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This article is part of: Executive Briefing Service
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Partnering offers telcos a way to unlock innovation and uncover monetisation opportunities to help fuel business growth. However, this requires telcos to embrace a different approach to partnering strategy and a more open, trusting mindset.
Telcos must reconsider partnership strategies
According to research by PwC , 52% of telecom CEOs believe their company will no longer be economically viable a decade from now if they continue on their current path. There is an urgent need for new approaches (e.g. partnerships) if telcos are to endure in the longer term.
Many telcos are looking to become more like tech companies and play a bigger role – beyond connectivity – in meeting customers divergent digital needs. Many attempts to travel this path alone, such as telco-own email services and media businesses, have been costly and unsuccessful.
Learning from tech leaders
Tech firms offer strong evidence of the importance of investing in partnering as a route to new business e.g. at Microsoft, partners have become central to the company’s strategy, influencing more than 95% of its commercial revenue and playing a key role in Microsoft’s shift to a more innovative and proactive market strategy. In contrast, partners have not traditionally played a central role in telco strategy. Partnerships are typically limited to channel partners such as wholesale connectivity partners that resell the telco’s services, or technology partners, where third-party solutions are embedded in the telco’s products or network, either as a supplier or a “white-label” agreement.
Telcos are realising that, like tech companies, they can use the help and support of partners to facilitate rapid entry into new areas and secure competitiveness. But this requires a rethink of the typical telco partnering approach: not just who they partner with, but how they partner and how they think about partnering in the context of their broader strategy and goals.
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Partnerships enable monetisation and innovation
A successful partnering strategy can offer new opportunities and additional avenues for growth to telcos, helping to accelerate a telco’s entry into new digital value chains and the realisation of benefits for all parties. Many telcos see partnerships as an easy way to bring additional services to their customers. But they can be a source of further benefits, boosting innovation capability and revenue scope.
Benefits of partnering
Source: STL Partners
Telcos must shift their corporate mindset to focus on the benefits of partnering, helping the business to transform. Collectively, these benefits can help telcos to differentiate and create new value in an intensely contested market. For this report, we secured learnings from techcos and telcos to provide guidance to telcos on how they can revitalise their partnering strategies and mindsets to ensure partnering success.
Table of contents
- Executive Summary
- Partnering recommendations for telcos
- Next steps
- Telcos face an existential crisis
- Learning from tech leaders
- Telcos need partners to enable monetisation and innovation
- Shifting the telco mindset
- Foundations for successful partnerships
- For high-value strategic partnerships
- Actions to transform telco partner strategy
- Partner operations: Partner enablement and success
- Managing strategic partnerships
- Managing non-strategic partners at scale
- Readying telco systems
- Evaluating partnering success
- Partner relationship management tools
- Conclusions
Related research
- Telecoms 2030 Part 3: Pathways to servco, infraco and techco
- Telco generative AI adoption tracker
- Future Skills Tracker report
- Telco to Techco: Six tenets for success
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