The wholesale game is changing, are you ready?

Transforming wholesale revenue management for now and the future

Our evolving connected world presents many great opportunities for consumers, enterprises, and organizations. For telco operators, this evolution presents enormous possibilities in providing the thread that connects the devices, services, and beyond. But to survive and thrive in the new digital world, operators must make a huge transformation to solidify their place in the digital ecosystem among IoT and OTT service providers. This transformation from communication service providers to digital service providers needs to happen very quickly, as others in the race have a head start.

For the wholesale telco business, the changes are even more rapid as lines are quickly blurring with the global nature of the operations and the greater interconnection of services and complexity of relationships with simultaneously supplying customers, suppliers, competitors, and partners. Wholesale divisions need to understand the multiple user segments and the needs of buyers that negotiate and interface with them. Developing a wholesale service approach for internal and external services requires a comprehensive strategy that encompasses retail channels, B2B users, commercial applications, end-user pricing, service costs, network profitability, and long-term network planning.

One of the biggest roadblocks in the transformation for wholesale departments is that, along with the rest of the telco organization, they have many legacy systems and processes in place. These systems and processes were built to make them successful in the old world, delivering wholesale communication services. They are not designed to efficiently enable the connected digital services of today nor to meet the digital service needs of consumers, enterprises, and partners.

With wholesale departments having a huge opportunity before them to enable the Internet of Things (IoT), they must tackle these demands and overcome the roadblocks. Focusing on these key areas will help wholesale teams be set up to take advantage of new growth opportunities:

• Simplify complex processes and relationships by unifying and automating business operations with the convergence of systems.
• Contain costs and quickly adjust by leveraging the legacy systems in place and adding more capabilities through modular solutions and new processes to enable new services.
• Have tools in place that provide real-time information for quick and accurate decisions and insights into which opportunities to take advantage of.

It is important that telco operators and wholesale departments work with flexible and responsive technology partners to innovate together. This will help them set themselves up to be market leaders in their domain.