LIVE FROM OPERATIONS TRANSFORMATION FORUM 2017, HONG KONG: Improving customer experience and operational efficiency are the two most common challenges facing operators across the globe, Sheng Kai, president of Huawei’s consulting and services solution sales department, said.

In a roundtable briefing, the executive said the challenges were highlighted in a Huawei survey of 200 operators across Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East and Africa. As a result, such areas are a focus for Huawei as it works with operators to implement their digital strategies.

He noted operators’ priorities have shifted from a “network-centric operation to the service-centric operation”. Doing so requires a “systematic transformation in terms of operations and infrastructure”.

Operator partnerships
Sheng cited three case studies to highlight how Huawei is working to address such operator concerns.

A project with Hong Kong Telecom (HKT), for example, tapped Huawei’s consulting services to identify and enable digital services which bring about new growth opportunities. He said the company also implemented agile digital operations, which he believes are critical to providing the bulk of services enabled by a digital transformation.

Huawei delivered its Operation Web Service (OWS) platform to a South Africa-based operator as part of the operator’s network 2020 strategy, which also focuses on agile operations. Huawei’s OWS platform is designed to “really support agile operations” and, in this case, saw the vendor cooperate closely with the operator “in the field of the cloud”.

The third example was Kuwait’s VIVA, which was seeking to optimise its total cost of ownership structure and capital efficiency as it strives to offer the best mobile broadband network in the Middle East and monetise the data traffic on it.

“It’s not easy to do,” Sheng noted, explaining the companies worked together to implement a “practice of operations transformation”.

Strategy
The executive noted a key driver of growth for Huawei’s consulting and services solution division is operators’ need to address changes in their traditional business model which is seeing voice, SMS and even data revenue declining. “They are on their way to explore more potential in the digital business,” he explained.

Such a change also fuels a shift in Huawei’s approach, he explained: “Before, I think the operator just gave you the requirement and you delivered your product. But nowadays, operators face a lot of new challenges”. For Huawei to meet those challenges it must identify operators’ business objectives, and then deliver customised solutions.

“We are talking about solutions. We are not talking about a product or the specific services,” Sheng said.