Telecoms: It’s time to Cloud-Source!
E-billing/self care for long has been known to have a positive impact on customer loyalty, profitability and consumer behavior. Increasing awareness and evangelizing the use of e-bills is a big lever towards higher profitability and customer loyalty. The need of the hour is to go-beyond and ask “Is there a better way to deliver e-billing /self care services in the telecom space?” The transformation from an on-premise, licensed software solution to a cloud-based approach presents itself as a cost-effective, customer-collaborative and high ROI solution reflecting the evolving telecom industry landscape. It is imperative for the telecom operators that cloud based e-billing / self-care is not seen as a cost-cutting initiative, rather, as a core constituent of a larger business-transformation drive focusing on the hottest customer touch-points of the web 2.0 and social networking era, such as smart-phones, twitter etc.
Mobile applications store is another critical dimension in cloud space along which Telecom operators can diversify their offerings portfolio. According to Strategy Analytics, as quoted in the post, total mobile applications market is worth $8 billion in 2008 and the operators earn $2.8 Bn of this pie. The mobile applications market is expected to double to $16 billion by 2013 and assuming the same share of the pie, mobile operators will pocket $5.6 billion. This does not take into account the mobile advertising revenues into the revenues equation. These numbers imply a good story in the making for telecom operators but the key lies in the approach. My bet is on the cloud computing approach as it enables the telecom operators to innovate, collaborate with partners, interact with customers and at the same time keeps the costs low and ROI high!
