Is Netcracker 2020 Supporting Telco A3 Aspirations?

Netcracker 2020 offers three key value propositions for telcos: the ability to better capture new market revenues, transformation of customer engagement and maximise return on investment in new and existing networks. Focus areas for development include a fully cloud-native portfolio, low code platform, hyper-automation and underpinning the digital ecosystem and partner management with open platforms.

My recent research has looked at the opportunities for adding value to a telco with new deployments of A³ (analytics, AI and automation).  In particular, with the addition of new automations and their inherent requirements for additional analytics and machine learning (https://charlottepatrick.uk/status-of-automation-in-telcos/).

The research found 5 short/mid-term focus areas for telcos:

1. Automation of the network – which is tied to the increased complexities of deploying 5G
2. Automation of the lead-to-cash cycle for new digital products – particularly, with the future increase in low margin, high volume IoT products
3. Improvements in customer and agent experience via automations in the contact centre and across digital channels
4. Marketing automations for campaign delivery and next best action
5. Automations which enrich new products and make them attractive to increasingly automated customers.

Netcracker 2020 speaks to a broad range of these needs. In more detail:

Automation of the network   Focus on orchestration and assurance of  5G core, Open vRAN, MEC applications and end-to-end slices – which will be the key long-term driver of full network automation and represents one of the major hurdles that telcos need to get over in order to reach desired outcomes such as closed-loop, self-healing and zero-touch operations.

Automation of the lead-to-cash cycle for new digital products   Offering automated onboarding and simplified lifecycle management for both the telco’s customers and its ecosystem partners. It is also offering new sales automation at the front end of the process and automation of the service design process. Both areas have good opportunity for providing financial benefit to telcos but are not so often discussed by telco specific vendors, seeming to be more often the domain of niche vendors.

Improvements in customer and agent experience via automation in the contact centre and digital channels   Its customer journey management solution uses ML and analytics to create ML-driven customer journeys and enable decisioning around the best engagement of customers across multiple touch points.

Marketing automation for campaign delivery Netcracker 2020 brings customer insight into the sales lead management, channel management and marketing campaign management spaces; using machine learning to create segmentation and improve the decisioning around what to offer.

Automation that enriches new products and makes them attractive to increasingly automated customers   This area requires a range of capabilities from different parts of a telco’s BSS/OSS. Netcracker’s focus on supporting telcos in edge cloud applications with MEC and their new solutions in slice management and charging will require ML to deal with the complexities of multiple new products and their requirements on the network. Their product catalogue also unifies telco and digital services from partners and dynamically creates the most attractive offers available through its marketplace.

How Much of the Financial Opportunity Offered by A³ does Netcracker 2020 Capture?

The diagram below summarises research into the total financial value (capex and opex savings; plus revenue uplift) available to an average telco from implementing new A³. The rows divide out the telco needs for A³ into various categories (see https://charlottepatrick.uk/uses-for-a3-across-the-telco/) and the colouring of the boxes describes expected total financial value.

Observations:

1. overlaying the Netcracker 2020 focus areas onto the underlying calculations for this diagram, it is estimated that it offers A³ functionality to support around 55% of the total $1 billion of potential financial upside for a telco
2. not all of this amount is available today for telcos. As already noted above, much of the more sophisticated functionality has yet to be implemented, so the figure of 55% assumes that Netcracker continue to deliver products in their current product areas into the future and look to increase their “intelligence” capabilities to support those areas which will require more sophisticated algorithms
3. when looking across the individual boxes on the diagram, the majority of the value will come from the network management side through projects such as NFV life-cycle management and further activities in the self-optimising network. Also from additional machine learning in revenue management, security products and order management
4. considering changes to telco customer behaviours due to Covid19 and what this might mean into the mid-term telcos:
   1. Netcracker’s commitment to delivering automation will dovetail with telcos increasing interest in reducing costs by pushing on towards full automation
   2. Its customer insight capabilities will help telcos adjust to changes in both business and customer product usage
   3. Lastly, there are yet-to-be fully understood new requirements for telco services and support in IoT and other new services. Automation and delivery of machine learning solutions around network slicing and MEC are likely to be important as telcos look at how they can innovate
5. considering areas where Netcracker does not have support for telco’s A³ ambitions, network and capacity planning offer new opportunities to add machine learning and intelligence into the telco.