Evolving for the next decade of wholesale: Part 2

In the first part of our Q&A with Gareth Prosser, Global Strategic Account Director, we explored what dynamics are impacting the next decade of wholesale for operators.

Now, we are diving into the importance of forming collaborative relationships with your vendors, and how solution partners can support you by aligning their development roadmap with your strategic goals.

How are changing market priorities affecting what operators want from their platforms?

Operators need a platform that can be agile. To respond to changing revenue and regulatory demands, operators need a multi-purpose solution they can throw anything at, and that they can continue to build.

They also need something to compensate for their declining resource. So, automation and AI – designed with a clear direction – will need to be used to maintain the controllability of complex wholesale services.

How should vendors work with operators to help them adapt accordingly?

I think a partnership approach works best for everyone. Product development should be a mutual investment that enables vendors like Telarix to build the solutions operators actually need. For example, we run quarterly sessions with our clients so we can truly understand their challenges and commercial needs and develop our roadmap alongside theirs.

We also stay heavily connected to industry event coordinators. It’s our way of staying at the front edge of the conversation, ensuring we understand the common industry goals while remaining agile enough to customise our roadmap for specific regional requirements.

You put a lot of importance onto building customer relationships at Telarix. Why do you believe this is so important today?

Trust is the most important thing to us.

We don’t have that same natural foundation for relationships that people had ten or twenty years ago; teams are smaller now, there’s more turnover, and it’s harder to get those broad touchpoints across a business. It’s our job as account managers and client-facing teams to work harder to bridge that gap and build that trust. If you don’t have a seat at the table, you don’t understand their goals, and if you don't understand their goals, you can't fulfil their needs. Without that relationship, you're going to miss out on the strategic conversations that matter.

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What qualities should operators look for in a partner vendor?

Beyond trust, agility and leadership are the main qualities to look for.

Operators have to look at a vendor’s proven ability to serve a market that is constantly changing. When every decision you make today will impact your future roadmap, you don’t want to be locked in with a partner who is going to be considered ‘legacy’ in a few years because they didn’t evolve.

This is something Telarix has consistently invested in. If we hadn’t proactively developed our product over the years, it would be far too manual and complex for the telecom landscape we see today. We had to make the decision to automate and increase usability, while retaining the necessary nuances of our solution.

How is Telarix best placed to help operators respond to wholesale complexity?

There’s a fair amount of vendor disruption in the market right now, with companies being bought out or put up for sale. Telarix's stability with Lumine gives our customers a stable and reliable partner who they can plan with long term.

Being part of an ecosystem of sister companies also gives us a wider perspective outside of BSS. We’re well-placed to support operators across all those critical integration points, from billing to mediation, ensuring our collective roadmap is as future-proofed as possible.

Read more insights and hear from our team members in our resources section.