I was interested to read the story on TechCentral.ie reporting a whopping 79% of telecoms staff felt their legacy infrastructure was preventing them from effectively selling new products and 82% could not easily bundle their offerings across all products and services.
Based on a survey of 350 senior telecoms staff in the US and Europe by CloudSense, the findings are bound to cause concern when allied to the fact that just under half of all respondents said winning new business would be a key challenge for 2015.
Commenting on the findings, CloudSense CEO Richard Britton said: “The challenge for the vast majority of communication service providers globally is that their current systems are not built to deliver future success.” He warned that “continuing to rely on ageing systems which undermine the order to cash journey impacts revenue, costs and customer experience”.
While he made a valid point, I can’t help wondering if there was anything unique about the situation Britton was describing. It seems to me that the same issue is likely to exist with companies seeking to provide IT services or services that require IT to deliver them.
Consider the responses advanced by telecoms staff when asked which technology would have the biggest impact on their business in 2015. The two most popular replies were cloud (29%) and digital services (21%). Only 10% opted for Big Data.
Would replies from an audience of IT staff be much different, I wonder? There’s a small possibility Big Data might be higher up the list (or have a higher percentage). Assuming they are quite similar, it seems likely that IT companies will also be struggling to bundle offerings across all products and services because of their own legacy infrastructure. After all, legacy infrastructure is not something confined to telecoms companies.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that they aren’t “built to deliver future success” as many of them are likely to enjoy some success delivering the services and products that they are actually able to sell. After all, the future is the day after today as much as it is six months away or a year down the line. In any case, the future has a funny habit of being not quite as radical as people are inclined to believe it will be, if only because all the legacy stuff (in any industry or sphere of life) can’t just be dumped and left behind.
In much the same way as countries are framed by their histories and people by their past experiences, so the advance of technology is built upon the foundation of the infrastructure already in place. We all know the difference between the vision and the reality. As with life, technology is not so much about how close the former gets to the latter but how much the latter gets in the way of the former.
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