In The Arena by TechArena - Accenture & Oracle: Transforming Telco with Digital Business Experience

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

Explore how Accenture and Oracle are revolutionizing the telco industry with their new all-in-one BSS solution, enabling cloud-native innovation, AI integration, and new revenue opportunities for service providers.

Welcome to the Tech Arena, featuring authentic discussions between tech's leading innovators and our host, Alison Klein. Now, let's step into the arena. Welcome in the arena. My name is Alison Klein, and today we are very excited to be joined by two business leaders that are making waves in the tech sector. Andrea Sassarini, Accenture Oracle Business Group EMEA lead, and Andrew De La Torre, Group Vice President of Technology. Welcome to the

program, Andrea and Andrew. How are you doing? Very well. Thanks for having us today with you. Yep. Same here, Alison. It's great to be here. Thank you. So why don't we just start with introductions about your roles and how you fit into the broader purview of each of your respective companies. Andrea, why don't we start with you? Andrea Cesarini Always a pleasure to start. So, Andrea Cesarini, I'm actually joined Accenture 27 years now. And I think that I started from Anderson Consulting and the majority of my career has been in the telco industry. I've been in the telco industry around 23 years, working always abroad, which is an interesting because I've been almost everywhere and always in a transformation where Oracle has had an important role.

Four years ago, I took the role of the Oracle lead for EMEA and I'm also the Oracle global CTO looking after the strategy and the roadmap and the way we invest jointly together with Oracle in order to address the client needs. And Andrew? My name is Andrew D'Alettori. I'm also on the wrong side of 25 years in this industry, so I've been around quite a while. I've done a variety of roles in the communications sector

from strategy roles into chief technology officer roles. Here at Oracle now, I'm a group vice president of technology. I'm responsible for the product strategy of the communications business. Oracle Communications is a part of Oracle, which is one of our industry-specific business units, and we're focused on the communications sector. I was really excited for this industry because both of your companies have such an incredible impact on the industry. And I really wanted to hear what you were doing in the telco arena. And Andrea, we have witnessed a complete transformation of telco in the last decade.

And this transformation is based on an ongoing pursuit as telco operators leverage compute to deliver cloud-like control and agility to their networks and open up new monetization streams and efficiency for themselves. Where are we on this journey in your estimation? I think, Alison, the telco industry, it has been an incredible industry, always been at the forefront of innovation and technology. But I think I like, let's say, to shape at the forefront of innovation and technology. But I think I like, let's say, to shape the answer according to three different phases. What was pre-pandemic, during the pandemic, and post-pandemic, just to highlight the key role of telco in this place.

I think there was an important transformation already started. During the pandemic, I think the telco demonstrated to be the backbone of every other industry. And now I think that the disruption is happening even more because, of course, it's clear how much is important the connectivity and how the telco can become even more important in enabling also the aviation industry. If you look at what happened in Europe, but actually in EMEA, if you like, what I see is that there has been multiple trends that were involving about monetizing the network, because I think one of the most important subjects after having invested massively in 5G was to try to separate

the network for the SEVCO, so the service company. I think that there is still a cost optimization because I think this is an industry that has been caught in a commodification with stagnating growth. Nonetheless, I think that, again, remain the most important industry because it's where you can exploit the new technology. I think that we will discuss, I believe,

later about the importance of generative AI and also about the importance of cloud. So I think that there is a lot of potential to express. I think it's important that we continue to invest further in the network and also to explore what is behind the connectivity, like becoming, I think this was a subject discussed while it was, but the telco at the forefront to become a modern orchestrator of B2B services, providing the energy connectivity, but also helping all the other enterprises to digitize and adopt data and AI. Andrew, Oracle made a surprising announcement recently with a major product innovation for

BSS automation that really caught my attention. I always think of Oracle about enterprise, and this introduced me as a first-time observer into the telco arena. Can you tell me what you've delivered? I'm glad we've managed to surprise you, Alison. So that's always a prime ambition. So what we've recently announced is a new digital business experience solution. Now, this is basically an all-in-one digital BSS solution for service providers. It's really designed to allow them to manage their experiences and their revenue across the entire customer journey. So all the way from concept to cash to care. Now with this solution, the idea is really that we can actually allow service providers to capitalize on the kind of new emerging enterprise opportunities because it will allow

