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Top 10 Asian telcos to ace enterprise services

Preface

The previous two insights, “ICT spending is going north, time to knock B2B doors” and “4 Pillars of enterprise business readiness for telecom service providers” highlight the importance of a diversified B2B focus for telcos. We have also developed a framework to assess the readiness of service providers as they address the emerging needs of enterprises and verticals.

To recap, our readiness framework combines learnings from leading telcos for the benefit of many. These learnings are along the following four dimensions:

1. Market focus and B2B orientation
2. Enterprise (B2B) sales readiness
3. Innovation management
4. Customer value and experience management

Tier-1 operators have a natural advantage

The strong regional reach of Tier-1 operators hands them an advantage in catering to network services needs of large corporations. Network services largely consist of service categories such as wide-area-network (WAN) transport services, cloud interconnect services, cloud hosting, managed software-defined WAN (SD-WAN), managed routers, switches, on-premise equipment, and other network-on-demand services.

Enterprises now are increasingly demanding WANs that offer much higher agility to support cloud IT delivery. They are also opening up to different business model such as network-on-demand and pay-as-you-use. Tier-1 service providers are leading by including software-defined networking services to their portfolios. However, these shifts are making enterprise network services a more competitive space.

5G and cloud are promising higher B2B value potential

APAC operators are also making significant investments in rolling out 5G networks. Unlike its predecessors, 5G is a software defined network architecture. Operator investments are therefore also providing for service providers’ own digital transformations. This has become more important than ever as the immediate sphere of B2B competitors has expanded to include hyperscalers. 5G enabled digital transformations allow service providers to offer a considerable level of flexibility to enterprise customers as they work to meet the benchmarks set by cloud providers.

Our top 10 list observes operators finding a balanced approach to networking services strengthened with 5G and cloud platforms. Chinese operators, China Mobile and China Telecom, have made strong progress by building end-to-end ICT solutions that combine underlying network with cloud based unified communications, enterprise cloud services, and IT applications.

Twimbit’s top 10 APAC telcos to ace enterprise services

Enterprise focused telcos

Best practices

Service providerBest practices
NTT CommunicationsEnabled cloud customers to manage, orchestrate, and provision multi and hybrid cloud environments.
Tata CommunicationsTransformed itself to become a digital ecosystem enabler. Offers collaboration platform that combines partner products and bundles to clients through a unified portal.
KT CorpReconstructing the IT stack including operations support systems early on as KT prepared for offering complex 5G use cases.
China MobileDriving innovation in 5G enterprise and vertical use cases with its partners.
PCCWRevived its network services business with software defined networking.
China TelecomStrengthened B2B connectivity propositions with innovative ICT bundles.
SingtelTransformed backed systems to automate end-to-end service fulfilment for enterprise customers. Addressed inefficient B2B sales by integrating enterprise-wide catalogs for all products & services.
TelstraStreamlined customer engagement with a single and unified console view.
Spark DigitalAdopted agile. It is now more customer centric, faster to market, and engaging with employees.
SK TelecomContinues to collaborate with digital natives as it strengthens 5G enterprise play.

8 selection prerequisities

The list below describes our inclusion and exclusion criteria for this research:

  • An established B2B unit, operating for the past three years or more
  • Total revenues of above $1bn for 2019
  • B2B or enterprise revenues accounting for more than 10% of total service revenues
  • Service providers expanding B2B portfolio beyond connectivity – typically covering cloud, IoT, and security solutions
  • Added flavour of software-defined overlay to standard network connectivity services
  • Exclusion from the study of retail service providers (RSPs) reselling bandwidth and not owning network assets
  • Exclusion also of operators who have not disclosed performance indicators for measuring the progress of B2B business unit either on public domain or to Twimbit during the period of research
  • Operators headquartered in Asia Pacific

Way forward

  • Enterprise technology transitions are underway. Telcos have an opportunity to be a provider of trust, security, and compliance for customer’s digital transformation journeys
  • The convergence of services is an opportunity for telcos to lead and own end-customers relationship in a complex and competitive environment
  • Service provider digital transformations of internal operations as well as external customer interactions must aim for both cost improvements and increased revenue recognition
  • Technology will be leading service providers’ B2B success. They must go beyond building end-to-end automation in sales processes, to using technology for predictive and intuitive actions

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