How Huawei Is Accelerating Innovation & Efficiency For Customers

The world has entered the post-Covid era, but that doesn’t mean everything has returned to the ways things used to be. That’s especially apparent in how we communicate. The pandemic forced people to shift much of their lives online, but even as conditions normalized, people continued to overwhelmingly use digital platforms to stay connected – both at work and at home. The digitization shift of the information and communications infrastructure (ICT) is permanent – which has created significant impacts for service partners, telecom carriers, and businesses across a wide range of industries.

Maurice Ma, President of Huawei Software Business, notes that Communication Service Providers (CSPs) had to pivot rapidly during the height of the pandemic – and that their evolution is long-term.

“Covid forced them to accelerate the rollout of many digital services as well as really rethink their customer experience to re-orient towards everything online,” Maurice says. “What we see is that many of these consumer behaviors not only have not reverted back, but users are demanding a further acceleration of digitization, having become accustomed to them and seen the benefits.”

The acceleration trend continues to influence how CSPs evaluate platforms and systems today – and will do so for the foreseeable future. Maurice says partners have shifted from reactive to proactive, and are prioritizing factors such as cloud readiness, ecosystem support, the speed with which they can roll out new features, and operational cost effectiveness. Moreover, this trend is happening across many industries outside of telecom – which is guiding Huawei’s strategy and how it enables partners, carriers, and other customers.

“Our business unit is focused on building the services and operations systems that help carriers and various industries innovate and monetize their services, especially under new opportunities brought by 5G and cloud,” Maurice says. “Our goal is to collaborate with carriers and partners to digitalize various industries.” Maurice describes a three-pronged approach to executing that digital-first vision in the cloud and 5G age.

1. Service realization for CSPs

Mobile communication and mobile money are reshaping the financial services industry; Huawei is helping carriers and partners make considerable inroads into this trillion-dollar market, creating new revenue streams.

“We believe now is the period for rapid development of Mobile Financial Services, and various operators are seizing the opportunities to occupy a favorable position in the future growth of the digital ecosystems, which will emerge powered by scalable, flexible, Mobile money and associated cloud technologies,” Maurice says.

For example, Ethio Telecom launched its TeleBirr service, supported by the Huawei platform, in May 2021. It passed 1 million subscribers in only two weeks and has since grown to more than 27 million customers!

Maurice expects similar penetration and growth in multiple markets throughout the world, especially as the industry embraces financial inclusion and begins leveraging new data and technologies to deliver credit and other financial services to previously overlooked customers. Huawei has extensive plans for the financial services segment in 2023, including the brand-new mobile money 2.0 platform, a cloud-based, one-stop Mobile Finance Service platform that enables partners and operators to provide secure, convenient, and comprehensive financial inclusionservices for individuals and enterprises.

In addition to helping carriers to break into new business segments such as mobile money, Maurice says that Huawei is focused heavily on enabling 5G service innovation. This is crucial for maximizing the revenue potential of 5G networks.

For example, Huawei is working to help carriers open untapped markets for new media and digital services such as New Messaging and video ringback tone (VRBT), promoting their service innovation and business growth in the process.

2. Service Monetization & CX for Carriers

Maurice notes that operators are under considerable pressure to increase ARPU – and that there is a general pivot in the industry toward service monetization and revenue generation. As such, they need revenue management systems with built-in intelligence capabilities and turnkey use cases for maximizing earnings.

“We provide open, cloud-native, backend operations platforms like billing (CBS) & CRM (BSS) & Contact Center (AICC) that support carriers to achieve agile operations and closed-loop business successes, especially under 5G,” Maurice says.

Maurice adds that there is also growing interest among operators in offering new non-traditional telco services in order to maximize ROI on their 5G networks, which in turn for modern operational platforms that enable agility and velocity of their service rollouts.

3. Vertical Industry Digitalization

Finally, Huawei is prioritizing how it enables partners to deliver similar digital transformations to various vertical industry segments.

“We work with CSPs and partners to explore how to expose their capabilities and assets, to deliver innovative cloud services to different industry segments,” Maurice says.

For example, its iTa InTouch Aggregator platform delivers ubiquitous one-stop communication capabilities for thousands of industries.

Industry verticals can be challenging because each has its own unique requirements and customer experiences. But Huawei is able to leverage its longtime carrier relationships, deep experience building communications products, large sales organization, and cloud services capabilities to help partners unlock these high-value markets.

“Each vertical industry is unique but, at the base of it, what we find is that they all need the same set of capabilities to support their customers, whether that’s communicating with their customers through various channels (iTA) or providing a contact center experience (AICC), many capabilities that traditional CSPs already have in some way,” Maurice says.

It’s all part of the fundamental shift in how people and organizations communicate – and how partners and carriers power the digital-first age. That’s the driving force behind much of Huawei’s own product development and innovation, from mobile money 2.0 and Converged Billing System (CBS) R23, to the InTouch Aggregator platform aimed at both vertical industries and CSPs

“These platforms all aim to accelerate the time to market new services and enable operators to more flexibly monetize these various services that are critical in the digital age to customers in the consumer and enterprise segments,” Maurice says.

To learn more about Huawei’s software business, please click here.

This content is sponsored by Huawei.