Note: This is a guest post by Ashley Wilson. We are thankful to her for contributing to our blog.
The telecommunications industry grew by leaps and bounds for decades. Yet the demand for telecom services only continues accelerating.
As 5G technology comes online, even more capacity and demand fuel incredible growth. Harnessing all this technology requires powerful hardware running powerful software.
Every company has unique requirements to sustain periods of growth. An individualized approach to your telecom company’s software delivers very real benefits for meeting those requirements.
Feature Customization
No single solution handles the needs of every company in any given industry. The best aspect of individualized software is that it meets the exact needs of a particular company.
There is a lot of high-quality off-the-shelf software available, but it’s not going to solve the specific needs of companies operating in specialized fields like telecommunications.
Installing ready-made software requires heavy customizing, adapting it to fit the particular environment and unique requirements of each individual company.
Custom-made software makes more sense for specialized industries because it’s created from the ground up to meet the needs of your specific business.
Geographic, demographic, legal, and regional economic differences from company to company dictate vastly different types of systems management among companies. The only way to efficiently address these differences is with fully customized software, addressing each specific situation.
Easy Scalability
Probably the most challenging part of systems management in the telecom industry is dealing with growth.
If you can’t manage your system’s growth in a controllable way, your company becomes vulnerable to service shortfalls where you can’t please your existing customers because of dealing with so many new customers.
This is a dangerous place for companies where the primary product is a service. The Deloitte 2020 Telecommunications Industry Outlook report makes clear that with 5G coming online, the volume of both bandwidth usage and data transmission will explode.
Services like recently-legalized sports betting, VR, AR, and other types of online experiences drive this growth in new ways not seen before.
Naturally, every telecom company faces security and privacy concerns in the face of this kind of data transmission onslaught. Easily scalable software is absolutely necessary.
With the additional burden of security concerns, there’s more work to do than before, and your software can’t get in the way.
With customized software, your systems use only the amount of hardware strictly needed to accomplish the mission at hand.
When bursts of growth intrude, you can scale up instantly with cloud server integration to cover the immediate needs while physical hardware catches up to the demand. When things level off, you strengthen your position and prepare for the next burst of growth.
Systems Integration
With a myriad of personnel and technical requirements, businesses in the telecom industry need software that handles a wide variety of management tasks seamlessly.
Off-the-shelf business and technical software requires stacks of manuals, the commitment of valuable IT resources to troubleshoot how separate packages communicate, and a host of licensing arrangements, each with its own cost and legal concerns.
When your systems are integrated from top to bottom, IT works on the technical aspects of the system rather than helping users understand the system. Management can handle personnel, finance, training, and similar duties without a need to oversee the IT team in relation to the business workforce.
When management pushes decisions and changes in policy downstream, those changes take effect system-wide for all personnel at once.
Similarly, when reports come in from the field, they’re distributed to the network operators, customer service representatives, financial department, and management on a need-to-know basis.
These data reports include notification and permission levels to prevent information being spread around to unnecessary places, enhancing security while making sure the right information is routed to the right places.
Maintenance Savings
Individualized software solutions provide automation possibilities and lower maintenance costs because IT labor is focusing on upgrading and maintaining the core of the system rather than constantly managing updates for numerous separate packages.
The IT team can expand feature sets rather than rebuild the lines of communication between different packages every few weeks because of separately updated brand-name software.
The degree of streamlining available with customized solutions offers long-term savings in cost, time, and wasted effort.
With software created specifically for a company’s needs, the software developer can interview stakeholders, design systems to accommodate varying concerns and integrate desired features and management enhancements from the very beginning.
There’s no substitute for the level of efficiency, cost savings, and long-term usability of a system designed to suit a company’s exact business, operational, and technical requirements.
Between more efficient operation, streamlined updating and reports, and a lower cost of maintenance and licensing, customization is the one approach that makes perfect sense in a complicated industry like telecommunications.
Final Thoughts
It’s clear that customized software costs more, especially during the initial installation, but these extra costs are worth the expense in the long run.
Long-term cost savings, efficiency, and the adaptive scalability of modern customized software mean telecom providers should look at customization to fill the task of smoothly integrating systems.
With better service, better growth management, and better economic aspects to systems management, an individualized approach to telecom software solutions makes plain sense. Your customers will thank you, and you’ll enhance the bottom line. That’s just good business.
Ashley Wilson
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- Customized Software Solutions For Telecom Companies - April 19, 2020