them to really easily sort of design these differentiated offers and be able to do really rapid order capture and fulfillment and obviously have very comprehensive revenue management capabilities. But importantly, this particular solution also allows them to continue to service the very complex and demanding consumer base that they have in their business today. So this is really a kind of multi-channel future-proof solution for them. When we spoke to a lot of our service provider customers, they really told us that they needed a very sophisticated set of solutions to be able to give them the necessary control and flexibility that they want over all the aspects of their business in this space. And so what we really tried to do with digital business experience was to give them something that allows them to meet the needs of the emerging industry opportunities, but also their existing markets. And so the focus was very much on something that was a full featured solution, giving all the benefits around a pre-integrated solution stack and giving them access to productized and configurable

capabilities already within there. And I think importantly, and Andrea touched on this point, it unlocks that ability to take that journey into the cloud as well. So this is a fully cloud native solution. It can be deployed anywhere. It can be on premise. It can be in public cloud. But it's really giving them the scalability and the operational efficiencies of the cloud. But more importantly, as Andrea mentioned, giving them access to those really significant technical innovations that we're now seeing in the cloud, such as AI. If I may add something, just because I'm so

interested in this subject and with Andrew, sorry if I interrupt a bit of the flow, but back to the original story. I think if you look at the evolution of the telco from business and how this has been matched by an architecture, I think that you can acknowledge a bit of three, four phases. And this is just why I like the importance of DB now. So if you go back prior to 2000, everything was about billing. And billing was the only channel that the telco used to communicate with customers. Providing a single invoice was actually the best way to interact. I think then there has been around 10 years where it was all about CRM and CRM to enable

the assisted channel. I think that in the last seven, eight years, I think the full attention was deserved to the omnichannel capability. And this has been further accelerated during the pandemic with the need to digitize. I think now DBE is addressing a specific point, which is for me critically important, is the digital core. And the digital core is what we were using in the past to call system of record and core transactional system.

What DBE is great at is a modern core system and for modern being cloud native, which is providing a central set of data with the secure access to the artificial intelligence. And the idea is to provide this suite from CRM to the billing to the order management in order to provide the client with that ability being cloud native, designed to run on cloud speed and resiliency. So,

Enric, what is important for Tevco to rethink back about combining all these elements that historically were considered as important, so CRM, billing, and now order management from an investment point, so that they could become a primary source of competitive advantage. Thanks for that. One question that I have about that, Andrew, is how does that fit into Oracle's broader cloud-first business strategy and your engagement across different businesses? To double-click on the topic of cloud, the first thing I would probably highlight is the journey for the service providers into the cloud is way more than just a technology adoption challenge. It is fundamental to their operating model and

the way that they run their businesses. And so it is an extremely challenging journey to take to be able to move into cloud adoption across all of the different technical components of the stack that they go on in line with their business strategy in the broader sense, but also their ability to transform their organization and to make those operating model changes. So when you look at what we've done with Digital Business Experience, I mentioned already that it's extremely flexible in terms of the deployment configurations that you can have. You can run it in on-prem environments. You can run it in public cloud. But more importantly, what we've done is we've connected it to Oracle's core strategy around really embracing and allowing

hybrid or multi-cloud environments as well. So the ability to be able to efficiently interconnect into other third-party infrastructure. And so if you look at some of the strategic partnerships that Oracle's already announced with Azure, with Google, more recently with AWS, these kind of highly secure connections between the cloud they're really unlocking the ability for the service providers to be able to move data around those different cloud environments in line with however they've chosen to deploy their various solutions so their

front office their back office whatever and the point here is that it's this data alignment that's really key to unlocking how you can then access the latest generation of insights that you can get from the AI capabilities in the cloud. So the ability to bring this data together and to get really good information and insights from it is what drives the opportunities. So for many of our customers, the CX has always really been a priority and it's viewed very often as this low-hanging fruit in terms of AI adoption. Looking at use cases like summarization or sentiment analysis or real-time transcript, I mean, all of these kind of capabilities you can get by having access to your data in a uniform way, and then being able to use these large language models, to use these AI engines to be able to deliver those insights. So again, to kind of wrap it up, the point here is that we've tried to provide

as much flexibility as possible for the customers because the cloud journey is not a simple one. It is one where we know that they're going to have to have different solutions from different providers, but what we've tried to do is make sure that they have a vehicle to be able to really bring the data together, which is where all the magic starts. Now, Andrea, it's really obvious that these two teams are collaborating deeply. Can you provide some context for the collaboration between the two companies? Let me say that, honestly, I'd been involved in this project even before it started.

Also, I think the collaboration with Oracle in communication, especially about me, is an historical collaboration. I think the two companies have collaborated since 30 years. I believe I started working on the same subject together with Oracle along the pendulum that was the same before that. And I started from billing and when Oracle acquired PortaLibs, we met and moving to Siebel then become the standard de facto for the CRM in all the possible country, the opportunity and the luckiness to work with.

