Marketplace Fireside Chat with Kloudville CEO Per Borgklint and Telco Republic CEO Martina Kurth
Summary:
Join Kloudville CEO Per Borgklint and Telco Republic CEO Martina Kurth for another chat as they explain how digital marketplaces can allow companies to innovate and tap into new opportunities for revenue growth.
Transcript:
M is Martina Kurth
P is Per Borgklint
P: Welcome back to the Kloudcast podcast, today, we have Martina Kurth from Telco republic with us and we are going to discuss Marketplace and why, how, what, when etc. the need of a marketplace comes in play. Welcoming her very much to have this discussion so Martina over to you.
M: Thanks a lot Per, thanks for having me, today’s discussion is really about new revenue generation growth, and that’s where digital marketplaces come into the game. They are a very important component of any service provider’s digital infrastructure to grow their revenues and to foster innovation by embracing external innovation. So, we all know that the traditional telco revenues and traditional telco services, like SMS data, is all pretty flat so there is really an urgency to find new revenue streams and digital marketplaces are one of those tools to tap into external value chains. Per, would you like to give me your view on digital marketplaces? What are the key benefits, why are they important?
P: I think the interesting thing is that, what really happens in our society, is that things get digitized all around us in all things we do. Simplicity on things to home or to your office has evolved over the last years in a rapid way, and with digital products and solutions also being available online of course that also gives you a rapid possibility to develop additional functions for features or products or solutions that you can combine with any internal assets. The key here, I believe, is that we as end consumers, users, expect to be able to engage digitally with all our suppliers and vendors and have a very easy way to subscribe unsubscribe or add additional products, features, functionalities to an existing subscription. I think these are some of the main expectations and to enable that you need some sort of digital frontend, eg marketplace, and have an underlying capability to manage, and also infuse partners, either digital or physical goods that can be sold in combination with your own products and solutions and that strengthens your relationship with your customer and it also helps your customer to have more ease in their daily work. I think these are some of the components why a marketplace becomes important and why moving into a digital environment is important.
M: I mean, there are also many more B2B/B2C scenarios out there where you can tap into really innovative services and offer those to your customer and also enhance the customer experience. Agility, time to market, for that you’ll need the adequate investments in the customer facing infrastructure like CPQ, order management, product catalog but also again the marketplace solution is the very component of this entire BSS/CRM infrastructure.
P: Yeah, the ability to take your products out in a digital front end is more or less what I would describe as a hygiene factor going forward. Then if you can, in a seamless fashion, also combine your product with other products and solutions from partners of yours, so you become a reseller of someone else’s goods and services then of course that makes you a more attractive solution provider, but it also enriches your relationship with your customer you can bond and build a broader and more deeper relationship. Over time a lot of communication solutions are moving into different needs and combination needs, which will require you to be able to do that to stay attractive and meet the needs of end users. And these things are on the verge of happening. To a certain extent it has already happened even though it is not offered in a combined fashion, but what we can do online as private persons, we will also be expected to be able to do as enterprises going forward. And that goes also to large companies where you would like to be able to maybe adjust and change and transform whatever subscription solutions you have in place with your vendor and add on or remove subscriptions in carts, IOT or add additional cloud storage or an additional user across some of these license based softwares you are using in your daily business.
M: Absolutely, why do you think some of the existing legacy solutions are inadequate to meet the needs of the telco providers to tap into new revenue strengths in a new digital economy?
P: Typically, what you see is that there’s vertically deployed solutions, so you don’t have a horizontal and holistic ability to offer them at one single front end. You have multiple product catalogs, you have multiple maybe billing systems, multiple CRM systems. Which hinders your ability to innovate at the front, but also hinders your ability to be competitive and innovative in the marketplace. That is one reason, the second reason is that, specifically the B2B space, it has been left a little bit behind. While consumer services has transformed into more or less fully digital experiences and you have total digital brands in the service field today. I believe the next step is that you will see the same kind of digitalization or digital experiences in the B2B space. That requires you to have a solution that can manage the underlying infrastructure, even if it’s verticalized, that can enable a customer to have a single sign on add and adjust and create new bundles for products, as they like to their benefit. And for your partners to also be able to upload their products and solutions so that they can offer to their customer in a seamless way. All of these things are pretty much needed, to do that you need a new EPC, so a centralized, some sort of product catalog we also prefer, we also have some PLM, product lifecycle management ability. To be able to rapidly and efficiently combine assets you have on the inside with partners on the outside, and also ease for the end user, possibility to subscribe, add solutions and products to their existing subscriptions and unified billing, of course, goes without saying if you can have a unified commercial order management, you can have one unified invoice following that. And then of course if you have multiple different vendors, or you have vertical stacks, the ability to integrate with those in a seamless and simple way, becomes a key component for the choice of vendor for a marketplace.
M: Absolutely, of course it makes a huge difference to work with a vendor like Kloudville that is really specialized on the telecommunication vertical because you need very unique expertise, experience, looking at the existing infrastructure environment the software these are all custom built solutions. We’ve seen in the past that many service providers were picking vendors outside telco expertise and many of these projects really failed.
P: The characteristics of the telco market is that there’s a lot of quality requirements and availability requirements that makes it a bit more challenging to be a good vendor in that space. And I believe that what we have that makes us unique is that we’ve created from the bottom up products based or developed for serving the needs of B2B Telco operators or Telco businesses and that has been possible because we don’t have a vertical legacy or a technical depth from at least one base or historical decisions to take into consideration, but we’ve been able to design and build this to actually instead think about the variety that is out there and how do we cope and deliver significant value if you’re sitting with these vertical and legacy vendors in your IT environment. Then we’ve turned that around and made that to our strength, that of course is a significant contributor to any operator that would like to have it quick and rapidly go to market. I think we have proven that in the case of Indosat where we launched our marketplace within 10 weeks from signed to up and running and fully operating integrated offers with their telco portfolio, and external partners.
M: That’s definitely a competitive differentiator, could you elaborate a little bit more on how does Kloudville marketplace 360 differ from other solutions in the market, why should people work with Kloudville?
P: Well, first of all, it’s a configurable product, meaning that it has ability to be configured to your needs rather than being developed to your needs. To a large extent we offer quick fixes that would be lengthy and difficult to deploy. We have our API framework, which makes it very easy to integrate and set it up towards any existing other legacy system inside your environment. We do cover everything from the very front and customer engagement down to both the commercial or the management layer, the service order management layer, we can also manage the full EPC. So, one single product catalog with a very easy product lifecycle management capability, that has the ability to manage both your own products, but also external products and therefore having the full partner manager view and having the partner to upload their products and pass through the system solution. We can manage the contracts and we also have the ability to do the CPQ, meaning that, creating the offers and staying active in the market in a very simple and rapid fashion versus most of our competitors.
M: Excellent, thank you so much.
P: Thank you! I believe what we will see going forward in the future is that there will be a lot of requests and demand for more complexity. I believe that it is also a given, based on where we’re heading and Martina it’s been great to have you with us and have your views and your questions in this space and it will be great to follow up and have some more podcasts going forward on other subjects. So thank you very much.
M: Thank you, have a good day.
P: The same.