Partner Article

Realising The True Essence of Digital Transformation

This year’s Mobile World Congress at Barcelona highlighted the progress operators are making towards digital transformation. Operators are developing new internal capabilities, increasingly leveraging partners’ expertise and are overcoming long-standing cultural barriers.

At this year’s event, several new themes rose to prominence; Delta Partners’ Associate Partner, Eudald Pous and Senior IU Director, Darren Tan explore the six key themes that were front and centre during this year’s congress: Video, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, 5G, Internet of Things, Artificial intelligence, and Network Virtualisation.

Video is forecast to be the main driver of growth in consumer data, and with analysts estimating the average video traffic per user to rise to 2.7GB per month in 2020, it is no surprise that telcos are exploring various video content strategies. In order to capture additional value from video, operators need to shift the focus away from the traditional offer of voice, SMS and data. The offer needs to evolve from selling connectivity to selling digital experiences, providing users access to the content and services they value.

Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) or Mixed Reality (MR) will remain relatively niche in the short-term with a continued focus on gaming, and in the short-to-medium-term VR and AR/MR will not represent a significant revenue opportunity for telcos. However, the longer-term potential for AR/MR and VR is significant, with telcos well-positioned to play a key role provided the operators can potentially leverage their position as enablers of these experiences, and in turn become the driver of VR/AR ecosystems, particularly for the mobile device.

In terms of 5G, what it ultimately delivers is not yet defined. Delivering 5G will require significant capital investment as operators improve coverage and capacity through small cell deployments and increased backhaul. The investment required is likely to lead to both greater industry consolidation, as well as closer collaboration between operators, governments and other industries that will benefit from 5G deployment.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been a headline topic at MWC for the last five years yet operators have struggled to capitalise on the opportunity. However, IoT is steadily gaining traction, with MWC 2017 highlighting the progress the industry is making. Fragmentation and a lack of interoperability across multiple standards and platforms has stymied the growth of IoT. Security becomes an increasingly important topic as a single weak point in the IoT system leaves the user open to attack, with the growth and success of IoT depending on the ability to secure the ecosystem.

The potential of Artificial intelligence (AI) is huge – it could shape every possible decision, providing additional insights to augment human understanding, however today’s capabilities are limited. In many cases chatbots still require human intervention and digital assistants do not yet command consumers’ trust as an intelligent, human-like companion. Concerns over data privacy, as well as wider philosophical issues regarding the nature of AI will also prove obstacles to AI advancement and adoption. To successfully leverage the power of AI, telcos will need to transform their organisations and digitise their assets to enable greater amounts of data to be captured and to facilitate increased levels of automation.

Network virtualisation –another hot theme in MWC 2017 offers several potential benefits to operators the sooner they embrace it, however new skills and ways of working will be required to manage a virtualised network. Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) will reduce the cost of network management and accelerate time-to-market as physical infrastructure does not have to be deployed at customer premises. Adopting these new methodologies will allow operators to move faster and innovate more, increasing overall organisational agility.

The potential arising from digital transformation is significant. The increased agility will allow operators to compete with the internet players and capture greater value from new digital opportunities.

Operators cannot afford to slow-down and must accelerate their transformation efforts as the pace of innovation continues to increase.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Broadcast Exchange .