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3 Trends That a Contemporary Telecom CIO Can't Ignore

Embedded Advisor | Monday, June 22, 2020

Technological advancements are taking place in all industries. However, the telecom industry is one wherein new technologies have a direct impact on their operations. The contemporary telecom CIOs have to keep themselves at the core of the latest telecom technology trends.

FREMONT, CA: Telecommunication services are among the fastest-growing sectors worldwide, and the use of latest technologies has been a critical factor for the industry.

Any technological innovation can be critical for the telecom sector. As a result, CIOs and other strategic decision-makers involved in technology and their implementation have to shoulder the additional responsibility of the aptest technical integration.

The industry has been encountering daunting market scenarios owing to a variety of reasons. Across the globe, subscriber growth and an increase in revenue have been the causative factors. Also, the communication providers are facing new challenges to turn digital providers in a way similar to web firms to extend highly customized and evolving services.

The present-day telecom CIOs have to encounter the challenge of thoroughly remodelling existing business strategies to redesign technological fundamentals. Among others, the most critical technology trends shaping the telecom sector include:

Artificial Intelligence

Today’s communication service providers (CSPs) continue to face ever-mounting demands for high-end quality services besides enhanced consumer experience. To meet the requirements of consumers and to make their businesses agile, telecoms tend to leverage vast amounts of data collected over the years from consumers. Data gets accumulated through networks, mobile applications, devices, customer profiles or even geo-locations.

This massive volume of data is what makes AI imperative for telecom CIOs. Telecommunication enterprises are increasingly harnessing the potential of AI to analyze these enormous chunks of Big Data. By doing so, telcos are able to derive actionable information to extend improved consumer experience, enhance operations, and derive more revenue through innovative products and services.

CIOs agree that AI has become critical for system assurance for all enterprises, especially with respect to projecting network tasks and enhancing the checking of networking inventory across several layers. Almost half of the respondents participating in their surveys pointed out that the ROI on their own service assurance is getting better. AI can be used as a tool for predictive analysis, network edge analytics, or the automated root cause analysis.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) will be a perfect example here. CSPs have to deal with a large number of consumers involved in millions of day-to-day transactions. All these transactions are susceptible to manual errors. Bringing in RPA into these processes has been helpful for the telecommunication sector to deal with rules-based and repetitive tasks. RPA has been beneficial in workforce management, data entry, billing, and order fulfilment.

Internet of Things

As the IoT continues to permeate the consumer and enterprise worlds, the telecom industry finds itself at the juncture of new challenges and revenue streams imparted by the revolutions in connectivity.

The first thing about IoT in telecommunication business is that CSPs can extend improved performance, and unleash the potential of user data enabling improved usability through IoT.

Yet another opportunity for CSPs is to unleash new revenue sources by enabling edge-computing infrastructure regarding application developers and OTT service providers through IoT.

Further, an increasing number of telecom operators are realizing the importance of IoT as a perfect tool for reducing operational costs in information technology. Applying IoT in software-defined networking besides network function virtualization has been helpful in making this possible.

Virtualization

Network virtualization might mean a highly centralized cloud infrastructure or on-premise industrial equipment and all the other points that are in-between. Through network virtualization, what we aim to achieve is to shift applications which previously were functioning on action-specific hardware. They could be moved into a highly virtualized environment to drive efficiency and bring down costs, enhance flexibility and deploy faster.

Virtualization in telecommunications has altered the manner in which businesses compete with each other. The emergence of the ‘smart world’ through IoT has been the driving factor behind this. Also, today’s telecom industry is interconnected like never before.