And then in the past, I think we had also another collaboration of Rodod that we can consider a bit of the father now of what DB is today. I think that the collaboration is quite high. I think two points that to me are very relevant. I think one, building on what Andrew said, the fact that cloud is becoming the admission ticket for a modern enterprise and that Erko is no different from the others. So I think that the evolutionary path taken by DBE to become cloud native and enable a SaaS-like operation is a critical point for all the telco. The second point, I think, this is strongly supported

by the Oracle strategy of multi-cloud. It should remind a couple of Oracle Cloud work. Egoo L'Ariellison introduced the concept of the internet of cloud, and he was introducing his speech saying, no wallet gardeners are tumbling down. And from that, I think many things happen. And honestly, I think the strategy is so strong,

acknowledging that there is no workload equal to the other. And every workload requires a specific cloud. And the specificity of Oracle is that Oracle is the best cloud supporting high transactional capability and back to the tech and back to the BSS and OSS is the place where you have the customer data, you have the order data, you have the product data, the billing data. So I think having a solution that is cloud native designed to run on cloud is a big value for the customer. So in terms of partnership, we will continue in the major client where we are developing

this opportunity. And of course, in designing the roadmap together of the client in alignment with the benefit from that. Another, to me, critical point is how the client will transform. We say that this is an industry always at the forefront of the innovation, but it's also an industry that supported all the other industry, but it's also an industry that has been disrupted massively with a lot of investment because it's a capital intensive if you consider the amount of money that Tesco plays on 4G, then 5G, and then

very soon with the 6G and some of them already started. So I think that what I think is important when we speak about DBE, that we can help the client to transform themselves, but with an evolutionary path, as opposite of a revolutionary path. So you are using all the great technology, but building on what the client has or what they can take, or having any historical data like CBIL, like BRM, like OSM and KON. So I think that this will help a lot because in a disrupted industry and in a disrupted

world, I think having the possibility to design your evolutionary path, to transform yourself, to reinvent yourself with the assurance that you are basing this to transformation that is evolutionary, is a kind of insurance that the client should adopt. And honestly, with this level of partnership knowledge, I think we are best suited to partner together and to get the client to where they want to be in the future. Now, why was this the right moment to target BSS? And what does this open up for monetization of services like what we discussed before?

If I may, I believe that, as I say, there is a pendulum. So like Andrew, we have a long time in the industry. And I think that the recent happening, fortune or unfortunate, I think that pushed some priority to the telco. So I think that during the pandemic, a lot of customer experience, a lot of infrastructure, job in order to save money, reinvest the capital in the area that were more urgent to save. I think that today there is another big event from the industry, from the market, which is the viability of generative AI, artificial intelligence in general.

That for the people that did engineer, like me, something that I did 30 years ago at the university, but there were at the time no computational power, no storage, and both of them were an incredible price and cost. Today is a technology that is available for everyone. So I think that refocusing on where the critical data of the telco resides is really strategic. And that's why I think we speak about the digital core. For me, DBE is a digital core for the telco. And we are helping the client to refocus on where the critical data is because then you can leverage the new technology coming from artificial intelligence and generative AI to improve the customer experience or to improve the sentiment.

I think Andrew mentioned a few of them, summarization, but also improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the billing, tracking the order or the service request or the level of services. So it's really the right moment. It's just an alignment of planets in the view. Now, Andrew, what has the customer response been to this announcement since you delivered it earlier this year? I'd start probably by saying that this business experience was actually born from listening to our customers and actually working with our strategic partners like Accenture and actually paying attention to what the needs of the market were. And somewhat unsurprisingly, the response has obviously been very overwhelmingly

positive because all we're trying to do here is really to give the market what it's telling us it needs. I would probably bucket those four needs into maybe four core categories. And so the first one and the first message that came across loud and clear is we need a solution that's going to help us to accelerate and move to the cloud and ultimately to get access to that latest generation of cloud services that then unlocks. And Andrea there was talking about, once again, all those different ways in which you can use AI to be able to augment and support what you do with customer experiences as an example. The second sort of message that came loud and clear was that they really wanted a fully digital solution. And so, again, Andrea's referring to this digital core and the criticality of that as a vehicle to be able to unlock new market opportunities that are coming from the enterprise vertical service space.

