magazine - Connect-World
magazine - Connect-World
magazine - Connect-World
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Communication service providers<br />
How CSPs can stay competitive<br />
by Gordon Rawling, Oracle Communications<br />
Competition has been hard on CSPs (communications service providers). Price competition<br />
- a race to the bottom - mines their businesses; still, CSPs don’t need to fight on price.<br />
Packages tailored to the individual user, based on usage data they already have, can help<br />
CSPs offer quality services which cannot be offered at the cheap, commoditised end of the<br />
market. Skilfully tailored services, based on analytics and insight, can fight churn as well as<br />
be a key to customer acquisition.<br />
Gordon Rawling is the Director of EMEA Marketing for Oracle Communications; he joined Oracle Communications as senior marketing<br />
director for market development in the EMEA region. Prior to his role at Oracle, Mr Rawling worked for Amdocs where he held a<br />
variety of roles, from delivery to product marketing. Prior to Amdocs, Mr Rawling worked for EDS, performing management consulting,<br />
relationship management and delivery roles throughout the organisation.<br />
Gordon Rawling graduated from Salford University with a degree in computer science.<br />
The Internet has done much to change the<br />
way we live and how we work and entertain<br />
ourselves, but our loyalty to those companies<br />
who first got us online, or who we’ve used<br />
for many years, is still something that can<br />
never be taken for granted. Especially if those<br />
companies fail to remain competitive with<br />
new entrants flooding the communication<br />
service provider (CSP) market.<br />
However, being competitive is no easy riddle<br />
to resolve. It would be easy to assume it is all<br />
about price but the truth is far from it, even in<br />
these straitened times. Our Internet access in<br />
particular has gone from being a nice to have<br />
to an essential in many homes.<br />
Network infrastructure is also coming under<br />
increasing pressure from industries. While<br />
consumers have been shopping, banking,<br />
reading and connecting with friends for<br />
some time, the rise of Machine-to-machine<br />
communications (M2M) to automate<br />
processes in industries including healthcare<br />
insurance, automotive, logistics, retail and<br />
utilities is a much newer phenomenon. The<br />
increasing volume of traffic related to M2M<br />
makes it even more important for CSPs<br />
to understand usage trends if they want to<br />
improve their service offering and find a way<br />
to monetise.<br />
But unlike other utilities where value for<br />
money relates to an intersection of price,<br />
availability and reliability, CSPs find a far<br />
greater array of customer preferences and<br />
expectations. Some customers are more<br />
motivated by speed, some by price, some by<br />
quality of service, and some by download<br />
limits or factors such as bundled content<br />
or value-added-services. However, none of<br />
those potential differentiators are mutually<br />
exclusive. Most consumers are likely to be a<br />
combination of these factors, skewed more<br />
or less towards price depending on the value<br />
they perceive their Internet service to provide<br />
them with, which is why M2M services are so<br />
crucial to CSPs.<br />
This means that first and foremost, the CSP<br />
must understand each customer and their<br />
22 • EMEA 2013