Finger on the Pulse is a series where we explore the major trends shaping business technology. In each post, you’ll learn from our key partners and their perspective on an industry trend through the lens of their unique business. Recently, we explored how to unlock digital transformation to meet consumer expectations. In this interview, the focus is developing business agility to optimize growth potential.
Building business agility
As the pace of change in any industry increases, the value of business agility skyrockets. An organization that doesn’t have the infrastructure, operations, or processes to quickly adapt to shifting trends simply can’t unlock as much revenue in emerging markets as a competitor who can. Industry leaders need to ask themselves, “Do we have the integration and unified digital ecosystem necessary to launch new products, partnerships, or business models at speed and scale?”
The telecom industry is a great example. For a long time, telecommunications have functioned as utilities, and telecom companies served as a pipeline for the content and data that other industries needed to function. Constrained by their utility-centric business models, the telecom companies didn’t get their share of the revenue generated by the explosion of content over the past two decades.
WIth the emergence of 5G and other innovative technologies, telecom companies are now transforming from pipelines to platforms. That transformation is creating exciting new revenue opportunities, which means the companies with the greatest agility are also the companies with the greatest potential to thrive.
MuleSoft and MATRIXX Software help clients drive revenue by leveraging integrated data to unlock value in emerging network infrastructure. We spoke with Jennifer Kyriakakis, MATRIXX Software’s Co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer, to learn how they’re helping companies around the world accelerate innovation and growth.
What are some obstacles that telecom companies are facing in developing the agility they need to adapt and grow?
A lot of the companies we work with came of age in a different time, which means many of them are dependent on dated legacy systems. Those legacy systems were built for basic functions like handling voice calls and text messages, not for the world we live in now with 5G and an ever-expanding portfolio of connected content, services, and devices. So those legacy systems create a lot of the obstacles our customers face in their attempt to be more agile and create new revenue streams.
For a long time in the telecom world, taking a product from concept to market usually took one to two years. That doesn’t fly today. In order to remain relevant with all the new companies that are springing up who need reliable telecom services, you have to be able to change those two year timelines to two month timelines.
How do MATRIXX and MuleSoft join forces to help companies overcome those challenges?
Many telecom providers are huge enterprises that tend to move slowly. Any changes or new offerings have to move through a lot of red tape before they can go to market. One of the huge benefits of MATRIXX Software is that we help those companies operate in a sandbox-like environment where they can develop and test new offerings or business models much more quickly. When something promising emerges, there is data available to validate product development at scale.
It might be helpful to talk through a basic example. Imagine a small business that wants to start hosting large webinars, and their first event is in a couple of weeks. They need to ensure they’ve got extra bandwidth and low latency for the best quality webinar experience, at an affordable price and only for the month of the webinars.
Without MATRIXX, even developing a quote for a prospective customer like this could be a huge task for the telecom provider. The process of determining the price for temporary upgrade to bandwidth and latency, let alone the back-end steps needed to activate and deliver the upgraded service, could take the telecom provider weeks or months, and the small business owner doesn’t have time to wait.
With MATRIXX leveraging the power of MuleSoft and Salesforce, we can help the telecom provider deploy a digital commerce and monetization platform that automates the steps necessary for that kind of transaction. So the agility made possible by a modern, integrated, cloud-driven monetization platform makes this new deal and thousands others like it achievable at scale.
Tell us about how MATRIXX Software benefits your clients in terms of security.
Because telecom providers deliver critical infrastructure around the world, security is an important priority for them and their customers. And with the MATRIXX platform, our clients process customer charging data and monetize revenue for both their consumer and enterprise customers across numerous industries. As a result, there are personal data and privacy concerns and a variety of different security regulations that must be met when handling customer monetization data, depending on the region, country or state they operate in .
For all those reasons we’ve always made security a top priority for our solutions. One of the benefits of our partnership with both Salesforce and MuleSoft is the number of security protocols and industry best practices built into your digital infrastructure at the most basic levels. You have encryption of all your data whether it’s static or in transit, and you support extensive customization, configurability, and repeatability to adapt your security efforts at an international scale.
Speak about MATRIXX’s relationship with the Salesforce ecosystem. Why does your partnership with MuleSoft make so much sense?
MATRIXX is a proud partner and huge fan of the Salesforce ecosystem. The constant innovations bring digital transformation to life and MuleSoft’s seamless integration has benefited a number of industries, including ours. For us, one of the reasons the partnership makes so much sense is how much data there is and how many layers that data needs to travel through when it comes to telecom.
Telecom providers have to create and support networks that are easily accessible and customizable for companies and partners that rely on those networks to offer their products and services. Then those companies also have to deliver that data to their end customers. All that data and information transfer has to be fast, seamless, and secure. So the value of our partnership with the Salesforce ecosystem, and MuleSoft in particular, can’t be overstated.
The synergy and out-of-the-box integration between Salesforce software, MuleSoft APIs, and MATRIXX solutions are really the critical components to delivering the agility that our customers are looking for.
Learn more about the MATRIXX monetization connector on AnyPoint Exchange.
