At a recent Ovum Executive briefing, wholesale telecommunications providers heard of growing pressure on wholesale telecommunications providers to become more efficient.
With higher value wholesale services (such as managed services) set to grow, Ovum’s Principal Analyst Wholesale Telecoms David James told the conference wholesale providers should consider offering tailored and bundled service offerings.
“It is no longer the case of ‘one size fits all’ for customers,” Mr James said.
“Wholesale providers can differentiate their service offerings on product range, price, quality, reliability and relationship.”
Mr James said telcos also need to increase their speed to market, be more flexible and responsive, provide cost efficiencies to customers and anticipate customer requirements.
The future of wholesale telecommunications
Ovum’s Senior Analyst David Kennedy spoke of the future of wholesale telecommunications and the likely impact of the global financial crisis on the telco environment.
“With the onset of the financial crisis, smaller market players will be placed in a more risky position,” Mr Kennedy said.
“Margins will be squeezed and many smaller operators will be forced to exit the market.”
Mr Kennedy also told the conference there were opportunities to exploit the demand for social networking and user-generated content.
“There is a growing demand for VoIP, products which cater for healthcare and education and the need for the creation of content management networks to manage the massive increase in content related traffic,” he said.
“There will be no major underlying physical technological change over the next decade, but with large volumes of voice and data capacity being available, buyers will be increasing pressure to reduce prices.”
Telstra Wholesale’s strategy
In her address to the conference, Telstra Wholesale Group Managing Director Kate McKenzie explained Telstra Wholesale’s market strategy of placing the customer at the centre of everything it does and its ongoing efforts to provide bundled solutions to meet its customers’ needs.
“A major part of Wholesale’s strategy has been to deliver consistently high value services to our customers to help them compete in the market,” Kate said.
“We have used market-based management to develop a better understanding of our customers’ needs and to help us better focus our efforts.
“The quality of our systems and our end-to-end service is something we focus on. In the last few years our customers have moved away from buying just one product from us. So now we try to tailor packages of products and services to suit customers operating in particular parts of the market.
“This approach is revolutionising our wholesale business as it allows us to optimise opportunities to help our customers grow their businesses and changes the conversation in the market from one of price alone to one of value.
“The more we can understand where our market’s heading and the business models people are looking to invest in, the better our wholesale business can support its customers through that evolution.”
Find out more about the Ovum executive briefing series.
