The countdown to the Cisco India and SAARC SP Leadership Summit 2016 has begun!
The three-day event, set in the beautiful locales of Mauritius, is the ideal platform to kick-start the year by bringing together the stalwarts of the service provider (SP) industry to Innovate. Transform. Digitize. This is perhaps the best context to initiate a dialogue, a critical one for the industry that has been riding wave after wave of technology changes – the latest of which brings with it the imperative to ‘disrupt or be disrupted’. This makes all the more sense if I refer to Digital Vortex: How Digital Disruption is Redefining Industries, a report by Cisco and the International Institute of Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne, Switzerland, according to which forty percent of market leaders globally will be displaced or eliminated by digital disruptors in the next 5 years.
In the hyper-dynamic telecommunication industry, customer demands are shifting from lower bandwidth consuming web based activities to immersive video, cloud services, the Internet of Things, and many other bandwidth intensive applications. If the SP industry does not adapt to these changes and plan for them, it can weaken their operations and customer satisfaction levels.
As much as we are banking on the digitization of SP infrastructure, equally important are the business transformations that must keep pace. Innovative models for product monetization must also be factored in, and SPs must come up with vertical-specific offerings that bundle their products and services intelligently to make sense for their market segments.
It has been said often enough that Cisco is enabling service providers to transform the experience, transform the business and transform the architecture, but the guiding principle for the SP Leadership Summit has been to steer the right conversation and help the telecom and video service providers to become truly Digital Service Providers (DSP). A DSP applies the fundamentals of internet service delivery to an architecture that is integrated, seamless, intelligent, automated and real time. The summit aims to provide a platform to brainstorm on how these future DSPs can provide digital services through a variety of business models built on a networked ecosystem of consumers and other service providers, with a sharp focus on driving all interactions online and across devices.
I see monetization as the key element of the Innovate. Transform. Digitize formula. The prime focus of the discussions will be to explore and understand the role of innovations like SDN, NFV and automation across mobile, video, cloud and networking environments, all with the goal of developing winning strategies to monetize the network in new ways. There will also be an emphasis on collaboration and strategies to win public-private partnerships to execute government projects – Digital India and Smart Cities, and create monetization opportunities for those in the value chain.
On this note, I look forward to meeting the leading SPs in Mauritius (28th – 30th January, 2016) and participating in the summit, and to witnessing the changes it will lead to, and the opportunities that will be created. The enthusiasm about the potential of the digital economy is palpable. The Cisco India and SAARC SP Leadership Summit 2016 is the perfect place to engage with the industry, gather knowledge about the latest-and-greatest, and build up the momentum for this massive transformation.
Authors