In 2016, Comptel focused on extending our Nexterday message and encouraging operators to stop over-thinking and start doing what they need to do to transform their businesses. The energy and excitement we felt at Nexterday North 2016, our second annual anti-seminar, told us that many operators are doing just that, turning the big ideas they hear around the industry into game-changing results.
Here on the Comptel blog, we always want to give room for those big ideas to take shape. Let’s take a look back on some of the top pieces – and ideas – we wrote in the past year.
All operators are on a journey to better serve their customers. The activities they take in this area can be put into two categories – customer transformation and network transformation. In this piece, we explained exactly what the personalised customer journey is all about, and offered a model for how operators can win the hearts and minds of their customers.
The new iPhone UI looks a lot like the old iPhone UI, which tells you how iterative many of Apple’s latest updates have become. In this blog, we proposed that it’s time the OSS embraced a design overhaul, and explained exactly how the OSS of the future should look to offer the same ease of use you might expect from an iOS product.
2016 was also a busy year for Comptel and our partners. At TM Forum Live! in Nice, we were involved in three separate industry catalysts, each led by a Comptel partner. There was Telefonica’s Open Source MANO project, Orange’s sponsored data initiative, and IBM’s cloud-based networking architecture. These cross-industry initiatives are so important to Comptel because they keep us on the forefront of innovation. We want to lend our expertise in a way that benefits the entire industry, and we’re proud to stand alongside these partners in that effort.
Our digital service lifecycle management (DSLM) model was a major theme for us in 2016, and in the Spring we put it to the test as part of the IBM Cloud Based Initiative. In this post, we explain exactly why and how digital service delivery needs to change to serve a new breed of digital customer.
Innovation abounds in connectivity, and 5G represents one of many emerging frontiers for investment and development. In the U.S., regulators opened up spectrum for telco experimentation, and in this post we covered the challenges that lay ahead for telcos who dipped their toes in this industry.
Pokémon GO was a huge mobile gaming craze in the summer of 2016, and T-Mobile jumped on the buzzworthy topic by offering players one year’s worth of free mobile data exclusively to play the game. It was another example of a savvy sponsored data play that shows other operators how they creatively leverage data access to win over digital customers.
In 2016 we also launched Nexterday.org, our online magazine and reader community. You can read much more of our writing on digital transformation, customer experience and network innovation there.
Every great journey has a destination. In a business journey, your ultimate goal should be to find new strategies, ideas and approaches that benefit for your customers. The cloud might be the biggest such destination for many businesses in the telco industry today, and at Comptel, our cloud journey is about embracing the emerging platforms and solutions that will make life easier and better for our customers.
Comptel’s cloud journey took another big step forward at this year’s Nexterday North, where we announced the addition of another cloud solution, Fastermind. Everything about Fastermind is influenced by or tailored for Generation Cloud, the savvy digital natives whose buying and engagement preferences are changing the ways telcos have to service their customers.
Generation Cloud wants services on their terms, at their speed and personalized to their specific wants and needs. The cloud is the only way to deliver the dynamic, personalized services these customers crave.
As an industry, the benefits that we have realized by cloud adoption is unquestionable. We are on a journey powered by the cloud for our infrastructure, engagement and business models. Therefore, a well-balanced cloud strategy that drives focus back to business top-line and in parallel drives up the cloud maturity is needed.
The cloud has opened new business models that weren’t feasible in the past. It accelerates partnering, experimentation and building of ecosystems. But, it also creates complexity and dilemma with all the options that are achievable – stretching from NFV/SDN to private cloud to public cloud applications and hybrid environment, from do it yourself options to SaaS options.
Service providers are on a road to cloud. Many service providers have matured their cloud infrastructure strategy and have collaborated with their vendor partners to deploy solutions in the cloud and have demonstrated clear efficiency gains.
So, what’s your cloud journey look like? Are you running at the speed of business? Are unlocking new revenue streams? Is stakeholder engagement better than before? Do you have free hands to experiment new propositions? Even a small tweak to a service has a significant positive impact to the top line and experience.
Future success relies on being proactive and open to engaging as a part of a broader ecosystem. Cloud as an engagement model is bringing businesses closer so they can collaborate and win together. Cloud native strategy will bring the needed maturity. Cloud directions taken today with the focus on future proactive needs is a road to cloud!
