Carrier Network Outsourcing (CNO)
The Carrier Network Outsourcing segment is rapidly maturing. Carriers are beginning to embrace outsourcing as a way to decrease costs, put more emphasis on what truly differentiates them in the market and increase the pace of transformation from legacy networks to an all IP world.
A CNO strategy not only allows carriers cost reductions but also delivers value and benefits from global scale and continuous best practice improvement that is unavailable on a regional level. Emerging globalization of processes and best in class tool sets are creating the ability for carriers to leverage infrastructure that only a global player would have. Additionally, carriers are often using CNO as a business enabler to drive both operational and network transformations.
Alsbridge is a leader in the evolving CNO marketplace. By using our proprietary methodology and industry expertise, we can develop and tailor your outsourcing strategy by focusing on the following areas:
Network Operations: There are a wide variety of global solutions that can be leveraged when looking at providing a 7x24 network monitoring capability. These solutions include a best in class tool set or integrating it with your own suite of applications. These approaches can accommodate support in local geography for business hours and off shoring centers during non business hours. An outsourcing approach in this area can also help accommodate merging legacy networks or consolidating centers into a best in class solution faster and less expensively than doing this on your own.
Provisioning: Leveraging a lower cost back office capability for provisioning is a growing area of focus for many carriers. Building a solution in this area by utilizing outsourcing can create robust savings and free up human capital to work on more strategic areas of the network. The ability to create a front office and back office approach for this function has allowed the creation of better process flow and cost savings to emerge.
Field Services: This function is and will continue to be a major operational cost for carriers. No matter how much automation is introduced into the network the need for smart hands will be an on-going requirement. However, with workforce management and other operational efficiencies enabled through outsourcing this function can be optimized to reduce cost and improve customer services.
Network Maintenance: This is the area where Equipment Vendors have historically generated significant operating profit by charging Insurance type rates for on-going technical support services. When outsourcing to equipment vendors carriers are often able to see significant reduction in costs while improving service levels as they bring the technical expertise one step close to operational challenges of their network. We are seeing an increased trend toward multi-vendor maintenance contracts either stand-alone or as part of a CNO relationship.
Engineering: This is an area that requires some intelligence and diversity when being considered for CNO. Network Planning and Architecture is often retained by the carrier so that their network strategy stays closely aligned with their business strategy. It is these functions along with marketing and customer service that will be their future market differentiators. Detailed engineering, both design and implementation is an area where CNO can provide significant returns and process improvements for most carriers. The larger outsourcing providers have greater scale and leverage points than most carriers could experience on there own.
Operational Support Systems (OSS): To achieve the economies of scale and points of leverage necessary for outsourcing vendors to be successful they often are required to revamp and upgrade their OSS. This provides carriers ancillary benefits in that these new systems force standards that may not have previously existed. Given the increasing number of mergers and acquisitions in the communications industry carriers often find themselves with a plethora of applications. Once these standard new environments are establish it can significantly improve a carriers ability to bring new applications to market in a timely fashion. Alsbridge’s expertise in the CNO space will assist carriers in their ability to gain the appropriate business leverage from this opportunity.
Hosted Applications: As applications become an increasingly important role in carriers long term profitability, new business models need to be explored. The current market dynamics are driving revenues and profits to the Yahoo’s and Google’s of the world while carriers are being forced to increase bandwidth with diminished margins on the network services they offer today. Hosted Applications is one area where carriers can bring new applications to market faster while minimizing up-front capital requirements. Additionally, the ability to capture market share and tie payments to revenue will enable controlled growth and improved ARPU. Allsbridge’s history of successful outsourcing consulting and unique business models will assist carriers in realizing the return on these types of relationships.
