As the global telco industry prepares for its annual TM Forum industry summit, Andrew De La Torre, Senior Vice President of Technology at Oracle Communications, discussed telco digital transformation efforts, progress, challenges and strategies for the future.
DTW Ignite will feature three major themes: Composable IT and Ecosystems, Autonomous Networks, and AI & Data. De La Torre, along with their customer Vodafone, will be part of the Agility Unlocked Composable IT and ecosystems keynote.
Where is transformation happening now?
We started with a candid look at what the telco transformation journey looks like today after more than a decade of effort. De La Torre noted that telco transformation isn’t a single undertaking but rather a continuing strategy that is being constantly revised as markets change and technology progresses. He spoke of four key areas that service providers are pursuing:
- Target markets – While the consumer market remains strong, service providers are increasingly focused on enterprise and business customers and more vertically focused monetization strategies. Beyond advanced network services, De La Torre believes that telcos will benefit from delivering a richer ecosystem that includes industry-specific offerings enabled by strong partnerships.
- Business and operations models – As telcos embrace virtual network services, they are moving from traditional OSS/BSS reactive solutions to cross-domain automated solutions that take advantage of the vast stores of transaction, performance and other operational data that telcos collect. At the network foundation; self-healing, self-scaling and self-managing infrastructure is necessary to meet dynamic network demands. For the customer, Oracle Communications advocates the judicious use of technology to deliver the right automation while maintaining an optimal customer experience whether that means agent-assist, end-to-end automation or an effective combination of both.
- Re-invent core products – Telcos deliver the network, making them the favored provider for a wide variety of value-added services. De La Torre discussed lifestyle product suites that can include anything from streaming services to security or virtual personal assistants. Likewise, business customer bundles might include unified communications and contact center services in addition to fully integrated offerings from industry-leading partners securely hosted by telcos. Telcos can deliver a captive customer base to willing partners for fully integrated connected applications, seamless bundles and service integration.
- Technology evolution – Perhaps the most challenging undertaking for telcos is rebuilding their technology stacks. Updating technology in an always-on business that continuously serves millions of customers is formidable. While telcos have traditionally sourced OSS/BSS from multiple vendors to prevent lock-in and ensure best-of-breed functionality, scale and complexity is shifting demand toward standards-compliant, pre-integrated adaptable solutions that fit into a composable architecture.
De La Torre noted that telco operations and OSS/BSS solutions are very mature and differentiation now relies on the customer experience. He emphasized that both telcos and vendors benefit from composable architectures and compliance with standards currently being defined by industry associations including TM Forum, GSMA and others.
Experience is everything
Customer experience is an important differentiator for telcos, but customer experience for business customers requires a different approach. Developing and selling robust services to business customers often requires industry-specific knowledge. However, familiarity with a specific industry usually doesn’t translate well to telco product development. Partners can deliver cloud-based applications that are then integrated with a network service, but that offering must also be integrated into telco operations. Specifically; sales, order management, fulfillment, assurance, care and billing systems which are often separate or only loosely integrated.
Oracle Communications Digital Business Experience is an artificial intelligence (AI) powered customer experience management platform built for telcos and pre-engineered by Oracle to help service providers launch, orchestrate and monetize new offerings as the market demands. From product development through fulfillment and care, this is a pre-integrated, pre-engineered, cloud-native solution that uses automation to streamline operations and simplify maintenance and integrations.
What’s next?
Oracle Communications is currently working with a number of customers to define and develop autonomous operations. The SATCOM With an Edge catalyst demonstration at DTW Ignite is a multi-year effort that initially tackled resilient connectivity for first responders. Now in Phase III, the demonstration includes edge orchestration, real-time assurance and billing to support third party or customer-deployed edge workloads for any business or government customer. Oracle Communications Unified Operations solutions is monitoring a composite multi-orbit SATCOM and integrated 5G services end-to-end for potential service level agreement (SLA) breaches and trigger remediation action before it happens through closed loop operations.
While AI, decision intelligence (DI) and machine learning (ML) will certainly be a big part of the conversation at DTW Ignite, these are not stand-alone technologies. A new operations approach is needed for both customer- and network-facing processes to enable end-to-end cross-domain operations. Automation and intelligence can then be applied to those processes to improve productivity, performance and customer experience.
De La Torre and Oracle Communications are defining and developing operations solutions to help telcos compete in a rapidly evolving technology landscape. Some of those solutions will be discussed during the Composable IT and Ecosystems keynote and demonstrated in the SATCOM With an Edge catalyst.
To learn more about Oracle and its solutions, visit Oracle at Booth #302 at DTW 2025 or request a meeting with their experts here: [email protected]