And so that was a very clear requirement as well. The third one was really around trying to ease the adoption and the implementation. And so the message there was really around bring us a pre-integrated offering, bring us something that has a rich set of out-of-the-box product models and predefined journeys and can allow us to do things such as one-click publishing to all the downstream applications. And this was really around how do we reduce time to market? How do I get a solution that allows me to be fast and agile in the market that I'm trying to chase? And then fourth, and I

think probably most critically, there was a really strong message around make sure that this thing is super feature rich right there was no willingness to compromise on the need to be able to continue to service the existing business that they have and so moving into new business spaces is really critical for the future of the industry but you can't walk away from what you have today and communications has an incredibly complex and rich set of products and journeys and experiences that are locked into the customer base. And so the message really there was loud and clear, which is we make no compromise on the capabilities of the platform. It has to be future-proof, but it has to do everything that we need it to do today. And so, you know, what we've

done with digital business experience is really creates an idea and quite unique because it manages to combine all of these kind of four requirements, these four attributes in a way that's genuinely best in class. And to come to the core of the question, the response really from the industry as a whole, from customers, from analysts, from our strategic partners like Accenture, it really has been super positive because they can see the ambition of trying to really create something that can really help the customers win in the market. Now, Andrea, can you just take that perspective that Andrew just laid out and talk to us about how customers actually implement the solution from the decision to deploy to full throttle activation? I think there are just two ways. One is Greenfield and the other one is Brownfield. Those are the two approaches that I see. Brownfield is the one

that is taking the majority of the value of an evolutionary path. And this is actually cool because you can just update your solution, adding some component if you like, until you get to the end. Greenfield is when you want to be a bit, let's say, revolutionary in this evolutionary path, creating a new instance and then migrate what you have in the house into the new platform. The other point of the decision is when you want to get the value from the cloud, if you want to get from the beginning

or migrating later, but the solution is already designed from that. And in case you migrate with some of our joint clients, with Andrew, that client that decided to embrace the dedicated region cloud customer, I think that we also observed an incredible improvement of the performance of the processes from the end-to-end standpoint. So I think that the fact that we are speaking about a solution that is full cloud-native, that gives you the possibility to decide whether you want to embrace the private cloud or the public cloud in the moment that you like, in the right moment in time. And this is the strategy to met the client where they are and to accompany them in their

evolutionary journey next to them to get to where they want to be. And Andrew, when you look at this deployment, what do you see as the benefit to your telco customers? This is really about investing in their future. It's really about investing in the next wave of market opportunity that is open to them. By deploying digital business experience, what the customers are actually really achieving is they're putting the foundations in to be able to monetize APIs, to be able to present themselves into the market as that kind of telco as a platform concept. And so this digital core is really the start of that journey into the world beyond consumer, the world beyond the current enterprise,

and being able to carve out a path to revenue growth. So that really is the whole raison d'etre of why they go down this path and why they're investing. It's about allowing them to have something that keeps them highly competitive still in their existing markets so that they can continue to generate the revenues that are fueling their businesses today, but have this digital platform that's going to unlock entirely new revenue streams as they move forward in the future. That's really important, effectively, to set the path forward, as it were, for them to grow and to be successful. And Andrea, when you think about what you've accomplished here with Oracle, what's next on the roadmap for the two companies working together?

I think that we should continue to design together the roadmap. And I think the way we can help is that Oracle is an incredible company when it's about data engineering a solution. Accent should complement Oracle with the industry knowledge and the function expertise. So I think that the idea is really to make sure that the roadmap continues to be sound and innovative, addressing the industry concern and the functional concern with the capability. And I think Andrew and I, we are always talking about

enabling at scale, low code, no code, generative AI, addressing one of the two, three cases that are more important for the client. In addition to always working together with our client,

because this is actually what is giving us the insight and the direction where we want to go, because we really want to help the client to succeed and to transform themselves. If I could add to that, Alison, because I really would like to reinforce why I think the relationship between Oracle and Accenture is so powerful.

Through digital experience, we're bringing an incredibly powerful toolkit to the customers, but then there's still the question of learning to use that in the most effective way. And the beauty of Accenture is that they have such an intimate and close knowledge of the customer's businesses, the challenges they have and what they're trying to achieve, that they're really well positioned to be able to take something like digital business experience and realize the full potential with those customers. So I think such a symbiotic relationship really between the two businesses here. Fantastic. And one final question for you, Andrew, where can folks find out more about the solutions discussed today? The go-to place is always oracle.com. So go to our website,

click on industries, click on communications, and you'll find our microsite there and you'll be able to see our latest press release. There's a really great data sheet as well on digital business experience where you can learn all the fundamentals. So take a look at the website and please reach out to us if you need more. Guys, it's been a pleasure. Really impressive collaboration and really impressive in how you're delivering value to your customers. I can't wait to hear more. Thank you so much for being on the show today. Thanks, Alison. Always a pleasure. Thanks for joining the Tech Arena. Subscribe and engage at our website, thetecharena.net. All content is copyright by the Tech Arena.