Video
With fierce competition from digital native start-ups, telcos must develop unique, differentiated strategies to compete in the half-trillion-dollar market for the Interent of Things. Velu Sinha, a partner in Bain's Telecommunications practice, outlines how telcos can win by focusing on connectivity, life cycle management and specific verticals to leverage partner ecosystems.
Read the Bain Brief: Close to the Core: Telcos' Competitive Advantage in the Internet of Things
Read the transcript below.
VELU SINHA: The Internet of Things is a half-a-trillion-dollar opportunity, because it enables businesses to reduce downtime, improve efficiency and generate insights. Many incumbents are being disrupted by digital native start-ups who aren't encumbered by legacy, and who are able to focus directly on customer pain points. For these incumbents, the heart of digital transformation is in being able to securely and continuously capture the information needed to optimize and automate their processes using machine learning and artificial intelligence. This allows them to improve customer satisfaction and intimacy, and create differentiation.
Telcos are in a unique position to enable these transformations because of their latent skills in building and operating networks. They have platform expertise around directories and OSS/BSS, which are critical for enabling scale IoT solutions. The opportunity to provide connectivity, life-cycle management and vertical solutions is worth tens of billions of dollars. Winning these opportunities requires telcos to focus on specific verticals, and to leverage partner ecosystems for devices, analytics and channels.
Close to the Core: Telcos' Competitive Advantage in the Internet of Things
Telecom executives eyeing opportunities in industry services should look critically at connectivity and life cycle management.