By: Steven Cho, Chief Marketing Officer, Whale Cloud International

Discover a digital transformation approach to risk control and ecosystem building.

Why is TaaS (Telco-as-a-Service (TaaS) needed now? 

Once upon a time, cloud computing caught everyone’s eye with its mysterious power and the “as a service” models. Now it is one of the hottest buzzwords in the world, as many businesses of all sizes across industries have reaped the benefits of high availability, scalability and elasticity.

In the telecom industry, Communications Service Providers (CSPs) seek to monetize 5G and regain momentum for revenue growth, and incumbent Business Support Systems (BSS) are incapable of supporting 5G use cases in a timely and cost-effective manner. Change is essential to ensure customer satisfaction and marketing competitiveness while maximizing emerging revenue opportunities for CSPs in this new era of

5G. Updating the existing BSS to be future-ready is always at the top list, while it is time-consuming, complicated, and risky. Therefore, CSPs need to adopt the “as a service” model and change the mindset of operations. Telco-as-a-Service (TaaS), a tailored “as a service” model for CSPs is here to change the game.

Typical business scenarios of TaaS

Undoubtedly, CSPs are undergoing transformation and making breakthroughs to meet ever-changing customer expectations in a rapid manner; however, a holistic digital transformation may be difficult for many CSPs, and digital brands are the opportunities to fuel growth for their core businesses by providing less-complicated and transparent offerings to acquire new customers more efficiently.

TaaS has the technology and process to help CSPs launch digital brands for new market initiatives in a short time. These digital brands coexist harmoniously with CSPs’ traditional brands while being more flexible in business operations and delivering a better customer experience.

TaaS also supports another transformation option ‘Greenfield Approach’ that helps overcome the risk of migrating the existing BSS/OSS. In this approach, CSPs can reinvent part of the business and use a phased, step-by-step method to gradually replace the legacy system and migrate to a new system.

Usually, the old system will run in parallel with the new one periodically. Once the new system is mature enough in operations, all the core businesses will be migrated in batches by types of businesses and customers. The greenfield approach is highly recommended for those CSPs with complex legacy BSS looking to embark on a transformation.

Furthermore, TaaS also help CSPs build up a marketplace for enterprise customers, which is the mature stage to realize the value of TaaS. In this stage, CSPs can sell extended capabilities (connectivity, data, channels, operations) to government and enterprise customers, playing as digital hubs for their government and enterprise partners.

How Whale Cloud TaaS enables you to do more with less? 

Looking out at the telecom industry, TaaS solutions mainly target the requirements of CSPs that pursue light-weighted digital brands, MVNOs market, or a transformation with the greenfield approach I mentioned above. However, there is barely a TaaS solution that can support the quick launch of digital brands/MVNO business, and empower a BSS/OSS transformation and even the ecosystem building at the same time, all with one. Why not do more with less?

Whale Cloud’s Digital BSS/OSS, including digital channel, CRM, billing, accounting, provisioning, and assurance can be deployed on mainstream public cloud environments to serve as TaaS, and on-premise deployment is also possible based on CSPs’ needs. This approach can significantly accelerate the digital transformation process, and reap the benefits on a monthly basis.

If you take a close look at Whale Cloud TaaS, the Out-of-The-Box (OOTB) and openness are the essential features that make it different from others.

In Whale Cloud TaaS solution, both IT functionality and business applications are built in an OOTB way. As we all know, offerings of digital brands/MVNOs are simple, and the key is operational capabilities.

Whale Cloud researched operational methods of the world’s top 32 digital brands/MVNOs and embedded them as OOTB capabilities into the system. We also summarized the most typical offerings, add-on packages, and promotions, and built them into the system.

Digital brands/MVNOs can easily configure their products in a parametric way and launch various digital marketing tools to acquire customers in a short time manner, increase Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), and reduce churn rate, with the characteristics of Whale Cloud TaaS below:

• A stable & future-ready BSS backend with rich open APIs for easy integration
• A pre-integrated mobile app with a ready-to-use digital experience across the entire customer journey
• Quickly design and launch your marketing campaign in a few clicks
• Data-driven operation metrics for the app channel operation
• An in-app gamification library to increase mobile app engagement
• Continuous innovation with new campaign templates & ideas

Once all the systems run mature and stable in the TaaS model, more complicated businesses will be moved from old systems for digital transformation, and openness will play the key.

Besides providing OOTB functions, Whale Cloud TaaS is equipped with open plugins, Integrated Development Environment (IDE), open APIs, and low code development, exposing more capabilities to allow integrators, partners, and IT teams of CSPs to co-build the systems.

By exposing digital DevOps pipelines, Whale Cloud TaaS can onboard CSPs’ IT teams to participate in the entire lifecycle of software R&D, realize agile development and delivery, quickly meet the diverse network and business needs, and realize business agility and fast time to market.

Whale Cloud TaaS features:

• An extensive API repository to boost channel application innovation
• A DevStudio with domain-driven design & extension points enables fast application customization
• Low-code tools embedded to extend new business applications easily

With these features, Whale Cloud TaaS shortens the time to market, powers businesses to embrace the ecosystem, and drives sales growth, thus enabling CSPs to play as the digital infrastructure provider of the whole society.

We are committed to maximizing value for our customers, helping our customers optimize operations with an agile and sustainable approach in the long digital transformation cycle, and ultimately becoming future-ready techcos.

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