet to realize the value of this data. They have not demonstrated they can be innovative when it comes to creating exciting new applications and they tend to move in a me too or herd mentality. Telefónica was an early leader in looking at ways to monetise mobile data and all of the tier one CSPs have had teams all looking to do this for several years. That said, the innovation continues to
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CT: Some on-demand burstable services will become the new norm. Hence, being in a position to manage those will require the ability to react very quickly. CSPs
are normally reactive to rapidly changing customer desires and behaviours so having the right set of analytical tools will become essential in order to proactively understand changing demands on their networks and the propensity for burstable demand emerging at specific times of day or in specific locations.
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