Accelerating Digital Transformation with "Surge" - The Digital Accelerator Platform

Over the years most of the researches conducted on Digital Transformation projects executed shows a gloomy picture with many such projects aiming at big-bang transformation failing to deliver the promise. While this has been a topic of discussion on why the projects fail, one thing it did is to reduce the confidence of CXOs to take up such a huge transformation project. The biggest question people have in their mind is - why should I touch what is already working today? The best solution would have been looking at it as just another feature extension on legacy, but unfortunately it’s a bit more complicated than that. Digital Transformation is not a project - it’s a continuous journey without a defined end stage.

With increasing number of new generation consumers as well as the employees in the Operator’s workforce, the expectations about good customer experience gets defined by the likes of facebook, whatsapp, google and Netflix and many more everyday experiences which keeps on evolving with the advent of technology. In the consumer market, even 6-8 years back, Omni-Channel, Omni-Device experiences were mandatory to start with, which the Operators are struggling to bring in today in their channels, especially the legacy ones. So, while playing the catch-up game, there will be new experiences keeping everyone busy with a long roadmap to implement superior and differentiating customer experiences.

Also, another biggest driver for Digital Transformation should be that all changes and priorities are business driven - there is no point in changing technology only for the sake of it! We are one of the pioneers in using open source technologies for Telecom IT products - but that also didn’t happen by chance - we had a business problem to solve evolving out of geo-political scenario in the world, and while doing so, we also realized additional advantages of that move to reduce overall TCO. The biggest problem that Operators face today might be the lack of agility and speed in their IT systems to introduce anything new - be it onboarding a new partner, or a new bundle offer or be it a new information to capture about subscribers in the CRM system. While the facebook’s of the world are rolling out new features daily and doing A/B testing to understand consumer behavior, the operators are in a league behind with age-old IT systems. Need of the hour is to have state-of-the-art agile platforms with continuous incremental feature releases that provides the ability to understand consumer behavior.  In order to overcome this challenge we focused from 2017 to start delivering containerized software to our customers.

Another important point to remember is that with emerging new experiences and digital enablers, it is important to think about new processes which are simpler than before and also developed in such an agile manner that making changes to them becomes extremely easy. Of course, Telecom industry is mandated to follow the government regulations and sometimes the processes burden is too much compared to OTT players, but still ease of process modeling and understanding the process flow is extremely important today. It also requires organization-wide culture change to think Digital.

Last but the most important one is to focus on growing revenues through an eco-system of partners to bring in the innovation from the market in the operator’s offering. Today’s way of building partnerships, signing contracts, onboarding partner offers, and finally multi-party settlements are too slow and a deterrent to creating topline impact fast enough. 

With all of these in mind, we launched our Digital Business Support Systems Suite 5 during February this year in Mobile World Congress, Barcelona. Since then we have engaged with customers to traverse their transformation journey with the Digital BSS Suite 5. However, we also realized that there are many a few operators who are looking at smaller steps to proceed towards transformation, rather than going for a big-bang approach. Our learnings from the market inspired us to start creating a platform for accelerating digitalization while reusing legacy as much as possible. We have worked with one of our customers in the Latin American market to Go-Live with a few new services on top of our platform. With this experience and keeping in mind the market needs, today, in AfricaCom, Cape Town, South Africa, we are launching a new product set – “Surge” to Accelerate Digital Transformation.

Built with open-source technologies, ‘Surge’ is an innovative and modern age offering that empowers Operators to fast-track digital transformation bridging the legacy services in the existing environment, thereby, ensuring business continuity. ‘Surge’comes in three different solution packages to suit the business needs of operators of all sizes:

‘Surge Services’ - Digital Microservices Accelerator: Targeted to fast-track digital transformation with open APIs wrapping existing legacy services, allows creation of new APIs on top with microservices orchestration and exposing & monetizing those metered APIs through an API Gateway. ‘Surge Services’ is a low-code platform that allows Operators to design processes, manage process flows and also identify process bottlenecks. It also comes with a set of common platform services like Rules Engine, Notification, SSO and ID management.

‘Surge Xperience’ - Digital Experience Accelerator: Created on top of the Digital Microservices Accelerator, it includes two out-of-the-box enablers – the Customer 360 and Omni-channel Enablers, which helps Operators to develop a robust omni-channel customer experience with a 360-degree view of subscribers across all business lines connecting to legacy platforms, as well as a state-of-the-art self-care application that reduces cost of Customer Care. 

‘Surge Revenue’ - Digital Revenue Accelerator: Created on top of the Digital Microservices Accelerator, it includes an out-of-the-box enabler, Digital Partner Relationship Manager and empowers Operators to open new monetization opportunities by creating an ecosystem with partner offerings. It enables Operators to onboard new partners, aggregate, bundle and sell partner offerings as well as the management of complex multi-party settlements.

The complete package of offerings in Surge will help the Operators to Improve Customer Experience, Increase the Speed of service creation and Boost Revenue opportunities with tools to build a partner ecosystem. And all of this will come in a very attractive low total-cost-of-ownership, as well as complemented with DevOps & Support services to help the Operators to track process flows, make low-code changes to the processes, and create new services through Micro-Services development. We believe this unique offering will resolve the pain points faced by many Operators today who are indecisive about when and what to tackle for Digital Transformation due to the inherent risks involved. We intend to keep learning from the market on the responses we get, but, as always, will be committed to solve the challenges, whatever it takes….