"93% of strategy execs said that exploring new business models is as important in this current economic climate as cutting costs and retaining customers."
Telco 2.0™ Brainstorm Participant Survey'

Focus

Part of the New Digital Economics EMEA Executive Brainstorm and Developer Forum, the 13th Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm looks at the how, through open innovation, the communications industry can better support the growth of the wider ‘digital economy’.

It builds on the strategic themes researched and developed by the Telco 2.0 Initiative and is designed for senior strategy execs from the telecoms, media and technology sectors who are in charge of or involved in new growth initiatives.

Based on new research and analysis the interactive event looks in depth at: New Market Opportunities in Communications, Media & Entertainment; Mobile Internet & Broadband Economics; Cloud Services; and Business Transformation (in Multi-Sided Markets).

AGENDA

0800 Registration Open

0830 Welcome, Introductions & Warm Up

0900 Investment & Growth Opportunities (in TMT)

The Telecoms, Media and Technology (TMT) ecosystem is becoming more complex as the business models of different players converge and collide. While investors have focused on the threats offered by ‘over the top’ players, executives at Telco 2.0's last two events (November 2010 in London and April 2011 in Palo Alto) believe that operators can generate significant new sources of value in the digital age if they act fast. Operators have substantial network- and customer-related assets and relationships with which to exploit opportunities generated by businesses and consumers using their digital networks.

At this session you can find out the new opportunity areas that operators and vendors within TMT are focusing on and debate the best way for the industry to exploit these. The session will also discuss key challenges and threats for TMT and what can be done to mitigate these.

Hypotheses:

Players within TMT must develop more flexible commercial strategies and greater operational agility if they are to navigate turbulent waters. Operators are turning their attention to these issues and seeking to develop the skills, culture and relationships to exploit opportunities and mitigate threats.
The recent increase in prominence of innovation labs and business development organisations supported by senior executives within operators and media companies is a good starting point and shows that service innovation skills are recognised as a key building block for future success.
Many service providers are seeking to build expertise in specific functional capabilities – advertising, marketing, content delivery, payments, process improvement – and in specific vertical industries – media, games, utilities, healthcare – which will facilitate management learning and provide a strong platform for future growth.
One size does not fit all and telecoms players will need flexible commercial, technology and partnership strategies and operations if they are to be successful.
Avoiding costly mistakes will be important. The nature of the TMT market is constantly changing with new threats and many ‘false opportunities’ being thrown up. Successful service providers will be those whose strategic approach circumnavigates threats and avoids wasting precious capital and management time on low-value opportunities.

Questions to be addressed at the brainstorm:

What should be the key role of retail TMT service providers in the next 3 years and what should their priorities be? How important is growing access and connectivity via the development of the ‘internet of things’? What emphasis should be placed on the preservation of voice and messaging revenues? How important is it for operators to develop a role in digital transactions and what should that role be?
What are the real opportunity areas for service providers? What are the ‘red herrings’ and ‘false dawns’? And what are the risks?
What immediate practical steps should the industry take now to preserve or grow value?
How should TMT service providers be working with internet players and with vendors for mutual benefit?

Presenters and Panellists
Short stimulus presentations x 3 (from representatives from the Telecoms, Media and Technology industries), followed by debate with participants using our ‘Mindshare’ interactive technology, followed by a panel discussion.

Presenters and Panellists include:

Chris Barraclough, Chief Strategist, Telco 2.0
Richard Kramer, Managing Director, Arete Research
Peters Suh, CEO, WAC
Sean Williams, Group Strategy Director, BT

(Watch this space for updates. Other event 'stimulus speakers' here).

Further reading

The Roadmap to New Telco 2.0 Business Models
Telcos vs. Internet Players: Act before it's too late
$Multi-Billion Telco 2.0 Growth Opportunities in North America: Can Telcos Act in Time?
New Business Models: Half Future Telco Growth
Innovation Principles for a Disrupted Market (video)

1045 Break

1115 Innovation Showcases

Adding airtime to airmiles: New revenues from selling mobile minutes into the $230bn global loyalty programme market. Lessons from Brazil.

