CANCUN, Mexico – The telecom industry is going through an extremely difficult period of change. As it moves to the digital experience, companies need to have the ability to leverage data in order to differentiate themselves. This was the main thrust of comments from the global CIO of Telefónica, during his speech at the Amdocs LatAm Business Summit, held this week in Cancun.
Phil Jordan said that IT has become the core differentiation for telecom providers.
Telefónica is undergoing a business transformation across all units that will consolidate about 7,000 systems into 2,000.
Jordan noted that the IT transformation is needed because the telecom industry is passing through a huge change in its current business model that will drive the company to automating customer relationship management and other operations, digital marketing and sales, and ubiquitous connectivity.
The transformation to become digital requires fundamental changes, Jordan continued, admitting that “By adapting to lead our industry, we have created suffocating complexity, IT complexity.”
The ongoing transformation at Telefónica has reached 16 countries in 18 months, with the main point being to break the dependency on legacy systems in order to speed time-to-market.
Telefónica is basing its business-led application transformation on the TM Forum IT standard basis and using a service-oriented architecture.
“We made a big bet on the transformation. There’s no other way. If we don’t go digital, we won’t survive. It’s a very heave-strong process,” he said, while noting that Telefónica should have started about five years ago.
Currently, Argentina is the most advanced in this process, while Brazil is only getting started.
“We cannot be global if it takes years to integrate products. But that’s a huge challenge for us due to our legacy business. We need to deal with several partners,” Jordan stated.
Telefónica has relied on Amdocs to provide for an operational data storage solution for its operations in Chile and Peru. Amdocs’ data-management services tool is one component of Amdocs’ big data analytics offering.
Telefónica Chile and Telefónica Peru will use an operational data store that aggregates data from multiple operational sources including charging, collections, ordering, customer management and enterprise product catalog.
Editor’s Note: Amdocs paid for travel costs to Cancun, Mexico.