At Comptel, we love the cloud. It brings us closer to our customers than ever before. We have been on a cloud journey for a long time already, as our operator customers serve more than 300 million end-customers in the private cloud environment. To date, our cloud solutions have provided our customers with important improvements in efficiency, but our upcoming product roadmap includes several important steps that will help us draw even more value out of the cloud. Stay tuned for more, and share your cloud journey!
There’s an entire world of fresh ideas and exciting opportunities for telcos to indulge, many of which are discussed in various industry conferences around the world. That’s why Comptel is happy to bring and present these ideas directly to you if you were not able to hop on a plane and visit each event.
The Nexterday Tour 2016 is our global effort to share the latest, most dominant and most appealing market trends directly with our customers and partners. At the same time, we discuss key thought leadership themes, including how Comptel’s software addresses market requirements in Nexterday.
We want to tap into the latest industry trends and insights from major global industry events, including our own Nexterday North event, which asks telcos to stop thinking about digital transformation and start executing. We package everything together with content and videos from operators, industry speakers and thought leaders, and go on tour to deliver them to telcos around the world.
What is the Nexterday Tour?
The program includes trends and insights gathered from a number of big events, stretching from the Comptel anti-seminar Nexterday North in Helsinki last November, and extending through Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, TM Forum Live! in Nice, the Big Communications Event in Austin, and a scattering of NFV/SDN events throughout Europe and the U.S. Our next stop will be in October for Dreamforce in San Francisco and the SDN and OpenFlow World Congress in The Hague.
It’s the third consecutive year we’ve run a global program. You might have known our previous tours by other names – “Barcelona in a Box” in 2014 and “Beyond the Event Horizon” last year. We visited more than 15 cities last year, meeting with 400 individual customers from 45 global operators.
So far, this year’s tour has taken us to South America, Europe and the Asia Pacific region, adding up to over 10 countries, over 15 cities, dozens of operator brands and hundreds of individual customers. And the tour finishes with our second annual Nexterday North from 28-29 November, 2016 in Helsinki.
Top Themes for 2016
Our focus in 2016 is on digital transformation and disruption within the telco industry.
We wanted to cover how new players in telco – including startups, but also non-telco players like Airbnb, Uber and Spotify – are shaking up the industry with innovative digital offerings that require operators to change their approach.
We’re also covering broader global trends. In his keynote speech at Nexterday North 2015, Kjell Nordstrom talked about urbanisation, describing how within the next 20 to 30 years, 80 percent of the world’s population and 90 percent of its economic value will be centralised in 600 megacities. On the tour, we’ve discussed what that means for telcos in the years ahead.
Similarly, we’ve heard frequently about the increasing value placed on customer experiences. A massive 89 percent of companies planned to compete on the basis of customer experience this year, according to Gartner. How has digitalisation influenced that trend, and – as keynote speaker Mike Walsh will discuss at Nexterday North 2016 – how does the increasing level of consumer familiarity with digital tools and services impact telco innovation?
We’ve discussed new telco business models, new network technologies and new service opportunities. We know that networks are embracing software in the era of NFV, data centres and cloud. We know that the Internet of Things (IoT) is a major opportunity, but that 99 percent of devices aren’t connected to the internet yet. At the same time, we know that up to four billion people on Earth also lack internet access. So what are operators and the whole industry doing to solve that challenge, alongside the others?
We’re also covering a number of challenges and opportunities in our industry, such as the need to find fresh new data monetisation strategies to take advantage of customers’ hunger for digital services. We also discuss the increased need for hyper personalisation in marketing, sales and service, and the need for telcos to re-engineer their service orchestration models to suit a more self-serve, conversational and automated service delivery lifecycle.
It’s been exciting to get out of the office, speak directly with customers and hear their ideas and thoughts on all of these concepts. Generally speaking, we’re seeing operators starting to broaden their mode of thinking. Ideas that would have once been considered too radical for telco are now being carefully considered, whether it’s ways to change how we work, new service opportunities to tap into, or new global trends that affect our business.
It’s important for telcos to continue the conversation and step away from the industry’s collective blindspot. With the Nexterday Tour 2016, Comptel is proud to play a part in helping operators have these important discussions.
Join us on the Nexterday Tour 2016 by registering for Nexterday North 2016, 28-29 November, in Helsinki. You can check out our fantastic speaker lineup here, which to date includes digital transformation visionary Mike Walsh, marketing guru David Meerman Scott, futurologist Dietmar Dahmen, operator speakers and many more.
We’re only one month in to 2016, and already the team here at Comptel has been busy on multiple fronts. We’re putting the final touches on our follow-up to our successful book Operation Nexterday. You’ll be able to get a full hard copy of Nexterday Volume II at this year’s Mobile World Congress, and we’ll also have a download link on our soon-to-be-launched website, Nexterday.org.
We have much more in store for this year, but before we get too far ahead of ourselves, it’s worth taking a quick look back and the progress Comptel made in the past 13 months. As it turned out, 2015 was a hallmark year for Comptel. We’ve been an important player in this industry for 30 years, working hard to deliver solutions that keep our telco customers competitive.
However, we recognised the playbooks that we – and the industry as a whole – have relied on for so long are broken. We used last year to pioneer change in the way that this market serves its customers, embracing digitalisation and helping operators learn how they can become the perfect digital company.
Along the way, we developed product innovations that support our vision of Nexterday, partnered strategically and are proud to have been recognised for all we accomplished. With that in mind, here are a few highlights from Comptel’s transformative 2015:
Operation Nexterday
Last year we launched Operation Nexterday – a mission and framework encouraging operators to redefine their sales, marketing, technology and service approach to better suit the demands of the tech-savvy digital natives that make up Generation Cloud.
We wrote a 150-page book explaining how the evolution in B2B and B2C buyer demands is challenging the telco industry, and outlining steps to achieve Nexterday – from perfecting the digital buying experience and monetising new services faster, to orchestrating network functions from ground to cloud and utilising intelligent, fast data.
The book compiled insights from industry experts within Comptel and across the digital and communications landscape, including analysts and academics. It was published at Mobile World Congress 2015, with more than 5,000 copies distributed since.
Nexterday North
The success of the book led us to launch our first “anti-seminar.” In November, we held the inaugural Nexterday North event in Helsinki, Finland, as a side event to the global startup conference Slush. The event focused on digitalisation and motivating operators to think about the telco world with a non-traditional mindset. Nexterday North brought together more than 500 Comptel customers, partners, key industry players and futuristic business thinkers from around the world to examine digital services as the next major revenue stream for telcos.
Product Innovations
Our product teams kept their foot on the gas and worked tirelessly to develop solutions that would help our customers succeed in Nexterday.
MONETIZER™, brought to market in July 2015, is an industry-first business policy and charging toolset enabling digital and communications service providers to innovate and design rich service offers instantly. With MONETIZER™, you can create, configure, launch and modify dynamic, contextual packages – and profit from consumers’ data usage – in minutes instead of months.
At Nexterday North, we launched FWD, an easy and contextual solution for operators to sell and market time-based mobile data directly from a smartphone. The FWD app makes buying mobile data fast, convenient and personal for consumers, while giving operators an easy-to-manage digital sales and marketing channel to maximise data revenues.
Industry Collaboration
We also extended our work with partners in our industry in an effort to help shape the future of telco.
We launched a four-month-long program with long-standing customer Saudi Telecom Company (STC) to develop the next generation of IT talent in Saudi Arabia. The program educates young Saudi professionals on communications networks, strengthens their knowledge of Comptel’s technologies and enables them for future leadership positions within STC.
Comptel also joined a partnership with Pivotal to market their solutions together in the Asia-Pacific region. The partnership enables operators to immediately act on data with easy, quick access to Comptel’s packaged data analytics applications via the Pivotal Big Data Suite.
Industry Recognition and Accolades
We achieved several proof points of excellence in 2015, including recognition by CIO Review as one of the 20 most promising M2M Solution Providers in 2015, and the Best Performing IT Team by TDC. The Comptel Operational Intelligence Model won OSS Innovation of the Year in the TelecomAsia Readers’ Choice and Innovation Awards, and the company’s work to evolve Chorus New Zealand’s fulfilment system was honoured with a Global Telecoms Business Award. Congratulations to my colleagues here at Comptel for earning this prestigious recognition!