Eduardo Jacob, CEO, MinuTrade

The growth opportunity in enterprise messaging and CEBP

David Harvey, VP Business Development, Message Systems

1145 Mobile Broadband Economics

The objective of this session is to discuss how to create new growth opportunities and sustainable business models for mobile broadband (MBB), learning from latest thinking from around the world.

With the explosive growth of smartphone penetration and usage, mobile broadband is at last providing a significant new way to access and use the Internet. The subsequent capacity arms-race to support the new volumes and patterns of data consumption is stimulating a new wave of investment in networks, business models, and control/policy and pricing capabilities.

Telco 2.0 conducts ongoing research and has published a major research report on how telcos can create new Mobile, Fixed and Wholesale Broadband Business Models. In our recent Americas and EMEA brainstorms we analysed the new economics of broadband, looking in particular at issues around LTE deployment, new tariff structures, ‘Net Neutrality’ and innovative strategies to deliver higher capacity of mobile broadband more economically.

Hypotheses:

Mobile broadband (MBB) pricing and business models need to support rapidly changing consumer needs and applications.
They also need to stimulate and reward telcos' investment and foster innovation in the wider Digital Economy.
To derive new revenues from ‘upstream’ (3rd party) markets telcos must offer real tangible added value rather than act as gatekeepers.
Telcos should employ strategies beyond just grabbing local access market share, for example exploiting wholesale more aggressively.

Key questions to debate

What is stopping promising new MBB business models and new revenue streams from being realised?
What are the innovations in pricing and applications?
What does “personalisation” mean for MBB, and can it work in practice?
What are the best ways to manage congestion on today’s networks – pricing, offload, optimisation?
What’s the rationale for LTE – more of the same (faster/cheaper), or something new (eg. Wholesale)?
Does network outsourcing limit business model flexibility?

Presenters and Panellists
Short stimulus presentations x 3 (from representatives from the Communications, Media and Technology industries), followed by debate with participants using our ‘Mindshare’ interactive technology, followed by a panel discussion.

Presenters and Panellists include:

Stefan Hedelius, Head of Marketing & Strategy, Ericsson
Rainer Deutschmann, SVP Mobile Products, Deutsche Telekom
Stephen Ford, Director of Strategy & Innovation, 3UK
John Giere, SVP Marketing and Products, Openwave
Dean Bubley, Senior Associate Analyst, Telco 2.0 Initiative

(Watch this space for updates. Other event 'stimulus speakers' here).

Further reading

Future Broadband: “Happy Pipes”: worth $416Bn by 2020?
Optimising Mobile Broadband Economics: Key Issues and Next Steps
LTE: 'Longer Term Enthusiasm'?
New Mobile, Fixed and Wholesale Broadband Business Models
LTE & Wholesale: Time to Get Aggressive?
Public Wifi: Destroying LTE/Mobile Value?

1330 Lunch (& exhibition)

1430 Innovation Showcase

Senders Pays Data case study - UK travel apps

Andrew Bud, Chairman, mBlox
George Sikking, MD, Rail Easy
Larry Breen, MD, CDT

1450 Cloud Services: What Roles should Telcos play?

Providing infrastructure services at very high scale with strong reliability guarantees while charging by volume sounds very like a classic Telco business. In many ways, the PSTN is the original cloud. This plays into STL Partners’ enduring focus on SMB and enterprise markets – essentially 100% of cloud computing is sold to ‘upstream’ customers of one kind or another, as an input into their business processes.

The fundamental questions are what are the most appropriate business models for Telcos, and how much could they benefit from being cloud customers? Recently, Telco 2.0's research practice has explored these issues in a new analyst's note, "The Cloud: Identifying Telco Opportunities"

In this session, we will be attempting to test the ideas raised in the note, further exploring where the issues and areas of opportunity for Telcos exist, and considering how the benefits of cloud computing can be realised for Telcos themselves. We will also be looking at the interaction between cloud computing and other elements of the Telco 2.0 agenda, notably developer communities, subscriber data, and bandwidth on demand. A major driver of cloud usage in enterprises seems to be rapid applications development and scaling (up and down), according to work at past Telco 2.0 events.

