Kathy Gibson reports from AfricaCom in Cape Town – Over the top (OTT) services are spreading across the value chain and driving new opportunities.
John McClure, GM: service provider group at Intel, says there are three different growth paths for operators to take advantage of these opportunities.
The first is to accelerate the cloud service offering; the second to accelerate their move to network function virtualisation; and the third is to increase the value of data with analytics.
There is a trend to cloud adoption and several operators are already making good money out of cloud services. “The key is to have a cloud strategy,” McClure says. “It’s critical to be developing your cloud service offering.”
The opportunities for operators in the cloud include infrastructure as a service (IaaS), with government being a good target customer.
Software as a service (SaaS) is another opportunity, with software players like Salesforce.com, SAP and Oracle all looking to partner with operators.
Hybrid cloud is a major opportunity for operators. Enterprises often don’t want to move their full workloads to the cloud, but prefer to have a hybrid cloud model. Operators are ideally positioned to capture this revenue, McClure says.
Network as a service (NaaS) is an area where operators are uniquely positioned to offer the best value-added services, security and unified billing.
A technology causing huge disruption at the moment is network function virtualisation – but operators can seize it as an opportunity to offer it to their clients.
“As the LTE networks are built out there an opportunity to build out services as part of the infrastructure,” McClure says.
The big data and analytics market is growing, and its move to the cloud is becoming a reality. The BDA market for telecoms is expected to grow at a 50% CAGR to reach $5,4-billion.
The critical steps to success start with using the technology internally to reduce churn and maximise revenue; then turn the expertise external as a service offering.
“The best audience for this is once again government,” McClure says. “By modernising infrastructure and moving quickly, operators can have a new revenue stream.”
