Company Updates

Top 5 Challenges Emerging for the Telco Carriers and Service Providers

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Over the past three months I have traveled to Europe, the Middle East and China speaking to Dell OEM Solutionsemployees, OEM Telecommunication’s customers, and leaders in the Information Communications Technology (ICT) market. My goals were to learn as much as I could about what concerns and needs the ICT market has when it comes to enterprise technologies, such as rack mount carrier grade servers, storage, networking gear, and services.

OEM China team pictured from left to right: Christy Ma, Franklin Flint, William Hua, and Jim Lee

What I learned was way more than anything I anticipated when I began my series of global trips. For instance, in Israel I was given a detailed list of technology requirements, services expectations, operations issues, and the pains the large ISV/NEP players have. Mainland Europe had much the same concerns as Israel, peppered with some EMEA specific concerns such as network regulations in the region.  And, in China, the experts made it clear and detailed for me exactly what kept them up at night, and what was being asked of partners and suppliers for Telco solutions.

To summarize these challenges the Telco industries face globally I’ve put them into a top five list:

  1. Reduce Time to Market:There is massive pressure to reduce time to market for cutting edge new technologies. A new technology roll-out needs to take months, not years, as the return on investment needs to occur within a much quicker timeframe, as the next great thing that requires investment will be ready in a year, not a decade.
  2. Focus on Costs:Since new services and capabilities are rolling out at faster rates, the costs of developing and deploying the current solutions need to be reasonable, so investment in the next solution can take place concurrently.
  3. Simplify Integration & Delivery: The “block and tackling” of integrating and delivering a solution after it is developed is associated with excessive costs and a shortage of resources to manage. There is a need to simplify and accelerate that process.
  4. Nimble & Flexible Design:Future solutions need to be more nimble, flexible, and scalable to ensure speed to market, new capabilities, and reactions to market pressure and regulations  can be managed rapidly and with ease.
  5. Improve Support: Support and reliability, especially in emerging markets, needs to be evaluated and improved.

The dozens of customers, co-workers and leaders I spoke to all addressed various aspects of these high level concerns. Right now the OEM Solutions team is evaluating these concerns and is developing processes and products which address them. We will look to the extensive capabilities already mastered by Dell in general and uniquely addressed by OEM Solutions for the OEM market. Our intention is to become the top provider and partner to the ICT market of Telco-class enterprise solutions in the near future.

Clearly, from many discussions with customers, the ICT market needs consistent global solutions from competent manufacturers, integrators and solutions developers as the needs were common in all regions and all markets. Dell OEM solutions already started this journey from the launch of our NEBS and Carrier Grade systems through to the Telco solutions expert team within our group. Join us in the conversation to learn more.

I would love to hear what you think of these issues and how you think they could be addressed. Please reach out to me on Twitter @franklinatdelland through your Dell account team or here in comments on Direct2Dell. We can discuss with you what we can offer today and how we are expanding our products and services to address more in the future.

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About the Author: Franklin Flint