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MTS's Latsanych Heralds End to OTT Cold WarTT: What impact is your digital transformation strategy having on your online sales? VL: This is something we are very keen on and which gives us hope. The results so far have been something like a tenfold increase in online sales. We seem to be having success in getting customers engaged with us and I hope we'll be showing even better results in the future. TT: You've previously told me that MTS has set up a specific department to guide the digital transformation process. What prompted this move? VL: The biggest driver was the notion that the legacy business of telecom is not going up in the near future. Basic services like voice or even data have slowed down or declined. But telecom goes in waves. There used to be a fixed-line voice business. Then there was dial-up Internet, and lots people engaged with that. Then that faded and mobile telecom came into play and created a huge boom. When that was finally over the mobile data business appeared. This is very unlike the car industry where after the development of the engine everything goes into refining. There is always something next. So we embarked on a search for the next waves. We cannot create this out of nothing and were browsing for potential interest points, and there is this talk about digital transformation and big data. We realized there is so much knowledge and technology in telecom that is not effectively exploited. The idea is to leverage available information to enhance the current operation and find new products, although not necessarily from within telecom. But we have to be ready when something comes along and it will probably be in the digital environment. TT: Has big data helped you to boost online sales? VL: That's less to do with big data and more about exploiting the knowledge of other professionals. We partnered with Ozon, Russia's largest online supermarket, and actually became a shareholder in that company to learn about their online business. We learned a lot about their sales processes and online management. We've adopted these and it's proved to be very successful. TT: Is it getting easier to work with OTT players? VL: I wouldn't say it's getting easier but a couple of years ago we had no idea how to approach the social networks, the advertising networks, and now we think we have a better understanding of what we could do together. That was not the case a couple of years ago, when it really was a cold war and no one was interested in talking to each other but just in ensuring the other side was losing. TT: What's changed? VL: The cultural side of the telcos has changed but these guys also understand they need us. They have entered into a certain maturity phase and started to look at their businesses differently. TT: You recently announced a partnership effort with a number of other international operators called the Partnering Operator Alliance. Is that mainly about sharing best practices on working with OTT players? VL: This is a knowledge-sharing alliance and does not involve equity or participation fees. We are there to get access to the knowledge of others and the others are there for the same reason. Because we are not competing directly with each other, we are ready to show them how we do business and they are ready to share as well. We've been doing this already but in the past it involved one-on-one arrangements and meetings. We were going to Seattle to talk to T-Mobile about the Un-carrier initiative to see if we could do something like that. We went to South Korea to talk to SK Telecom about mobile commerce. This alliance gives us a relatively open garden to exchange knowledge and practices. We hope it will bring us more insights into how others do business and at the same time there is virtually no cost. — Iain Morris, , News Editor, Light Reading, Editor-in-Chief, Telco Transformation < Previous Page 2 / 2 |
In part two of this Q&A, the carrier's group head of network virtualization, SDN and NFV calls on vendors to move faster and lead the cloudification charge.
It's time to focus on cloudification instead, Fran Heeran, the group head of Network Virtualization, SDN and NFV at Vodafone, says.
5G must coexist with LTE, 3G and a host of technologies that will ride on top of it, says Arnaud Vamparys, Orange Network Labs' senior vice president for radio networks.
The OpenStack Foundation's Ildiko Vancsa suggests that 5G readiness means never abandoning telco applications and infrastructures once they're 'cloudy enough.'
IDC's John Delaney talks about how telecom CIOs are addressing the relationship between 5G, automation and virtualization, while cautioning that they might be forgetting the basics.
On-the-Air Thursdays Digital Audio
ARCHIVED | December 7, 2017, 12pm EST
Orange has been one of the leading proponents of SDN and NFV. In this Telco Transformation radio show, Orange's John Isch provides some perspective on his company's NFV/SDN journey.
Special Huawei Video
Huawei Network Transformation Seminar The adoption of virtualization technology and cloud architectures by telecom network operators is now well underway but there is still a long way to go before the transition to an era of Network Functions Cloudification (NFC) is complete. |
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