Key talking points from the Huawei Operation Transformation Press Conference held at MWC 2022 in Barcelona.

At MWC Huawei held a round table looking at digital transformation within the telecoms industry. In it, a panel of experts from Huawei took questions from journalists on subjects including best practice, partnerships how operators can manage their own services. The panel consisted of:

Jacky Zhou, Vice President, Marketing & Solution, Huawei

Simon Liang, Director, Consulting & System Integration Marketing & Solution, Huawei

Bin Feng, Director, Software Marketing & Solution, Huawei

Here are some highlights from the discussion:

Question: Huawei has emphasized that digital transformation needs to come from practice. Why is this emphasized, and what are the changes it brings?

Jacky Zhou: Actually, in the last 5 years, Huawei has accumulated a lot of digital practices regarding the O&M, delivery, marketing and sales. Before that, we primarily focused on our own digital transformation. And because of our own journey of digital transformation, we have accumulated many experiences as well as lesson learned. We always believe that we must change or transform ourselves before serving our customers. That is to say we’d like to jump with our parachute first. With the practices accumulated in the last five years, we now have a better idea about the direction of future digital transformation, how to implement digital transformation, and how we are able to create greater business value.

That’s why we believe that digital transformation must be based on practices. So, we identify the frustrations or pain-points faced by our customers. We have collaborated with over 180 customers around the world. Moving into the future, we will continue to update our models used for assessing the maturity of digital and intelligent transformations. We are offering the maturity assessment model, which includes five different phases and five different dimensions, and we try to help our customers to embrace their own digital transformation. What’s more, we hope to enable our customers to help their customers to implement digital transformation in the B2B segment or the verticals.

Digital transformation should start with a comprehensive or overtly ambitious plan. There’s an old saying in China which goes ’if you want to walk 1000 miles, then you must start with the very first step.’ That is to say we want to get things going and then to really cover the long journey instead of to try to do everything at the very beginning.

Question: What is the right model for carriers to transform their operations?

Jacky Zhou: The five dimensions included in these models are strategic planning, value measurements, organization of processes, digital platform, and organizations and talents. That is to say this model allows our carrier customers to assess where they are, where they would like be in the future, and how they can achieve their digital transformation goals in these five dimensions, as well as in five different phases.

Question: What kind of partnerships are the most important for digital transformation?

Simon Liang: Digital transformation can be a very large topic. Today we’re seeing digital services developing fast, and the complexity of networks is also growing fast. That is why digital transformation is not an option, but a must-do thing for us. In the last decade, Huawei has been collaborating with our operator customers, industry organizations, and other partners in the industry to encourage the distribution of digital transformation practices. We believe that we need to start with the right high-value scenarios. That is to say, we need to review and analyse the entire customer journey, and we hope to increase the agility during the purchase stage and to improve user experience during the early stages. And then during the O&M stage, we’d like to introduce a higher level of intelligence.

After selecting these high value scenarios, we also need to go back to our own practices as well as our customers’ practices. That is why along the way of the digital transformation, we have been noting down all the best practices, the experience, and digital assets along the way.

Question: You mentioned that your objective is to help operators to move from a managed services situation to be able to manage their own services and offer digital transformation to their customers, can you outline a bit more about this and how you want to achieve that?

Bin Feng: Regarding the goal of enabling the digital transformation of operators, we hope to help them improve their revenue. That is the most important thing. Operators today are facing competition from OTT vendors. They are facing challenges, but they also enjoy their own advantages in the market. For example, operators have larger user base, and they have stronger background of ICT technologies. They also have a better channel to reach the users.

In the B2C market, operators can tap into their larger user base to roll out a greater number of digital services, including video ringback tone, FinTech services and New messaging. I would like to share a successful story regarding FinTech. In Africa, fintech services have helped an operator to increase the penetration rate of their FinTech subscribers to 80% of its total mobile subscribers. What’s more, the fintech service is delivering this operator an additional 32 dollar ARPU every year.

Then in the B2B segment, the ICT technologies and experience of an operator can be introduced to vertical markets. For example, we have released the ‘Customer Engagement Centre today’ and the traditional operators’ customer service only was only using voice. But these new types of customer engagement centre introduce video and intelligence capabilities to the solution. As a result, the revenue of this solution can be five times higher than the traditional ones.

Question: Can you explain more about the SmartCare Smart series and AUTIN i series solutions?

During the OTF Forum this year we announced the ‘Smart series’ of SmartCare and the ‘i series’ of AUTIN. Those offerings are being offered because we have accumulated the digital transformation practices of Huawei and our customers. We are trying to make the digital transformation specifically designed or satisfy the goals of value scenarios, business process as well as the needs of users.

Then to better support the digital transformation of the O&M and operations of telecom operators, we have decided to consolidate the previously siloed offerings into the whole package. And this year we rolled out the Smart series of SmartCare, which is designed for optimizing experiences along the entire journey of a network roll out. For example, we have Smart Planning –  this offering is designed to increase the precision of network planning and network construction. And another offering –  Smart Optimization – serves to optimize our network. And Smart Experience serves the goal of allowing our operators to conduct proactive experience management. Another offering – Smart Decision – is helping operators to conduct precision marketing.

Then under the SmartCare family, we also have a new offering called Smart DataCube. This is a converged data engine. It’s a local platform helping operators to unleash the value of data. That is the SmartCare family.

For AUTIN, we are rolling out the i series, which includes four different offerings – iFM, iPM, iEM and iStudio. iFM, it’s used to conduct fault management. And iPM is used to manage performance. iEM is a new offering we are announcing as well, which is used for event management. And as a matter of fact, iEM is managing the event in a way to be service-impact-oriented. This is the way that we believe can help operators to really transform their style of O&M from being network oriented to becoming impact of service oriented. Then last but not least is the iStudio offering under AUTIN, which is a local platform designed to facilitate the transformation of talents.

The functions of these offerings are indicated in their names, and operators can review where they are today and what the scenarios of digital transformation are, so that they can select what they need, and all these offerings can be deployed on a unified data foundation. So carriers have the freedom to select all of them, or just use one of them. This mechanism makes it easier for operators to kick off their digital transformation.