Steps telcos need to take were highlighted in two presentations at France’s TM Forum Live! today
Operators must move quickly and act smartly if they are to leverage the Internet of Things to create new opportunities for Real-time communications, Italtel’s Chief Marketing and Technology Officer warned today.
Speaking at TM Forum Live!, held in Nice, France, Federico Descalzo said the ‘webification’ of communications raises the question of what this means for the future of the traditional telco.
It is far from bad news, though, according to Descalzo, as the transformation of communications from a telecoms service to an application within a service provides more than enough opportunity for operators to claim their slice of what promises to be a very lucrative pie.
“In order to achieve success in this area, telcos must consider two factors,” said Descalzo. “The first is what is the most valuable, and therefore most lucrative, service they can offer and the second is are their networks and processes equipped to deal with the dramatic change IoT and WebRTC will no doubt bring.”
In terms of services, Descalzo continued, providing a gateway between Over-the-Top (OTT) applications and the legacy network is perhaps the most immediate and worthwhile service which operators can offer.
Descalzo stressed that moving from exploitation to exploration requires a dramatic cultural change, with the ability to develop communication ecosystems and the identification of the reusable assets appealing accelerators in the transformation towards the digitalized world.
Speaking at another presentation yesterday, Federico’s colleague, Francesco Sferlazza, Head of Agile Innovation Lab at Italtel, explained the second element which operators must take into account.
“SDN & NFV are replacing legacy hardware with software. Operators can actually leverage on Agile & DevOps. This will require a new mindset, a cultural change, a new organizational model,” he said. “Agile & DevOps are all about to lower the cost of future change with the ability to adapt now being a key performance indicator for telcos”.
Sferlazza went on to outline how technologies, such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) can help achieve this and how Italtel is working with operators to make this a reality.
