Operators exploring new ways to engage with customers

The Regional Telco and Connectivity IoT Leaders' Panel.

Operator revenues are no only longer about providing connectivity, which is now a given for business operations, said panelists at a Regional Telco & Connectivity IoT Leaders Panel at the recent Asia IoT Business Platform conference in Singapore.

"Customers don’t really care about connectivity, it should just be there," said Mikael Lindholm, Head of Asia Pacific, Telenor Connexion, who moderated the Regional Telco & Connectivity IoT Leaders Panel.

Apinetr Unakul, Member of the Board of Directors, CAT Telecom, where he sponsors the CAT City Digital Platform business team said, "We try to engage startups, we can’t do everything ourselves so we provide a platform for incubation for small companies. We put in a lot of effort for other people to come in and join it. We're creating an ecosystem in various cities...if we’re friends in the future we can do something together. We're creating a lot of friends and have invited a lot of friends and will help them grow."
 
Michael Frausing, Head, Enterprise & IT Enabled Services Group, Globe Telecom, shared that the Globe sales team used to sell connectivity. "Now it is about the customer's pain points, how to solve them, an end-to-end conversation," he said. 

Zamry bin Abdullah, CMO, Telekom Malaysia's subsidiary VADS Lyfe, which aims to be the market leader in smart home and smart city services for real estate development in Malaysia, disclosed that the company works with suppliers and customers on a revenue sharing model.

Zamry elaborated that vendors have to 'rearrange their thoughts' about the way they do business. "They have to change, and at least in my organisation we don’t even have the term 'vendor'. We only have 'partnership' and 'management'. It’s all about collaboration," he said. "Big companies have fallen because they are not willing to change their business."

When a company comes to VADS Lyfe looking for office connectivity, VADS Lyfe may turn the discussion towards access control instead, or offer a wider solution that includes access control, parking, and video surveillance using third party smart equipment with more features to reduce TCO, he explained.

"We get returns from services that we provide. We must allow for other partners to come in," he said.

Alfian Manullang, GM, M2M Product Development, Telkomsel, the largest mobile operator in Indonesia, said that Telkomsel aims to be a digital company with the technology and infrastructure part of the conversation in the background, instead of at the forefront. "It's a new growth path. We need to incubate an end to end sales team," he said.  "What we are offering is analytics, data, insights, a platform play as well. It is open for everybody. We are competing with startups and everything, and we have to develop a startup-based organisation in the company. It’s not easy, but it’s a new game; this is the only way."

Alfian has developed various connected products and services, including the first connected motorbike solution in the region.  

 

Tran Viet Ha, Deputy Head, Multimedia and Value Added Services, Mobifone said that the company - the second largest telco in Vietnam - wants to be a digital operator engaging in new business models. The Mobifone strategy involves revenue-sharing partnerships with customers in which Mobifone may share up to 95% of the proceeds, with co-owned IT applications. "We create a new IT," he said.

Panelists said that the new business models had to embrace risk when asked by Lindholm if risk-sharing was a problem.

"If we want to be different from a vendor just selling (products and services), we have to share risk," Zamry said. He gave the example of a mall owner which had approached VADS Lyfe about buying digital signage. VADS Lyfe counter-proposed paying for digital signage and running it instead. While the mall owner can still add its own messaging onto the digital signage, VADS Lyfe profits from charging other parties for exposure on the same signage.

"We’ll share the profit with your business; we will take that off your budget and invest our own money. Otherwise they will see us as vendors pushing the smart city or what-have-you," he explained.

Frausing noted that a revenue-sharing business model used to be taboo, but holds both risk and reward. At Globe, consultants conduct discussions with the C-suite of prospective customers. "We guarantee the savings; it’s all about savings at the end of the day, If we don’t share the savings, we reimburse them. Otherwise it’s just (a conversation about) cost, cost, cost and in the end it doesn’t scale," he said.

Frausing shared that Globe works very closely with customers and partners, to the point where staff from partners are seconded to Globe. "We have to put skin on the game with our clients," he said."We feel the pain and we can work out something together. There has to be value."

Lindholm further noted that everyone is still in a testing mode for many IoT platforms. Tran said that IoT trials are on the books in 2018, noting that customers which are not familiar with the benefits of IoT are not going to be willing to change.

Zamry added that VADS Lyfe is always looking for ways to drive down the costs of providing a service. New standards such as LoRa are being studied as a way to connect buses. "It's something we are looking at, to connect street lights and parking," he shared.

"We're always testing new things. What is important for us to ensure that the architecture of such technologies allows (other) services to be connected. If it doesn’t allow for the integration of services, then we are creating silos," he said. "You turn around the corner and there’s a new technology to be developed. You just have to make a call on what technology you want to use."

Frausing recommended showing relevance instead of going for a big, general goal. "Focus on areas that are pain points in society that you can address with IoT and then start there. Try not to be (too esoteric), With smart cities, you have got to do it in bite sizes," he said.

"You've got to be quick or you’re dead. What we do as an operator is we come up with innovative infrastructure that people can (try). We're testing LoRa in a few cities, if that turns out successful then we can expand," Unakul said.

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