Overview
Effectively managing customer data and applying operational information is fundamental to success in the telecommunications industry. You need up-to-date information to make critical decisions along a range of dimensions, from operational performance metrics to new competitive threats. Layers of legacy systems have compounded complexity and costs while yielding little improvement in customer satisfaction.
According to the Application Management Global Benchmark Study by the Bathwick Group, 70% of telecommunications executives report the complexity of their application landscapes is having an impact on their organization’s competitiveness, with 15% stating the impact is significant. Now is the time to streamline that complexity and reduce the cost of your application infrastructure.
Telecommunications industry challenges
- Operational effectiveness/cost reduction – Over half of all telecom respondents reported that inflexible or non-integrated business processes represent a real threat to competitiveness. Existing application portfolios reduce the ability of organizations to respond to market changes and result in higher maintenance costs as they attempt to accommodate an explosion of new services. With over half of the executives reporting that most of their application testing is still done manually, this signals an opportunity for greater test automation to improve development processes and have a significant impact on application quality and cost, and ultimately, overall customer satisfaction.
- Quality customer experience – For telcos, customer insight linked with operational facts and analysis are the surest path to enhancing the customer experience and reducing churn. Analytics not only help telcos anticipate service problems and reduce handling time, but they also assist with segmentation and targeting of relevant products and services. This improves the customer’s digital experience and subsequent loyalty. The challenge lies in streamlining and integrating all the applications, but in the Bathwick study, only 57% of responding telcos report they can actually see all data relating to a customer in a single view.
- New business models – As telcos are challenged with delivering new communication, content and advertising services in response to a rapidly changing marketplace, legacy and redundant applications represent a “speedbump,” resulting in lower flexibility and higher costs. Nearly half of the survey respondents admit this is having an adverse impact on their ability to cope with changing business demands and impacting new business development strategies. It’s no surprise that over half of the respondents reported that they are planning significant investment in reducing the number of applications in use.
IBM Application Services offers the tools, technology and resources to help your telecommunications organization become a leader in service innovation, digital convergence and operational service assurance. Application Services provides the following best-in-class solutions for optimizing your application portfolio and your business integration, innovation and transformation objectives:
- Using SOA/SOA management to create inherently flexible infrastructures
- Improving and streamlining processes to meet recognized quality standards
- Employing testing services to improve application quality and lower costs
- Rationalizing the application portfolio to support better integration with third-party systems
- Accessing IBM's breadth of specialized skills for custom application development and systems integration
- Managing non-strategic applications to reduce cost while freeing key resources to focus on innovation
- Adoptingglobal delivery resources, best practices and business processes to minimize operational costs with high service levels
- Re-assessing governance processes to focus investments in the right areas
Why IBM
IBM's industry expertise, global investment in application skills, and leading modernization and testing capabilities help provide its foundation for leadership in application design, development and management. Our in-depth understanding of business processes and information technology uniquely qualifies us to work with clients who wish to focus on transformation initiatives, establish global support models, simplify and reduce support vendors and business risk and eliminate support costs.
As one of the largest providers of consulting, systems integration and application services, IBM has unrivaled experience optimizing application investments and aligning them to business requirements. Our team of more than 90,000 Application Services consultants located around the world can assemble the industry and technology expertise through proven methodology, research innovation, and solution assets and accelerators that help you achieve greater productivity and business agility.
