Have you ever wondered how some of our oldest and most fundamental industries have been able to completely transform themselves and, consequently, completely revolutionize the way that we conduct our lives on a daily basis?
Consider banking, transportation and entertainment. The way we interact with these now very modern industries and their services is wildly different than it was a decade ago. What can we learn from them and how can we apply the same approach to telecom to create stronger businesses and better customer experiences?
Financial services used to be one of the more painful customer experiences one could encounter. From writing and mailing checks to traveling to an ATM to withdraw cash, to reading credit card numbers over the phone, the experience was filled with friction and inconvenience at every turn. With innovations like Venmo and Zelle, moving money has become one of the more seamless transactions of our time.
Travel and transportation formerly involved waiting in the rain to flag down a taxi and spending hours or even days to book a multi-destination journey. The advent of rides on demand from companies like Uber means that you can now order a car at a precise time and location, pay without touching a button, and even track a ride in real time. The logistics industry has been transformed, too, with a level of efficiency unimaginable just a few years ago.
The entertainment industry was built on a model that dictated what we consumed and when. The advent of OTT streaming from companies like Netflix and Spotify have given the power directly to the consumer. We have instant access to virtually any show, movie or music genre we want, wherever we want. What’s more, the experience has become intimately personalized to give us more of what we want and to help us discover new favorites.
All three of these industries have modernized by achieving agility—speed, flexibility, and responsiveness across every level of the organization. How did they do it?
In all of these cases, it comes down to a common foundation. An Event-Driven Architecture (or EDA) is a system by which every transaction or input of data generates an “event”, which is captured and processed by an event broker. Microservices then consume these events, apply business logic, and trigger subsequent actions–such as adding to or subtracting from an account balance, updating a vehicle’s location every tenth of a mile, or suggesting a new drama we might enjoy based on how many minutes we watched a similar one.
Event-Driven Architecture and the Future of Telecom
The impact of modernization in each of the aforementioned industries is massive and timeless. Yet all of these examples were made possible by the ability to process millions of small transactions in fractions of a second.
EDA and microservices are on the brink of completely transforming the telecom industry. By shifting away from legacy service-oriented architectures (SOA) telecoms are realizing never before seen agility that can impact every facet of the business, and every customer experience. Further, the complex web of legacy pairwise system interfaces are minimized, allowing the flexibility and scalability to meet increasingly growing demands. If we examine the most common areas where telecoms consistently look to improve and innovate, the advantages are clear and striking:
- Provisioning: Activating a new customer account or adding a new service generates an event that can be processed in real time to ensure a smooth customer experience.
- Billing: Prepaid recharge, post-paid bill generation, and usage monitoring all produce events that can be reconciled immediately. This provides greater transparency and accuracy for the consumer and the service provider.
- Product and services development: New products and services can be developed and deployed quickly and locally, instead of disrupting entire product stacks with one sweeping update. This modularity gives telecoms the advantage of testing and marketing new products and services with great speed while minimizing risk.
- Product catalog updates: Changes to product offerings or service bundles generate events that can be propagated across specific systems for accurate customer billing and service provisioning.
- Subscriber management: Changes to individual subscriber details can be achieved instantaneously and across all applicable touch points. What’s more, these events can be easily and accurately organized and distilled to inform potential service opportunities.
- Migrations: Because microservices are decoupled, moving subscribers or updating from one service to another can be handled as individual events, minimizing or eliminating service disruptions.
EDA and microservices have offered the power to fundamentally change the way telecoms build, test and develop products and services, and manage improved customer experiences. At Wavelo, EDA is the backbone of the software we’ve developed to build the telecom of the future. Leveraging this powerful technology is how Wavelo has helped telecoms of all sizes innovate new products and services and even launch new brands, like Boost Wireless, who was able to migrate millions of subscribers to an entirely new billing and provisioning system in a matter of months. Just like the industries who have revolutionized some of our most common daily activities already, telecom is about to embark on a new era of transformation and heightened ease and utility.
