Paul Wallbank | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Where next for the telco industry?

The telecommunications industry is facing a cultural shift as the market moves against the sector

The last thirty years have been good for the telecommunications industry; a wave of privatisations, regulatory reforms and technological change drove the sector and company profits.

As populations around the world adopted mobile phones users started enthusiastically calling and texting, Telco profits exploded.

Twenty years later the massive growth to the industry has peaked as customers have moved to using their cellphones for less lucrative data services.

So where do the telecommunications companies go next for growth and profit? Today and tomorrow I’m attending the Ovum 2020 Telecoms Summit where they’re looking at the future for the industry.

Salvation from the internet of things

The great white hope for the telco industry is the internet of things and the machine to machine (M2M) technologies; the hope being that putting SIM cards into every car, kettle and shipping container that this will be another lucrative revenue stream.

Martin Creighan, Managing Director for Australia and New Zealand at AT&T, points out that by the end of the decade there will be seven times as many connected devices as live mobile phones. This is where the opportunity lies.

The problem with the M2M vision is annual revenues per user (ARPU) for connected devices are a fraction of those from voice and messaging over the last twenty years and telcos will need more than that to maintain their revenues, let alone grow.

Moving into the cloud

One of the other revenue streams is adding cloud services, again this is a low margin business and involves competing with global giants like Amazon and Google along with the myriad of specialist companies.

Another possibility is in providing professional services as Jennifer Douglas, Director of Fixed voice and platinum for Telstra, described in the company’s home support product.

The problem with both the cloud and professional services model this requires a change in culture for the telcos, the traditional contempt telecommunications executives have for the end user doesn’t cut it in the professional services and cloud computing industries.

For the telcos, this major change is something that’s been experienced by many other industries. That a comparatively protected industry like telecommunications companies are subject to these disruptions illustrates just how no sector is safe from being uprnded.

The fight for cloud computing’s sweet spot

An old PC industry was is being re-fought in the cloud. Will the result be different this time.

One of the great market battles of the PC era was the fight between the ‘best of breed’ software designed to do specific jobs well — Lotus 123, WordPerfect, and Harvard Graphics — versus the bundled ‘suites’ led by Microsoft Office.

Bundled suites of programs offered a common platform and cheaper price over buying products individually.

In the case of Microsoft Office, it also helped that the software giant was aggressive in undercutting the market and leveraging the deals it had made with hardware vendors and system integrators.

The winner of that battle was Microsoft as it turned out customers preferred the cheaper price points of the bundled packages and the common software platform made it easier to share data across the applications.

In the cloud computing field that fight is happening again as Zach Nelson, CEO of Netsuite, describes; “I think the next battle is going to be the same battle that happened in the client-server world. Is it the best of breed cloud apps or is it the suite?”

Nelson believes the suite vision will win out, “the suite is going to win again for exactly the same reasons why the suite won in the client-server world — it’s very hard to synchronise data between applications.”

Given Netsuite’s business, as its name suggests, is in providing a suite of software it’s no surprising that Nelson believes their way of doing business will prevail. Those providing ‘best of breed’ stand alone cloud applications naturally disagree.

Chris Ridd, Australian General Manager of accounting service Xero, disagrees with Nelson’s view. “With cloud and open APIs you have the holy grail of interoperability,” Ridd says. “In the 1990s the open systems were too early and didn’t work as well as they do today.”

Ridd also points out that Xero has over 350 add on services, ” I don’t think any suite can deliver that” he says.

History is on Nelson’s side but it may be that in this case history doesn’t repeat as the technology has moved along and now stand alone apps are what the market wants.

Time will tell although its unlikely whichever prevails will have anything like the success and market domination of Microsoft Office during the PC era.

Zuckerburg’s curse

Zuckerburg’s curse — Twitter is not Facebook and nor are most startups

Twitter yesterday released its third quarter 2014 results which saw the stock drop a stunning thirteen percent in the half hour after the announcement.

For Twitter’s management and shareholders the worrying thing about the stock drop is the result was in line with analyst’s expectations, the shares fell because its clear the service isn’t getting the traction investors believe is necessary to succeed online.

Investors however have only themselves to blame; as a business Twitter is simply not worth it’s thirty billion dollar stock market capitalisation; it may be worth five billion, it may be worth ten but it’s desperately overpriced at its current prices.

Zuckerberg’s curse

Almost all social media services, and many tech startups, are suffering the curse of Mark Zuckerburg — Facebook’s success has led investors to believe that all online businesses should be valued in the ten of billions.

Making matters worse, Facebook’s billion dollar purchases of Instagram, Oculus VR and WhatsApp have baked the expectation of huge valuations into the startup community. Now every service with a modest user base believes it’s worth something similar to WhatsApp’s $19 billion.

The worry is that companies like Twitter carry out dumb and ill advised things to emulate Facebook and maintain its overvalued stockprice which will damage both their brands and customer base.

For many of these social media services it might be worthwhile admitting that they aren’t Facebook and accept they are a niche product.

It may well be those niches are more profitable than being a mass market product and the idea that online success involves huge takeup is just another relic of the Twentieth Century broadcast model.

