Letter from Expert - Telecom

There is no doubt that the telecom sector is at the forefront of digitization. It is making tremendous shifts in technology to enable new ways of communication, interactions, and accessing information. I believe digital transformation brings new opportunities for telecom businesses to innovate for improving the consumer experience in line with their expectations. Moreover, it is empowering them to rebuild their market position, produce attractive offerings for consumers, and recreate the business ecosystem.

I believe integrated network management, 5G, wireless payments, and the internet of things are core components of any telecom business strategy. What makes these important for telecom operators? It helps them offer faster speeds and new services & products to their consumers, thereby enabling a competitive edge.

While security remains a primary concern, other challenges like adopting agile-development-based digital solutions and meeting the demand surge in OTT platforms are significantly impacting the telecom industry. I think telecom companies must move away from their legacy systems to incorporate cross-functional collaboration, network APIs, consolidated systems, and governance-as-a-process.

Although telecom businesses have overcome the pandemic repercussions so far, macroeconomic factors continue to pose headwinds. The focus of organizations must remain on technology innovation and investment, along with the drive for standardizing operations and processes. In addition, adapting to top influential trends, such as cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, edge computing, predictive maintenance, and data analytics is the way to go for telecom companies if they aim to remain at the forefront of the competition.

I would like to point out that the proliferation of IoT and the use of ML algorithms in the telecom sector has entailed a massive demand for potent computing power. Cloud computing plays a vital role here, equipping telecom companies with more capacity, improving resiliency, enabling effective scalability, and facilitating system updates. To give an example of the cloud’s influence, mobile network operators can improve their industry-wide and leverage cloud computing to accelerate their digital transformation efforts. It makes it a cinch for them to meet the expectations of modern customers.

We can already witness more and more telecom companies move away from legacy systems to benefit from an agile, scalable, and efficient cloud environment. Digital transformation powered by the cloud is enabling telecom companies to enhance customer experience via digital omnichannel services, customer relationship management, social media interactions, and chatbots. By analyzing vast amounts of data using modern data lakes and data warehouses, telecom companies can extract valuable data for better planning and strategic developments.

Looking ahead, it would not be an overstatement to say that networks will revolve around data centers that proliferate in hybrid environments, to make the best of both worlds, which are cloud and on-premises deployments. As telecom operators seek more affordable ways of managing network operations, their need for cost efficiency will rev up. Ultimately, the industry will benefit from the ongoing spiral of new capital that empowers them to transform into an integrated provider of digital-native telecommunication services.