Across industries, the cloud has completely disrupted the way people and organizations do business. Nowhere has the impact been more apparent than in the telecom industry, which is in the midst of a major shift to the cloud as it looks to take advantage of the serious business benefits the cloud provides. Telecom customers are increasingly looking to take advantage of Salesforce and other cloud-based platforms to tap into a host of applications.
Although there is considerable urgency among communications service providers (CSPs) to digitalize their business and introduce new avenues to better service and access all that the cloud provides, they must ensure they are implementing cloud technology strategically and taking a thoughtful approach.
Divide and conquer
Incremental success is a much better strategy than overcommitting to the cloud. Companies need to select a couple of different departments where its easiest to apply initial change. By identifying a few different use cases and picking those off one by one, telcos can remain focused and achieve quick success. With this strategy, telcos can see roundup to deployment in six months. For example, one California CSP, Telnexus, recently implemented the Salesforce Sales Cloud to enhance their legacy infrastructure. By doing this and leveraging third-party apps like Conga’s document generation app – Conga Composer – on top of that, they ended up increasing productivity.
Telco gets cloudy
Telcos have a reputation for extremely complex legacy infrastructure, with systems bogged down by costly on-premise data centers that are difficult to maintain. Enter the cloud, which has completely shaken these systems up and given telecommunications organizations a way to replacing legacy IT systems with new technology that is easily scalable and doesn’t require costly upkeep. Seeing the advantages of a cloud-enabled future, the telco space has been quick to adopt cloud technology for different use cases. Unlike other entrenched industries that are slow to adjust (ahem, financial services), the telecommunications industry has been more actively innovative and eager to adopt this type of technology. Why? The telco industry enables the data centers that are essentially the backbone of business.
The ROI of the cloud
The cloud allows for much faster speed to market than legacy IT systems. The old deployment lifecycle in telecom usually included a three-year build out of complicated technology across many different departments. For example, Salesforce’s demand and expand strategy gives companies the ability to very quickly deploy the technology, then subsequently make changes and updates to the various applications that run on the platform. This gives executives and IT administrators the ability to incrementally address different solutions one at a time, thereby making updates quick and efficient. Furthermore, adopting (and regularly updating) cloud applications gives the telecom industry the opportunity to be nimble and remain competitive over OTT providers like Google and Apple.
A cloud-powered future
A smart, strategic embrace of the cloud is critical to bringing the telecom industry forward in today’s digital age. This can be made possible by adding to and taking advantage of already laid IT infrastructure. By adopting cloud technology and embracing the real-time innovation that it provides, telco providers will find they can enable a much better customer experience – far better than the experiences they’re known for.
Even as subscribers and consumers continue to “cut the cord,” it’s a simple fact that telecom services will always require some level of infrastructure from telecom providers. By adopting cloud-based platforms, telecom providers can reduce costs and better position themselves to provide the service and technology that subscribers expect.