Unfortunately while Facebook dominates the social media market and Google continues to draw most of its revenue from online advertising, the wild over valuations and flawed business models will continue.

Old business and new tech

When old businesses embrace new tech they have to be thinking of their customers’ problems, not theirs.

The payments war has been well and truly on as companies like Stripe, Apple and PayPal battle it out to control the next generation of currency.

One of the more hapless bystanders in this has been the CurrentC consortium, a group of US retailers set up to take advantage of mobile technology and bypass merchant fees.

This weekend news leaked out that some of the consortium members have disabled Near Field Communications functions in their store Point of Sale systems to prevent Apple Pay and Google Wallet from working while they wait to roll out CurrentC.

In a deep dive review of CurrentC, Tech Crunch looks at how the service works and its limitations. One of the things that jumps out in Tech Crunch’s review is just how cumbersome the system is compared to its competitors.

Despite being founded in 2011 and having the backing of some of America’s biggest companies, CurrentC is two, or possibly three, iterations behind other services which illustrates the problem of incumbents trying to innovate their way out of problems.

No doubt the committee model of CurrentC hasn’t helped the development process along with the aim being addressing the consortium’s fixation with merchant fees rather than making things easier for customers.

It’s hard not to conclude that CurrentC is doomed and the actions of retailers in blocking competitor’s products is only staving off the inevitable. When old businesses embrace new tech they have to be thinking of their customers’ problems, not theirs.

Google moves deeper into the smarthome

Google Nest’s acquisition of Revolv is about further locking in the smarthome market

Since Google bought smart smoke detector company Nest earlier this year it’s become apparent that the search engine giant sees the smarthome as one of its big marketplaces in the near future.

Nest’s acquisition of smarthome automation company Revolv yesterday illustrates this and shows that Nest is Google’s smarthome division.

As the smarthome becomes more common, the value of controlling the systems that run the connected home’s devices becomes greater. So the positions being taken by Apple, Google and Samsung are going to be important as the marketplace develops.

The latter relationship — Google and Samsung — is particularly fascinating as Samsung’s smartphones and tablets are locked into the Google Android system which makes it harder for the Korean industrial giant to strike off in an independent path.

All of this of course is based upon homeowners being happy with having their smarthomes locked into one vendor’s platform. We may yet see the market rebel against the internet giant’s ambitions to carve up the connected world.

On being a digital anthropologist — brian solis on technology disrupting buiness

Innovating within a business can be hard work says Brian Solis

“Technology is part of the solution, but it’s also part of the problem,” says Brian Solis, the

Brian Solis describes himself as a digital anthropologist who looks for how businesses are being disrupted. We talk about digital darwinism, how businesses can approach change and the role of individual changemakers within organisations.

“My primary responsibility is to study disruptive technology and its impacts on business,” says Solis. “I look at emerging technology and try to determine which one is going to become disruptive.”

To identify what technologies are likely to disrupt businesses it’s necessary to understand the human factors, Solis believes.

One of the problems Solis sees is the magnitude of change required within organisations and particularly the load this puts on individuals, citing the story of one pharmaceutical worker who tried to change her employer.

“Her mistake was thinking this was a short race, she thought everyone could see the opportunity inherent in innovation and change when in fact it was a marathon. She burned herself out”

“What that means is to bring about change you really have to dig yourself in because you’re ready to do your part. You can’t do it alone, you have to do change in small portions and win over the right people.”

Returns in a low growth world

GE CEO Jeff Immelt sees a different world of investing and business in coming years where growth is slower

Today GE had their At Work conference in Sydney where CEO Jeff Immelt was interviewed by Westfarmers’ boss Richard Goyder.

One of the key messages from Immelt in his interview with the Australian conglomerate’s CEO was that finding growth in a flat global economy is going to take hard work and creativity; just relying on increased domestic spending is not longer an option.

Immelt was particularly pointed about the developed world’s economies, “the US is best since the financial crisis, growth is broad based but it’s still in the two to two-and-a-half percent range. It may be that’s the new normal.”

“Europe and Japan are pretty tough, forty percent of the world’s economy is still difficult, not going downward but stable and flat.”

Preparing for a slow growth world

“We’ve prepared ourselves for a slow growth world but one where you can invest in growth.”

“There’s still opportunities out there,” Immelt observed. “We’re going to have to make our own growth.”

Part of that growth story relates to the end of the consumerist era where debt funded consumer spending, particularly in the US, drove the global economy.

“We are coming out of a time period of the last ten or fifteen years where the US grew four and half percent every year with no inflation. So the US was the dominant economy in the world during the 1980s and 1990s.”

“We knew that was not going to be the same, so we’re in a world with no tail wind where we think greater focus on things like R&D, globalisation and things like that which will be critically important.”

Changing business focus

One of things Immelt did after the global financial crisis was to change the focus of the business away from the consumer finance division that had been a river of gold over the last thirty years back to being an industrial infrastructure company.

“Everyone needs to paranoid about relevancy and what they do great in the world today. There is no shelf life for reputation or anything else.”

“The engine of growth in the US when it was growing at its best was the US consumer, both in the combination of their own wealth and in taking on leverage. That was the engine of growth from 1980 to 2007.”