We’re Only Getting Started
It’s fine to pat yourself on the back once in a while, and I’m certainly proud of what our team was able to achieve last year. However, in an industry that’s always evolving, we always want to be moving forward. Last year showed what Comptel is capable of, but we’ve only scratched the surface. In 2016, our mission is to execute on the ideas we introduced last year and turn those concepts into action. We’re challenging operators to create perfect digital companies for and with their customers. We invite you to join us on our journey toward Nexterday and to start transforming your business as well.
Comptel will be in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress 2016 (Hall 5, Stand 5G40). We’ll launch our latest book, Nexterday Volume II, and host a #Nexterday party on Wednesday, 24 February at 7 p.m. CET. To book a meeting, contact your Comptel account manager or send us an email at [email protected].
Last month, we told you about Mavis Wong and Chin Kang Tan, also known as Team Dragon, who wowed the judges at Comptel Hackathon 2015 with their innovative mobile retail app. Congratulations are once again in order for Team Dragon, as they took second place and a cash prize in the Next Gen eCommerce track at Ultrahack this month.
Ultrahack is a 48-hour hackathon that rewards prizes worth up to 130,000 euros to the best innovations and offers expert coaching and support from developers at some of the world’s leading companies. It’s one of many hackathons that occur in the weeks leading up to Slush, the biggest startup conference in Europe. Team Dragon first qualified for Ultrahack by winning Comptel Hackathon 2015, where they were rewarded with a first-place prize that included a full two-day pass to Slush.
Team Dragon’s app, called Match & Snap, brings the power of the Internet of Things to the retail shopping experience. The IoT-based technology immediately recognizes Match & Snap app users once they enter a store. Users then receive targeted content to improve their shopping experience, whether it’s suggestions on what to wear or information on in-store sales and bargains. There’s even a social component, so Match & Snap users can share their new outfits with friends and ask for their input.
Comptel is once again proud to offer aspiring developers – including Mavis and Chin Kang – an opportunity to share their inventiveness, creativity and intelligence with the world at major events like Nexterday North and Slush.
We’re also thrilled that Team Dragon follows in the footsteps of other Comptel representatives at recent hackathons. Rami Al-Isawi, a software engineer at Comptel, participated in this year’s Junction hackathon, another side event to Slush. He managed to win awards in two categories: The “Most Destructive Hack” and “Most Useless Hack” tracks.
Congratulations to Rami, Team Dragon, and all other participants in this year’s Comptel, Ultrahack and Junction hackathons. We look forward to seeing the innovations that these bright minds bring to the table next year!
Read more about Nexterday North or click to learn about Comptel’s latest mobile data innovation FWD.
By Harry Järn, Head of New Business Ventures, Comptel NXT
Last week’s Nexterday North delivered big ideas from industry experts, business leaders and futurists who discussed the impact of digitalisation on our world. It also included one big surprise: the launch of Comptel’s FWD, a solution that we believe will revolutionise how operators serve customers in the next age of digital services.
What is FWD? It’s a full E2E, cloud-based, white-labelled, solution for operators.
The basic components of FWD, which includes SMPL, the native app, CTRL, the cloud-based controlling system and CNSL, the browser-based operator management tool, combine to create a complete solution for enabling and managing mobile data purchasing.
The native app radically simplifies how mobile customers purchase data. It puts customers in the driver’s seat by letting them set their own terms for buying data. It also puts operators in a better position to monetise mobile data at a time when customers desire more control of service terms and highly personalised, instantaneous service.
Our own mobile customer survey demonstrated why many subscribers are frustrated with the current state of mobile data purchasing. According to the report, 65 percent of consumers struggle to find a mobile data package that fully meets their needs, while 62 percent feel their mobile operator lacks a wide enough range of package options.
Part of that frustration can be tied to rigid mobile data packaging. Though they currently buy data by the gigabyte, customers aren’t sure just how much data they need. Is a 1GB package enough if you only plan to check emails and surf the Web? Is a 10GB plan economical for someone who watches streaming video on their smartphone?
FWD eliminates customer confusion by empowering mobile users to easily buy time-based data access. Here’s how it works: Let’s say a user wants to browse Facebook for just a few minutes. After he opens the Facebook app, he’ll be prompted with a few time-based data options, whether it’s one minute or one month of access. Once the data packet is purchased, the user is free to browse Facebook without limits, and he can easily extend his session if he needs more time.
