“It’s one thing to be a ahead of your time. It’s another to change the future.”
Lexus.
Do telcos need differentiated prestige brands, in much the same way as Lexus is to Toyota? Do they need to differentiate their bit and byte businesses from solution integration and again from apps/content, etc?
Telcos tend to be trusted providers of bit and byte and all manner of other carrier services that are unfortunately (or fortunately??) commoditising. Naturally enough, the telcos want to move up the value-chain into services such as solution integration, managed services, content provision, etc.
Being highly generalistic here, telcos don’t tend to have the same trusted name in delivering solution integration (SI) for customers as they do for leased lines for example. Even when they acquire respected SI’s, they tend to get subsumed under the umbrella brand and the respect gets diluted.
Each of these services that step up the value chain require different business models and skill-sets and cultures. Just as Toyota realised they couldn’t sell premium product under the Toyota brand and spawned Lexus, I wonder whether telcos need to lose the attachment to providing higher-value services under the umbrella brand?
With each of these differentiated brands, the requirements from their OSS and BSS tools also change. Sounds like an fascinating dilemma to me!
Standing out in a highly saturated and fragmented OSS market can be really difficult. We’re regularly involved in bake-offs where we see dozens of OSS
One of the things I love about my job is all the vendor demos I get to see. Product demos are one of the four
Have you read the book, “The 4-hour work week” by Tim Ferris? It was one of those relatively rare books that inspired a complete mindset
Over the years, we’ve been involved in many OSS procurement events and have seen a variety of different pricing models proposed by vendors. Being software,
Here at Passionate About OSS, we are exactly that – Passionate About OSS (Operational Support Systems). We’re also passionate about BSS, NMS, or any other names you call the tools that help to operationalise your network.
2 Responses
Hi Ryan,
You’ve made an interesting point – I wonder then does having very different OSS requirements across a large telco business mean that different OSS systems should be utilised? Probably the practical answer today is ‘yes’, but maybe that’s not the best approach going forward? Appreciated the internal silo problem is significant but perhaps changing market pressures will drive them towards taking much more advantage of their large ongoing investments into OSS – it will be interest to watch!
Hi Evan,
Yes indeed! I see there being room for the aircraft-carrier-analogy in the way OSS evolve as a way of overcoming the inertia of most large carrier OSS suites.