“It ended badly, but those were big engines of growth. What will be the next engines of growth?” Immelt mused.

Asian consumers to the rescue

Immelt sees the rise of Asian economies as being the next growth drivers with over billion consumers rising in affluence.

Whether those Asian economies can generate the growth that the hyper-developed economies of North America, Europe and Japan were able to provide during the past thirty years remains to be seen given China’s, and most of Asia’s, consumers having nothing like the West’s spending power.

The truth is we’re decades off Asia’s huddled masses having the economic strength to carry the global economy in the way the western world’s consumers did for the closing decades of the Twentieth Century.

For economies like Australia that are largely based upon domestic consumption funded by debt, this will mean a massive redirection of the economy away from renovating houses to investing in productive industries.

Immelt’s message to business leaders is clear; don’t rely on a rising tide of domestic growth to keep you afloat. Companies are going to have to find new markets and products if they want to grow, waiting for customers to arrive is no longer an option.

Apple launch a local listing service to succeed where Google and Facebook failed

Apple may be able to succeed in small business listings where Google and Facebook failed.

They are late to the party, but given both Google and Facebook have missed the opportunity to grab the local listings market, Apple just might be the company that gets it.

Connecting people to spaces

Smartphones, beacons and smart software are the key to future retail success believes Proximity Insight’s Steve Orell

Beacon technologies are one of the hottest items in the Internet of Things with retailers, sports stadiums and hotels looking at how they can use these devices to improve their operations and customer experiences.

At Dreamforce 2014 Proximity Insight’s Steve Orell spoke on the event’s wearable panel about how their service plugs into beacon technology and customer service.

Proximity Insight was born out of the 2013 Dreamforce Hackathon where Orell and his team were finalists. From that, the company set up operations in New York with a focus on customer relationship management in the retail industry.

Retail isn’t the only the field that Orell sees for Proximity Insight with the hotel and casino industries as being other targets.

“With the hotel, why check-in? Why not walk in and let your smartphone do it for you?” Orell asks.

“It’s all about making live so much more seamless and slick,” Orell adds. “There’s opportunities in every sector.”

For businesses looking at rolling out beacon technologies the key is to be adding value to enhance the customer experience, Orell believes.

“You have to be delivering something to the customer beyond tracking them, it’s about making the whole retail or hospitality experience better. It has to benefit the customer.”

With beacon technologies now becoming common and the supporting hardware being built into all smartphones, we can expect to see more applications coming onto the market. It’s worth considering how your business can use them to enhance the customer experience.

Paul travelled to Dreamforce 2014 as a guest of Salesforce

Social media’s fatal attraction

Social media’s desperate struggle to revive the dying business model of print advertising.

The story of Whisper and the betrayal of its users continues to roll on, but the real problem is the way social media services are desperately trying to recreate the dead business model of print advertising.

Whisper’s problems with The Guardian continue as the company tries to salvage its reputation but the irony for the service is that it was trying to shoehorn its business to fit the print publishing model that the internet started to erode twenty years ago.

It’s not just Whisper; almost every social media business from Facebook to Twitter wants to be an advertiser funded publishing company, just like the newspapers of thirty years ago.

A few weeks ago I wrote about LinkedIn’s pretensions of becoming a publishing platform and this week Forbes tells of Pinterest’s adventures at the Cannes advertising festival as it sells its marketing services.

Every social media service has some sort of angle that harks back to the golden age of newspaper publishing where print advertising was a deep river of gold. Most of them want to become publishers themselves.

It would be hard to think of a service less suited to being a media company than Whisper; but then there’s Yelp whose main business of reviewing eating houses and bars seems to be totally at odds with newspapers of yore.

On the Salesforce PayPal Media panel last week, Yelp! Founder Jeremy Stoppelman was asked if he saw the restaurant review site as being a media company, his response was “sure, it’s a blogging platform.”

So we have new media aping the old media business models where these platforms try to lock users into information silos; in the same way that a London Times reader would never buy the Sun.

The problem with that is the internet broke down the geographic barriers and today a Sun reader in London can just easily find celebrity gossip on TMZ and the broadsheet reader might find more thoughtful analysis in the New York Times.

Certainly someone browsing the web for restaurant reviews might find a better site than Yelp while a bride researching wedding dresses could just as easily find ideas on Facebook as much as Pinterest.

In reality, social media sites have nothing of the stickiness of the old fashioned newspapers in the days before the internet.

Of the social media services it might be that Facebook is the best placed to succeed as an old media publishing service with its advertising smarts pushing messages to its diverse and deep user base but that isn’t certain given the widespread user dissatisfaction with its news feed.

For the social media services much of the problem – -particularly for Facebook – lies in their contradictory aims; they are trying to be identity services, buying platforms, publishing services and advertisers.

For publishers that balance between content and advertising was always a delicate one; and one that shifted over time. For online services that balance is far more complex and the future far less certain.

One thing that is clear Is those contradictory aims aren’t going to be easy to reconcile and the quandary may prove to be insurmountable.

What’s clear though are the advertising models of the future are still waiting for a David Sarnoff moment.