That means no more bill shocks for surpassing their data overages. No more frustrating data throttling in the middle of a streaming television program or movie. No more complex, extended data service plans. It’s a simplified purchasing process that ties directly into customers’ desire for data control. Our survey found that 65 percent of mobile users want to set their own terms for buying digital content and services. FWD lets them do that.
The FWD management tool for operators opens up new possibilities to sell, target and market mobile data, as well as monitor your business performance in real time. You have full control over offer creation, which means you can experiment with new ways to entice your mobile customers. Embedded analytics will help you understand how your customers consume mobile data and allow you to react accordingly, which could mean dynamic pricing that helps you run a more efficient and profitable network. All of this analysis occurs instantly and in-the-moment, not after a month of data crunching.
We’re also excited about the possibilities FWD offers operators in tapping into a new market: the 2 billion individuals worldwide who have not yet been connected to the internet. With smartphone penetration expected to take off in emerging markets, the question of bringing all these new mobile users only will need to be answered. FWD provides a compelling solution because it’s easy to use, fosters customer engagement and loyalty, and encourages customers to spend more on mobile data.
Digitalisation is forcing many operators to re-think how they engage with and serve a new breed of mobile consumer. Comptel is excited to help operators innovate their service approach and drive toward a digital business revolution.
Although Comptel’s inaugural Nexterday North has wrapped up, post-event enthusiasm hasn’t faded at all. Take a few seconds to scroll through comments on our official Twitter hashtags – #Nexterday and #NexterdayNorth – and you’ll get a sense of the massive number of ideas and insights attendees were able to gain over two inspiring days in Helsinki.
As our CEO Juhani Hintikka said in his closing remarks, we are grateful to all of the partners, colleagues, speakers and guests who helped make our first antiseminar such a success. Plenty of blogs and articles have already been written recapping Nexterday North – check out the links at the bottom of this post for some of those – but here’s three of our own parting thoughts from the first Comptel anti-seminar.
Futurist Rohit Talwar (left), Stewart Rogers of VentureBeat Insights
There is Hope for Humanity
Those were the words Juhani used to describe Day 1 of Nexterday North, and it’s easy to see why. Our first day’s presenters offered a hopeful message of perseverance, potential and positive transformation.
Futurist Patrick Dixon’s energetic presentation taught us that emotion is the single most important driver of the future of technology, business and culture. Successful businesses remember that and seek to satisfy their customers on an emotional level. WIRED’s Gregg Williams shared a similar take, saying “It’s just as important to take bad things out of people’s lives as it is to add good things.”
Riisto Siilasmaa’s candid talk on Nokia’s business transformation had the crowd buzzing, and he offered a compelling walk-through of how he helped lead the company through one of its most challenging time periods. It was an inspiring lesson for the crowd that even in difficult times, there is always hope if you can commit to change.
Ted Matsumoto of Softbank (left), Horacio Goldenberg of Telefonica
Customers Drive the Future
A consistent theme through every session – and especially on Day 2 – was the importance of putting customers at the centre of business strategy.
Our moderator, Ville Tolvanen, hosted a fascinating fireside chat with T-Mobile’s Milan Ruzicka that explored the company’s popular customer-centric Uncarrier movement. In a panel discussion Smart Kalasatama’s Veera Mustonen suggested that business transparency earns customer trust, while Tele2’s Lars Torstensson explained consumers’ desire to set their own service terms.
Of course, you need strategy and structure to put customers at the centre. SoftBank’s Ted Matsumoto offered a compelling business model to help operators fine-tune to customer needs. We also heard from experts on the data, service architecture and monetisation strategies that will play a vital role in operators’ business transformation.
Mehackit's Cycle for Technology (left) and the launch of FWD
It’s Time for New Ways of Thinking
Many of the presentations also focused on the new service opportunities available to operators, from app development to smart cities to digital servies.
VentureBeat’s Stewart Rogers described new insights into hyper-personalized marketing that could deliver richer customer engagement. Futurist Rohit Talwar suggested a business pairing – experienced workers with younger ones – to balance the need for structure and discipline with the desire to innovate. And storyteller Linda Liukas advocated that children today could be the next generation of innovators if we make learning about technology fun and exciting.
Nexterday North was an exciting and inspiring event with more than a few surprises, including the launch of Comptel’s FWD app, which we believe will change how operators sell and market mobile data forever. Ultimately, Nexterday North proved that when you think differently, you uncover ways to make the world a better place for everyone.
By Sofia Nylund, Marketing and Communications Coordinator, TweetAtlas
The post-digital era is here and the Nexterday of business looks unruly, but at the same time extremely inspiring, challenging and prosperous. When new playbooks are rewritten you don’t want to be on the sidelines. It is time to think ahead, again and beyond.
These are the words Compteluses to describe its event Nexterday North, taking place in Helsinki on November 9th-10th. Together with a broad range of ecosystem partners such as Tech Mahindra, IBM, CloudSense, Hitachi and TATA Consultancy Services, Comptel is presenting six conceptually innovative industry blueprints in order to guide operators’ digital business and IT transformations.
The Nexterday blueprint “Hyper-Personalised Customer Engagement” focuses on how to drive new revenues through automated intelligent actions. It explores how companies can achieve smart real-time decisions for upselling services by targeting the right customers through the right channels with the right content, including analytics and sharp decision-making technologies.
So, in what sense will business playbooks be rewritten? When speaking of the fields of marketing and communications, technology and digital advancements have really changed the whole landscape. The need to serve increasingly tech-savvy consumers is driving dramatic change in demand for new capabilities like, for example, analytics. This requires operators to rethink their activities and processes in the digital market.
Social media is no longer a new thing, we are all a part of it to some extent. However, social media is evolving all the time, and its usage and applications are continuously developing and expanding. This is creating an abundance of opportunities. For professionals within marketing and communications social media, can be a real goldmine. At the same time, social media can also cause a lot of challenges and headache.
Brands as well as operators all over the world struggle with incorrect data, incompetent tools and lack of resources to measure and understand the impact of their ever-growing investments in social. Measuring the ROI of social has become the number one challenge in digital marketing according to many studies.
The underlying reason is actually quite simple; data has become more complicated (think: pictures and videos) and old text-mining based tools have become outdated. Today, over 90 percent of Facebook posts contain either a picture or a video clip, on Twitter the same number is over 50 percent and on Instagram, naturally, 100 percent.
Another big challenge with social media usually has to do with targeting the right customers, knowing how to address them in an appropriate way and understanding their rapidly evolving needs. How can you really understand your customers, their behavior and desires, and how can you effectively and proactively address them? In many ways, the customer now owns the brand. Therefore, some businesses may find it intimidating that they are not able to control what people are discussing about them and their brand.
In order to get relevant and accurate social insight you need advanced analytics that have adapted to the rapidly changed market and evolution of content in social conversations. Just because of the sheer volumes of these conversations, it’s impossible for any social media team alone to review and interpret all the content online about a brand, yet computers aren’t smart enough to understand sarcasm, irony, pictures, videos and multiple languages. The complexity of data has become a real issue. In today’s fast changing world, it has also become more and more vital for management to be aware, in real time, the tone people use when discussing your brand and products.
High quality analytics will eliminate the three biggest analytics problems on the market. First of all, irrelevant data, so called “noise”, is removed from conversations (according to research, on the average 60-80 percent of all data is noise). Secondly, analytics is able to interpret complicated data like pictures, videos and text containing sarcasm, irony and other types of tone. Lastly, in order to get a comprehensive brand insight, true multi-language support must be provided, as many businesses today are global even at launch.
By conducting high-quality social media analytics, one is able to receive valuable insight that helps fuel business-critical decision-making and market understanding. It’s now possible to learn in real-time how to better serve your market, while adjusting your business on an operative level to achieve your strategic business goals.
Completely holistic social insight can only be provided through combining the best capabilities of computers and human beings. Computers are excellent in processing large volumes of data rapidly, whereas human beings excel in interpreting complicated data accurately. When smartly joined together, they offer an unbeatable value proposition to any brand or operator who’s keen to win the game in the long run.
Learn more about the next generation of social media analytics at TweetAtlas.
Digitalisation has opened the door to new customer experiences and fresh monetisation opportunities, while virtualised infrastructure empowers telcos to do more with less, faster than ever. However, all of these new possibilities have also created a great deal of uncertainty. From a service architecture standpoint, operators are not sure that they can innovate fast enough, nor are they certain they can meet customers’ increasingly demanding expectations.
