Telcos understand the need to transform their operations as well as their networks, but to keep pace with changing consumer expectations they have to shift from a network-centric view to a customer-centric one.

In the past, operators followed a bottom-up approach, which started with the network and moved to operations and then the actual business. Wei Bing, CMO of Huawei’s Global Technical Services, explained that to truly transform they need to switch to a top-down approach, focusing first on the customer experience and services, and moving away from viewing the network and operations as silos.

Speaking at Huawei’s Operations Transformation Forum 2016, he said three of the biggest challenges for operators are how to be more agile and intelligent, how to reduce costs, and how to recruit quality staff.

“Operators’ network opex accounts for about 10-20 per cent of total opex, and this share will continue to decrease. We see new opportunities to help operators reduce costs. For example, we can fix the server room to decrease the area needed, which will bring down rents,” he continued.

There is also an opportunity to help operators reduce costs by integrating online and offline services, such as giving customers online access to their monthly bills and invoices, eliminating the need to send by post or print out at a retail outlets, which is common in many Asian countries.

After working with operators around the world to virtualise and cloudify network infrastructure over the past few years, he said this year Huawei is seeing an increase in demand for troubleshooting network problems.

“The challenge now is how to recover first and resolve later. With the cloud, it can be a big issue to locate the route cause of a fault. This is a growing segment for us,” Wei said.

Its managed services business is also seeing an increase in requests for IT integration. And in China there is a big opportunity from the government for cloud services, which is unifying its data across sectors.

With operators’ revenue growth slowing, he noted that we don’t know if operators’ digital transformation journey will be successful. Many are moving in that direction, but most are focused more on reducing opex in the early stages.

Huawei’s professional services is a $12 billion business, representing 33 per cent of the carrier group’s total revenue. “For the past three quarters, we’ve seen strong growth in overseas markets – higher than our hardware growth,” he said.