In this era of deregulation and accelerating technological evolution, operators face an ever-growing number of disruptive factors that threaten their revenue. If operators have the tools and processes to get more content and applications to the market quickly, and reduce their costs and business risk in doing so, they will have a significant competitive advantage.
Consumer knowledge means more opportunities and reduced risk for operators going into services outside the traditional telecoms arena. Ericsson offers a broad market insight via Ericsson Consumer & Enterprise Lab as well as Ericsson Mobility World’s global network of third-party developers.
In addition, Ericsson can help operators to build a profitable and sustainable supply chain that offers attractive consumer and enterprise services and content, in two ways. The first is an operator-owned solution whereby Ericsson provides a service-delivery platform that supports service creation, sourcing and launch with common functions, testing and integration. The second is a hosted solution in which Ericsson offers proven consumer services and takes full responsibility for integration, operation and maintenance of portals and applications. Ericsson even has established relationships with major content providers such as Sony Music, EMI Music and Napster, significantly reducing the time and effort needed to offer what users want.
Most operator networks include elements from a variety of different suppliers and even different network generations. Systems Integration is the glue that keeps all these heterogeneous elements linked with the operator’s business and operations systems, providing quality of service, scalability and support for multiple network environments. Ericsson’s Business Unit Global Services provides advice and systems integration based on its global experience in helping operators deliver reliably and cost-effectively.
Ericsson’s experiences with operators that have deployed a well-structured service-delivery environment or chosen a hosted solution have shown that they can launch new content and applications as much as five times faster. With the common functions of Ericsson’s Service Delivery Platform, one southern European operator was even able to reduce time-to-market from 12 weeks to just two. In several cases operators have been able to launch music services in less than six weeks, after signing a hosting contract with Ericsson.
As Marc Leclerc, marketing manager at Ericsson, says: “Ericsson is uniquely positioned to be the supplier of choice for operators. We have global experience with hundreds of customers, and thanks to our experience from hosted services we know what it takes to efficiently deliver content and applications with telecom requirements. We deal with everything from content, supply and systems integration all the way to getting services into the hands of users.”
With Fast Service Launch, Ericsson offers an end-to-end responsibility for service delivery and content management that reduces time-to-revenue. As Leclerc says: "We understand this business intimately, we know how to deliver it and we think we are the ideal business partner for operators, helping them to launch new services quickly."
