A vision put into practice

unite: Hello Bosco. Let’s start by discussing your view of the opportunities and challenges that operators face today.

Bosco: We are in the middle of an incredible journey. The communications industry is transforming billions of lives around the world. Today, some 3.5 billion people are connected, and we expect another two billion in the next five years. Five billion people, each with their own needs, their own behavior, their own personal relationships, their own way of communicating. This is creating huge opportunities for operators, not just by connecting new customers, but also in bringing new services to every subscriber, meeting their individual communications needs, creating a single network experience for the market of one.

But of course, opportunity attracts competition. Communications is one of the world’s most intensely competitive industries. Just look at markets like Brazil, India, Japan and the UK. You can almost feel and smell the intensity of the competition.

Operators face many questions. How to position themselves? How to segment the market? How to attract and retain customers? How to expand into new services and into new geographical regions? How to control costs? And how to build a long-term, sustainable relationship through customer engagement and branding?

unite: What is the Nokia Siemens Networks vision and how does it apply to our customers?

Bosco: We describe our vision as the ‘Individual Communications Experience’ - defining and delivering a service experience tuned for each individual end user and their specific situation. Our mission is to help operators to build more valuable customer relationships.

It’s interesting that in the many meetings and discussions that I have with our customers, this vision resonates well with their thinking. I think we and our customers enjoy a shared understanding of the opportunities and challenges of today’s markets, for instance how to manage data growth in networks while cost pressures are increasing, and how to create real financial value from data services.

unite: Please tell us more. What marks out Nokia Siemens Networks in the market?

Bosco: We are focusing very sharply on two key areas.

We create extreme network efficiency through efficient, low-cost connectivity, and flexible service creation and management. Cost is a very important element of course, and efficiency is about much more than just the lowest cost per bit, or per connection. It provides the business agility and speed that is needed to focus on customers and their needs.

Our second focus area is to improve the customer experience by bringing the service and network layers together – effectively and efficiently. Different customer segments have different communications needs. A teenager and a business user will want very different communications experiences from the same network. They will also have different spending behaviors – and spending budgets.

It is important that operators are able to optimize service delivery and capacity in line with their customers’ willingness to spend, thus providing network capacity and quality according to the subscriber value. This requires a deep understanding of service consumption and customer segmentation.

We offer a wide portfolio of solutions that enable operators to achieve more cost effective and more agile service delivery. We also offer service solutions that address provisioning and segmentation. Our R&D investments are focused on network and service efficiency, as well as the service experience.

unite: What are the three key success factors to enabling a richer customer experience?

Bosco: Reliability, security and quality. All are a must. Plus the ability to personalize services for customers. This requires customer insight, data profiling and segmentation. And again, I emphasize the need for agility to be able to react rapidly and adapt the network to changing customer needs.

unite: And if you were heading up a operator, what three characteristics would you expect of Nokia Siemens Networks?

Bosco: Innovation, excellence of execution, and value for money. I believe we meet all these demands well. Our innovation is illustrated by a long list of initiatives, including our advanced subscriber data management, our managed services and remote delivery capabilities, and of course our Flexi Single RAN base station platform.

We always strive for executional excellence and have a track record of keeping to our commitments, and doing so on time. And value comes from our understanding of the commercial realities facing our customers and our solutions that address specific business needs.

unite: Finally, what is your promise to your customers for the next six months and beyond?

Bosco: Relentless customer focus. Our customers will continue to see this commitment in all of our day-to-day dealings with them.

unite: Thank you for your time Bosco.