It’s a matter of eliminating friction and embracing flexibility. Innovation starts with service infrastructure, which is the foundation on which we build tomorrow’s digital service businesses. To get there, operators must seek solutions and partnerships that enable agility.
This will be a major focus point of the Blueprint Alley and related discussions at Comptel’s inaugural Nexterday North, which will run from 9-10 November 2015 in Helsinki.
Perhaps nowhere are operators’ challenges more evident than within the network. For decades, they have spent fortunes on building rigid architectures that suit their service needs, but digitalisation continues to expand the variety of potential service offerings and the number of ways these services are made available to customers. Voice is no longer the dominant service offering; operators must now quickly connect consumers with the data-driven services (apps, messaging and digital content) they crave.
That means operators must constantly re-evaluate the network to ensure they can capably serve customers now and in the future. This impacts the dynamic between operators and their technology partners. Though they may possess domain expertise, do legacy partners have the forward-looking vision and innovative solutions that deliver a wider range of services? If your entire service architecture is tied up with a single vendor full stack, do you have the flexibility to react to the next big digital development?
In our Blueprint Alley at Nexterday North, we will explain to visitors that agility will be their biggest asset in adapting for the next 10 to 20 years of telco.
Operators must design their architecture to anticipate change, as agile service delivery will help reduce the friction that prevents them from connecting their digital supply with customers’ demands. If their current system integrator or technology vendor inhibits this approach, then it’s time for operators to seek progressive partners that possess both domain expertise and vision.
Nexterday North will be a rare opportunity to hear from big thinkers from both inside and outside telecommunications about building agile businesses. You will hear examples on what leading operators have been able to accomplish by emphasising agility in their infrastructure, and learn the steps you need to take to meet increasing customer expectations for speed and service.
By embracing this vision and looking at service architecture with a more creative eye, operators will eliminate obstacles and create a clearer, more certain path to future growth in Nexterday.
Want to learn more about agile service orchestration and delivery? Register for Nexterday North to receive a 2+2 pass – two days at Nexterday North, the site of our Service Orchestration Blueprint Alley, plus two days at the massive startup conference Slush.
At Comptel, there’s nothing we like more than a killer idea. That’s exactly what we found when we organized our first ever hackathon. We’re now pleased to announce a winner: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s Team Dragon, which includes developers Chin Kang Tan and Mavis Wong. Congratulations!
Comptel Hackathon 2015 ran from 18-19 September. Our aim was to identify superb innovations in three categories: Smart City, Internet of Things (IoT) and Mobility as a Service. Teams had from noon on the 18th until midnight on the 19th to create their concepts, with presentations to the jury held on 23 September via Skype. Our jury evaluated each submission based on the level of innovation, the merits of the solution and the quality of the presentation.
Team Dragon wowed our judges with an extraordinary IoT-based shopping application called Match & Snap. The app creates an integrated shopping experience from the moment users enter a retail location. Once the store recognises them as a Match & Snap user, the app feeds users relevant offers and helpful content. For example, users can rely on Match & Snap to find the perfect outfit, send updates to friends via social media and learn about great bargains.
With their win at Comptel Hackathon 2015, Team Dragon will now represent Comptel at Ultrahack – a 48-hour hackathon in Helsinki, Finland scheduled just a few days before Nexterday North and Slush 2015. Team Dragon also won a trip to Slush, which takes place 11-12 November.
Second place in the Comptel Hackathon 2015 went to Team Tangra of Sofia, Bulgaria, who has earned a team dinner for their impressive data anonymising solution. Third place went to The Mechanics, also from Sofia, Bulgaria; they built a tool that makes hardware sizing easier and faster. Both of these teams will receive an additional much deserved prize for their amazing innovations!
Eight teams in all participated in Comptel Hackathon 2015, and our jury was delighted to see the energy, inventiveness and preparation each brought to the table. We can’t wait to see what Team Dragon does at Ultrahack and Slush, and we’d like to extend our thanks and appreciation to all the teams, jury members and organizers who made our first hackathon a success!
Last month, 
Although Comptel’s inaugural Nexterday North has wrapped up, post-event enthusiasm hasn’t faded at all. Take a few seconds to scroll through comments on our official Twitter hashtags – 
Operators must design their architecture to anticipate change, as 
