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from the industry

interaction with the customer would be simple, seamless and efficient.

A huge new revenue-generation opportunity exists for the cable industry, but requires substantial upgrades of existing back office systems and processes, including identification, authentication, device onboarding and management, data aggregation and normalization. The cable advantage As the industry adopts virtualization and looks to the future, cable operators can take comfort in their huge advantage with their local infrastructure. Virtualization and back-office transformation are two significant technology shifts that can help MSOs to capitalise on the growth in business services. By embracing virtualization, cable operators have more opportunities to deliver a variety of enterprise-specific offerings, including cloud-based SMB apps stores, security and data centre services. However, telco service providers, with their deep pockets, deep fibre and 5G, will be competitive too. First and foremost, MSOs should ready themselves for more flexible monetisation, but the initial focus should be on monetisation flexibility of today’s available speeds. The evolution towards Gigabit levels of bandwidth can only benefit an MSO if back-office processes are first aligned around current services. So now is the time to prepare and ensure that the technology roadmap is ready.

As delivery technologies evolve, so must the MSOs’ order- to-cash strategies. The industry has to navigate between the legacy environment, in which it has poured billions of dollars, and prepare itself for newer greenfield services. As the majority of MSOs in the US outsource much of their back-office processes to third-party technology suppliers, now is the time to align expectations for new service revenues with the needs and requirements in the back office. With the increased adoption of virtualization at the CPE level, the core service delivery functions of compute, storage, encryption and packaging move to the cloud, giving significant flexibility around service innovation and device lifecycle. MSOs must map this flexibility to the abilities of back office systems to manage: n Provisioning and billing of traditional “legacy” video service bundles and higher value 4K and HDR services when available, on-demand video streaming and multi-device business support models. n Revenue settlement between MSO and OTT providers, whereby the MSO provides instant access to the customer and the OTT provider complements existing offerings with unique and highly monetisable content or related services. n Next-generation, non-traditional but data-intensive service offerings that can generate new revenue streams such as IoT, smart homes and automation, and B2B services.

How Cable Order to Cash Processes Must Evolve Empower enterprise customers and deliver superior experience for complex products

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Vol. 38 No. 4 - November 2016 Issue