The future of NSN: can NSN survive without its Managed Services business?

Our recent article on NSN (The future of NSN: a happy-end at last?) has been a blockbuster of sort. It has attracted more than 3,500 readers since publication at the end of April 2012, from Germany, Finland, Portugal, India as well as many other countries. We have been very surprised by the interest that the article has generated. There was nothing new in the article that was not in the public domain already, and the financial numbers were taken straight from the Nokia web site.

We have reasons to believe that many readers must have been NSN employees trying to decide what to do now, in the view of the various outplacement and redundancy programs set up by the company. Also a former NSN employee indicated that “the NSN management would never point out the series of multi-hundred-million annual loss so clearly”! If this means that the NSN management has lacked transparency towards its own employees in the past, then this is rather worrying.

IBM whitepaper quotes Investaura and the work that we are doing to reduce service provider churn

Investaura is pleased to appear in one of the most recent IBM whitepapers:

 Harness the power of data and analytics to maximize the value of each customer

Download “Smarter Communication through Analytics”

04-Smarter-Comms-through-Analytics-WirelessWireline.pdf – Downloaded 8635 times – 2.84 MB

This excellent whitepaper highlights how mobile and fixed line telecoms service providers can leverage the data that they have about their customers to reduce Churn, boost ARPU, reduce Costs, and overall increase the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) of their subscribers.

We also agree with IBM that four key components are required to make this enterprise a full success:

Are you a product, a solution or a service company?

Recently, we have noticed something interesting.   Go to the web sites of the top telecom suppliers and check in which order the words “products”, “solutions” and “services” appear there.

We have done the check:

  • Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN): products, solutions, services
  • Huawei: solutions, products, services
  • Alcatel-Lucent (ALU): solutions, products, services
  • IBM:  solutions, services, products
  • Cisco: products & services
  • Ciena: products & services

Interestingly, IBM is the only company that puts ‘products’ last. And NSN, ALU and Huawei seem to put a strong focus on ‘solutions’.  But are they really ‘solutions’ companies?  Well, not in the IBM sense. Finally, Cisco and Ciena don’t even talk about solutions, at least at the top level.