At Mobile World Congress 2022, we attended Huawei’s Operation Transformation Forum Roundtable on the theme of Accelerating Digital Operations Transformation towards Business Success.
The speakers were Jacky Zhou, the Vice President of Huawei Marketing & Solution, Simon Liang, Director of Huawei Consulting & System Integration Marketing & Solution, and Bin Feng, Director of Huawei Software Marketing & Solution.
Jacky Zhou explained that in the last 5 years, Huawei has accumulated a lot of digital practices regarding O&M, delivery, marketing and sales. These have given the vendor a better idea about the directions of the future digital transformation, how to implement digital transformation, and how to create greater business value. Moving into the future, Huawei will continue to update the models it uses for assessing the maturity of digital and intelligent transformations.
We asked about the possibilities that digital transformation will enable in emerging markets, and were told that in these regions, Huawei has observed the low penetration rate of both MBB and FBB users, with the 4G penetration rate remaining lower than 30% in some markets and home broadband penetration often below 10%. Huawei believes that to address this issue, it must help its customers to identify areas of high potential where users would be eager to adopt new technologies and then accelerate the process of user migration; however, the vendor acknowledged that relying solely on traditional methods for this would not be possible.
Huawei believes that the answer lies in digital transformation and digital platforms, which will help its customers achieve swift business success. Across many global markets Huawei has deployed data-driven platforms to accelerate user migration for its customers. These digital methods have sped up the user migration journey faster than a traditional method could deliver, demonstrating the tangible benefits that digital transformation has delivered to Huawei’s customers.
With digital services developing quickly, the complexity of networks is also growing to the extent that Huawei does not consider digital transformation to be optional. In the last decade, the vendor has collaborated with operator customers, industry organizations, and other partners in the industry to encourage the distribution of digital transformation practices. Finding the right high-value scenario involves reviewing and analysing the entire customer journey, increasing agility during the purchase stage and user experience in the early stages, before introducing a higher level of network intelligence during the operations and management stage.HuaweH
Through digital transformation, Huawei aims to migrate its partners from managed services so that they are able to manage their own services and offer digital transformation to their customers, thereby improving their revenue. Operator revenue faces a lot of challenges, for example from OTT vendors, but traditional operators enjoy their own advantages in the market such as a larger user base and stronger background of ICT technologies, as well as a better channel to reach their audience.
In the B2C market, operators can tap into their larger user base to roll out a greater number of digital services, with FinTech a hugely successful example. In Africa, Huawei has helped a service provider to increase its FinTech subscribers penetration rate to 80% and boosted average revenue per user by additional US$32 annually. In the B2B segment, operators can leverage their ICT technologies and experience in the vertical markets. For example, traditionally operator customer service centres used voice agencies, but new types of Customer Engagement Centres introduce video and intelligence capabilities to the solution. This delivers two main benefits to the customer. The first of these is all-channel video capability, so many of the services that could only be accessed in the offline channel face to face can now be moved online. The second is Intelligent capability, which can reduce average cost per call by 30% by improving fault mitigation and reducing average call time.
Working in tandem with the Customer Engagement Centre is Huawei’s new cloud-converged billing platform CBS R22, which is a convergent and agile offering that helps to boost reliability from the previous fives ‘nines’ (99.999%) to six ‘nines’ (99.9999%). In addition to this, the platform can reduce TCO for carriers by as much as 30% - in part due to its agile service provisioning, which enables operators to introduce new software releases upgraded in just seven days, compared to the current typical three-month.
Huawei identifies the frustrations or pain points faced by its customers, and notes best practices, digital assets and experiences in order to engage with customers to improve its digital transformation path. The company believes that digital transformation shouldn’t start with a comprehensive or overtly ambitious plan – it’s impossible to do everything at the very beginning, as it’s a continually evolving journey towards realising the potential of digital transformation. Through examining its own digital transformation practices along with those of its customers, Huawei has developed and released the Smart series of SmartCare and the i series of AUTIN, which are specifically designed to satisfy the goals of value scenarios, business process as well as the needs of users.
The SmartCare series consolidates the previously siloed Smart series offerings into a whole package, bringing together solutions such as Smart Planning, Smart Optimisation, Smart Experience and Smart Decision to help optimise the network roll-out journey. Huawei has also introduced Smart DataCube, a converged data engine that can help operators unleash the value of data. The AUTIN i series includes four different offerings - iFM, iPM, iEM and iStudio – which respectively address fault management, performance, event management and talent transformation. Operators can review their current digital transformation scenarios and select the required offerings, which can then be deployed on a unified data foundation. This makes it easier for operators to kick off their digital transformation.
