The telecom industry had to shift gears after the pandemic.

In recent times, the telecom industry has had to overcome major challenges, which include complex business models and billing procedures, lack of flexibility in system integration, lack of trust and speed, complex data analytics, poor efficiency, high operational costs and low-quality digital customer experience.

To keep up with a rapidly changing landscape, the industry has embraced AI in a way that upgrades measures related to cybersecurity and risk management. It has also adopted decentralized broadband networks to stay aligned to the broadband markets that are AI-enhanced and increasingly competitive.

AI in telcos

Telecom companies (telcos) are using AI to optimize network quality by leveraging traffic data based on time zones and regions. They are also analyzing data using AI to enhance customer experience.

Data analysis further helps telcos in real-time network management, predictive maintenance, root cause analysis, fraud detection, achieving sustainability goals, crowded marketplace management and revenue growth, among others.

AI-powered cameras, which help telcos with raising alarms during natural disaster and emergency situations, have come as a big boon for the industry in mobile tower operation optimization.

Additionally, automation is playing a variety of roles streamlining these complex processes. This is where, HCLTech’s Turbo automation platform is addressing these challenges by automating testing, reducing the burden on Telecom Service Providers (TSPs) and enhancing their agility.

By leveraging analytics, Turbo has been reducing operational costs and accelerating network and service launches. It is also streamlining end-to-end test lifecycle management for telco networks, devices and applications.

Turbo’s key capabilities powering telcos for next-gen advancements include automatic test execution, AI-driven intelligent test planning, insights and dashboarding covering planning metrics, execution tracker and visualization, and HCLTech’s SmartLab services.

However, telcos are leveraging other emerging technologies too to stay ahead of the curve. In this article, Trends and Insights explores three key areas in which HCLTech helped global enterprises recently in their digital transformation journey.

Migrating operations to cloud

A monolithic IT infrastructure — prone to cyberattacks — often becomes a major hurdle for telecom providers to achieve business goals and enhance customer-centric experience. Here, an automated and secured cloud-enabled IT infrastructure brings in stability and consistency.

For example, a leading Canadian communication and media company wanted to transform its data centers by adopting next-gen technologies like cloud and hybrid cloud and improve its customer satisfaction index by enhancing operational stability with transparency across IT systems.

As a managed service provider to transition services and migrate the client’s data centers to cloud, HCLTech had to first scrutinize the existing IT infrastructure, look for gaps and present end-to-end system automation solutions with next-gen technologies.

With the aim to fully automate the environment to achieve transparency and stability, HCLTech offered a modernized and secured infrastructure solution to achieve stability and reduce the client’s technical debt.

This demanded further involvement with new-age technologies and HCLTech invested in cutting-edge AI and ML, enabling the adoption of best practices to drive automation. The client’s global operations center and platforms were enhanced to improve service-level agreements (SLAs) or response time and enable predictable operations with integrated monitoring, auto ticketing and self-healing.

The remote support from HCLTech resulted in 27% OPEX savings. Among impact areas, the major incident count was significantly reduced by 89.8%, which further improved to 95% for in-scope services, meantime to restore from major incidents was reduced by 59%, resulting in faster resolution times, and the provisioning time for GTM products accelerated by 50%.

As-a-service

“As-a-service” models cater to a wide range of industries. In the telecom industry, delivery-as-a-service (DaaS) ensures speed and quality through digital transformation.

For example, a leading US-based telecom company that offers innovative mobile device financing products and services, including customized financing options, credit checks, checking accounts and churn and debt management tools needed to quickly prototype, test, scale and meet high standards of quality, compliance and user interface.

It partnered with HCLTech to reevaluate its technology delivery model. This innovative model also focused on key areas like launching financial products and features within specific timelines, exercising effective governance and quality control, proactive engagement in planning and execution, seamless communication and establishing data-driven KPIs and SLAs.

The model provided end-to-end technology services and led to product excellence and transformed operations, enabling the client to expedite outcomes and achieve remarkable progress. Within 16 months, the client applied this pilot program in 50+ projects and it delivered tangible, sustainable and accelerated outcomes.

This included a 25% reduction in build-to-launch cycle-time, 110% delivered/committed story point ratio, 40% increase in sprint velocity, 200% improvement in sprint backlog, 100% automation of in-sprint testing and zero defects in production build.

Modern billing system

An enterprise’s billing system is essential for evaluating its financial competency at the end of a fiscal year. An outdated billing system can cause accounting inconsistencies and misalignment with objectives and ROI. A modern system reduces costs and impacts operations positively.

For example, a global telecom major found itself unable to adapt to changes with an old legacy billing system that was not cost-effective. It partnered with HCLTech to migrate to a commercial billing system.

HCLTech chose to move the existing charging system to a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) platform: a brand-new telecom billing product making use of accelerators such as bill comparison and TM Forum process maps. To prevent any disturbance to existing operations, the procedure used a focused-deployment approach.

This system could be promptly modified without disrupting the client’s ongoing operations. Among the major impact areas, this migration reduced operational costs by 40% and accelerated new features and product launches by 20%.

Looking ahead, telcos will continue to invest in emerging technologies to maintain competitive advantage, meet sustainability goals and reap the benefits of reduced costs and enhanced efficiency.