Hypotheses:

There is a nontrivial market opportunity for Telcos here. Delegates at the last Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm converged on a rough figure of $40bn a year.
As cloud providers, Telcos have certain key assets that differentiate them from the IT-world competition.
The core Telco product is still connectivity, and the key assets cluster around it. Telcos have control of network assets and also of a geographical footprint that permits them to provide an ADN or Application Delivery Network analogous to a Telco.
However, a major driver of cloud adoption is the developer community "voting with its feet". An unexpectedly strong result from the last Executive Brainstorm was the value that several presenters had derived from using cloud computing as a rapid-prototyping tool.

Key questions to debate

What are the lessons from the best telco Cloud Services examples / case studies?
What are the key Cloud Services opportunities in SME and Enterprise Markets?
What are the priorities for Telcos to take advantage of these opportunities?

Presenters and Panellists include:

Stephan Hadinger, Chief Architect Cloud Services, Orange France Telecom
Fabio Gori, Head, SP Marketing Europe, Cisco
Michael Crossey, CMO, Aepona
Andrew Collinson, Research Director, Telco 2.0 Initiative

(Watch this space for updates. Other event 'stimulus speakers' here).

Further reading

Cloud 2.0: What are the Telco Opportunities?
Cloud 2.0: "Worth $43Bn by 2013"
Making Sense of 'Cloud / xAAS': Seven Clear Examples

1630 Break

1645 Innovation Showcases

Optimising interactions with subscribers in Social Networks

Andrey Belevtsev, CEO, Roox
Pavel Roytberg, Internet Services Director, MTS Russia

1700 Business Transformation and Personal Data

Rapid mobile broadband growth and the mass move to data services requires and allows communications service providers to re-think how their customers experience their services. New models, methods and tools can empower the market facing teams within operators to adopt best practices from the e-commerce world, to deliver value to subscribers and to drive new revenues.

Personal Information - digital data relating to an identified or identifiable person - is being generated, transmitted and stored on a vast and increasing scale, primarily for internal use by organisations looking to better serve individuals, but increasingly for external use to support third-party organisations to better interact with those same individuals.

Still only a nascent industry, the business of using personal information to create value for individuals and income from third parties, holds considerable promise. For example, Facebook, only 6 years old and generating an estimated $1bn in revenues, somehow commands a $50bn valuation, by doing just this.

In 2010 the World Economic Forum established a project on Rethinking Personal Data, which Telco 2.0 along with MIT, Harvard Law School and others supported. A white paper was launched at Davos in February 2011 and the project continues. This session will draw on the work undertaken on the project and seek to further develop the themes highlighted by it. This will be covered in greater detail at the special ‘unconference’ workshop - Personal Data2.0: Igniting the Personal Data Ecosystem - on Friday 13th May, the third day of the New Digital Economics Brainstorm.

Hypotheses:

CSPs will need to develop new tools, skills and processes to transform how they interact with their customers and support them into new multi-sided business models.
Telecoms providers are uniquely positioned to participate through one or more of the roles required for the development of trust networks.
Ultimately, carriers will need to play a stronger role in managing personal identity if they have aspirations beyond communications. The alternative strategy is for an operator to focus on being a carrier or “Happy Piper”.
Analytics, Identity management and authentication represent key battlegrounds for companies looking to bring richer offerings to customers and provide 2-sided business model platforms to the market.

Questions to be addressed at the brainstorm

What does the next generation CSP look like? How does it operate, what do employees need to achieve their objectives? How do they achieve this?
What can CSPs learn from Internet players in how they equip and organise themselves to innovate?
What are the potential roles for CSPs in the personal information economy?
What skills and capabilities will CSPs need to fulfil these roles and how should they acquire these?
What examples of CSP-based authentication exist and what purpose do they serve?
How should operators organise themselves to address new 2-sided business models?

Presenters and Panellists include: