In today’s digital era, competition is growing increasingly over platforms regardless of the industry enterprises belong to. If an enterprise can afford a better platform, it will never fail in providing a decided advantage over the competition. Glancing at some pioneering global brands, it is clear that most of them are platform-oriented companies; for example Google, Facebook, Ebay, Amazon and many more. They have become the ultimate rulers in their domains not merely by owning a platform but also by creating an eco system around their stakeholders exploring new ways to co-create and capture value.
A similar trend can be seen in the Telco domain too, as most of the profitable and successful Telcos over the past two decades are those that have realigned their organizational practices with a digital platform model – a strategy whereby Telcos can accelerate digital service creation. This could either be an internal platform or an external one; however the goals are in fact very similar. Both of them are about co-creating value between different stakeholders where most of the times external platforms connect customers and partners where as internal platforms connect infrastructure assets to application development teams.
The advantage of having such a digital platform is that telcos can easily extend the innovation process to even third party entities allowing them to build products and services on top of the platform monetizing telco infrastructure. However, still many Telcos could not succeed in becoming platform leaders because their technology and/or business strategies fall short.
According to Harvard Business Review (HBR), the success of a platform strategy is determined by three factors:
- Connection: how easily others can plug into the platform to share and transact
- Gravity: how well the platform attracts participants, both producers and consumers
- Flow: how well the platform fosters the exchange and co-creation of value
HBR also introduces three building blocks to achieve above mentioned goals that help creating successful platforms:
- The Toolbox creates connection by making it easy for others to plug into the platform. This infrastructure enables interactions between participants. For example, by purchasing an extensive API management platform, any telco can easily open up their network assets via REST based APIs. Yet, without fostering a powerful service creation community it will be difficult for Telcos to harness its maximum capability; because what is more significant is not merely exposing APIs but making it more easy for all the service creators to create services. For that Telcos need to possess a platform which offers assistance and guidance via Developer evangelists, frequent hackathons and workshops, Monthly developer meetups, Mentoring sessions etc.
- The Magnet creates the pull that attracts participants to the platform with a kind of social gravity. Telcos need to attract both developers and subscribers to create services as well as to consume those services in order to have improved ARPU. Therefore Telcos must be partnered with right platform providers who pay attention to facilitating incentives, reputation systems, and revenue share models creating a valued experience for all the engaged parties and enforcing them to engage with the platform more.
- The Matchmaker fosters the flow of value by making connections between producers and consumers. Data is at the heart of successful matchmaking that distinguishes platforms from other business models. The Matchmaker captures rich data about platform engagement and leverages that data to facilitate unique connections between service creators and consumers. For example, Providing in-depth insights and real time analytics about application usage will help service creators to understand the subscriber’s mind and deliver a unique experience for subscribers to fulfill their exact needs.
It is indeed clear that rising of platforms enforce every enterprise to have a precise platform strategy harvesting the benefits of this digital platform era. Thus, investment in your organization’s platform efforts is likely to be one of the most important and crucial to competitiveness. Therefore, every enterprise needs to be very vigilant when choosing the right digital partner for their business as it would be the key element for their sustainability and profitability. However the right choice will make it extremely rewarding for each enterprise, as it will assist them with continuous service creation, helping them to win over the challenge of digital transformation.
As an extensive platform provider, hSenid Mobile revolutionizes the Telco sphere with its Digital capability and extendable Telco platforms helping Telcos to be pioneers in the face of digital transformation. It is high time for everyone to focus more on platforms, simply because in the future there will be more and more platforms instead of mere products.
Our platforms widening the Telco Digital Presence
Our Telco Application Platform (TAP) is a cloud based telco specialized API Management solution to pioneer digital service innovation bringing in new revenues for Telcos. With TAP, telcos can set up their roots in digital sphere eliminating the revenue pressure taking lead in the face of digital transformation. Find More
Our CUBE provides a Customized User Bound Experience, with its turnkey business-to-consumer fidelity program management engine designed as an intelligent analytics platform to analyze the customer behavioral patterns and trends for telcos to monetize their customer data. Find More
