In this interview with Angus Ward, CEO, Beyond Now, at Digital Transformation World 2024, he reflects on how innovation and AI are shaping the industry, shares key insights on how CSPs can be successful in their transformation journeys, and why B2B is the single most important opportunity for CSPs, highlighting the need for a new approach.
It's definitely been a hard year for the industry. You only need to look at share price across the board to see which carriers actually increased share price over the last 4-5 years. There are only a handful who are growing revenues and profits. So, it’s a tough environment out there.
That having been said, we've got a clear vision for how businesses can transform, in three key ways.
Firstly, how to digitalize the operating model. Increasingly, carriers want to be able to sell online and have self-serve. So, moving the whole operating model to enable enterprise customers to be able to discover, configure and buy things digitally with assisted sales, and then have end-to-end automation, is how to drive out costs for those products and services based on that digital operating model.
Having a highly successful customer experience is also extremely important, with an online experience backed by tools like AI for digital marketing and digital selling, that keep the journey super simple. This makes for a wonderful customer experience where customers visit a website and can easily step through the process to discover and buy things.
Then finally, if you've got optimized orchestration and fulfilment of services – a super quick, super easy customer experience – then they'll want to buy more. And that means adding an ecosystem of partners or having a rich portfolio of products and services people want to buy. But you need to go beyond the simple Microsoft 365 and things like Google Workspace, to create real solutions that solve customer problems and flip the model. Therefore, you start off with a customer and the problems they want to solve, and then create the perfect solutions to those problems, whether that's in industry verticals, or solving things like security and cyber attacks.
With an ecosystem of partners you add complexity with a richer portfolio, but take out complexity by having that end-to-end automation. This means you can do everything from the self-serve to the partner settlement, completely automated, completely frictionless, which means adding cost to your base, but adding revenue at the same time.
A lot of CSPs and even tech companies are looking to push their businesses more online to enable their products to really be discovered and to transform into a fully digital customer lifecycle instead of the old analogue way. What we see is a single umbrella customer journey, which brings together core connectivity and all the products and services and ecosystem partners in combined offers.
Keeping pace with technology and the changing needs of our customers is of utmost importance to us. We work diligently to constantly improve our product to ensure our offerings are as simple, effective and innovative as possible for our customers. On the product side, we’ve launched a number of new modules.
Our Partner Orchestration, which provides a truly digital journey for building a partner ecosystem, gives partners the ability to go through a portal with a structured process to be evaluated, and onboarded into a library of partners. This ensures they can build an ecosystem with a clear library and database of all the partners and capabilities they bring.
The new Partner Entity enables simple onboarding of those partners to be added and combined into new solutions with core connectivity. For the CSP, we also have Headless E-commerce, another new module that's moved online, as a single umbrella customer architecture, and of course our Wave AI suite.
We wouldn’t be who we are today without our customers and collaborators. We're committed to helping our existing customers expand and grow. You can find out more about our work with Adamo, who tripled their customer subscription numbers using our platform and have grown successfully using Beyond Now’s BSS.
We're delighted to have a new customer, Odido, formerly named T-Mobile Netherlands, supporting them with our Digital Marketplace and BSS. We also shared a stage here at Digital Transformation World with Omantel, who have a national Vision 2040 with a marketplace at its center to help move their entire business economy towards a digital economy.
We are also expanding into Latin America with a number of new opportunities – something we see as a very exciting market. Finally, deepening relationships with hyperscalers such as AWS and Google, boosts our innovation and capabilities – something that is ultimately passed on to our customers.
We typically divide this into three segments.
The first one is how you digitalise your operating model, really using AI in the back office to actually take costs out, be super efficient and have a great orchestration fulfilment process, using AI to overcome some of your biggest challenges.
The second area is around customer experience and how you move to having an online presence, using AI both to digitally market and digitally sell, with assisted sales rather than the old physical sales model. You can have a far richer set of products with more complexity because the AI assistant really helps you. Let’s take a small and medium sized business, for example, perhaps a farmer who is not so IT literate – they can buy sophisticated solutions using an AI assistant, introducing things like smart farming solutions, whereas without AI they would have to keep it simple.
And the third area is around revenue generation, where you create the products and services, and adding AI into those products you sell. So, for example, on SD WAN, there is an analytics dashboard, but what you really want to know is, are my routers working? Using AI as a key component, the solutions created highlight the value, so it pings you when your routers aren't working rather than giving you a huge dashboard to wade through.
To really address these needs of digitalizing your operating model, customer experience and revenue growth, we've launched our Wave AI module, which is a fantastic way of helping customers give prepackaged, out-of-the-box solutions to deliver those outcomes for customers.
