Accenture Solutions for New Product Development and Innovation for the Communications Industry -- Full Text

As the global economy recovers in the midst of ongoing uncertainty, communications and high tech companies are beginning to set a new growth agenda, fueled by innovation. In today’s environment, the ability to innovate boldly and cost-effectively will separate the successful companies from the mere survivors. Accenture, a market-leading provider of solutions to the communications industry, helps companies achieve more rapid and effective delivery of innovative products and services, supporting the growth that shareholders demand.

Growth and innovation: A renewed strategic agenda
With a range of tested and robust offerings in the areas of new-product development and innovation, Accenture is helping clients across the spectrum of communications, high tech, software, media and entertainment drive toward high performance in a market situation driven by a renewed commitment to growth.

Accenture helps companies accelerate their ability to develop and launch innovative new services, establish enabling systems for a new business, accommodate the technology changes inherent in a high-speed broadband world and manage the entire ecosystem of innovation across multiple partners and devices.

Today's development challenges
By streamlining new-product development processes, Accenture helps companies generate the operating efficiencies, cost savings and new revenues that can fuel the innovation and growth agenda.

New research from Accenture—based on a global survey of 277 communications, media and high-tech executives conducted in late 2008—confirms the presumption that times are hard when it comes to new-product development.

The executives we surveyed are feeling cost pressures and the frustrations of being unable to move ideas through the pipeline fast enough. The ideas are there, but companies just can't execute them quickly enough.

Half the companies surveyed, including 58 percent of European executives, cite budget overruns in new-product development. 42 percent of the companies (including 47 percent of the American executives surveyed) report that they suffer from an overly slow pace as they move a product from idea to prototype.

Leading-edge technologies are a doubleedged sword to companies in these industry sectors. On the one hand, technology developments constitute a major source of innovation. On the other hand, unproven and often incompatible technologies further increase development times, as well as costs and risks.

Products and services may become so complex as to be overly daunting to consumers, who seek instead a simple interface and a unified experience when it comes to their communications services and electronic devices.

As a result of these challenges, 70 percent of the companies in our survey stopped development of at least some services last year. The average company discontinued 15 new products, and 10 percent of companies (including 35 percent in the United Kingdom) discontinued more than 50 services.

This research finding is a cause for concern. An essential capability is at risk for many companies: the development of new services that keep them competitive and advancing toward high performance.

Open innovation, which emphasizes collaboration with third parties as a way to increase the pipeline of ideas and services, is a way to meet many of these challenges. Yet open development requires a service infrastructure that can be readily integrated with a company's existing IT infrastructure. Such an approach helps manage IT processes (from content management to billing) more cost-effectively, provides simple linkages to external suppliers, delivers a unified view of the operator's customer, and reduces the complexity of creating, launching and managing services for non-IT staff.

Companies need help managing the complexities of an open development environment. Other research from Accenture, conducted with the Economist Intelligence Unit, found that 60 percent of communications service providers used more than ten co-design partners per product development project.

Accenture's award-winning solutions and assets help companies succeed in this environment—streamlining and industrializing their new-product development process, and cutting costs and risks while reducing time to market for innovative services.

Overview: Accenture Solutions for New-Product Development and Innovation
Accenture's award-winning assets and solutions have delivered measurable improvements in business performance for clients around the world. Our offerings for service innovation help drive high performance for service providers by:

• Integrating and industrializing the innovation process.
  
  
• Helping to reduce cost and risk.
  
  
• Expanding and supporting the collaborative development environment.
  
  
• Reducing the time to market for innovative services.

Accenture's extensive and markettested offerings for new-product development and innovation include:

Innovation Strategy Solution
A comprehensive offering that helps companies put in place the vision and strategy necessary to guide new-product development effectively, as well as the management processes that can reduce the costs and risks of multi-party, open innovation.

Service Delivery Platform Solution
An award-winning solution that provides the infrastructure and comprehensive technologies required to create, deliver and manage a wide range of products and services for consumers and enterprises more quickly, and at less cost and risk. Based on an open infrastructure and designed specifically for innovations in the Web 2.0 world, the Accenture SDP takes traditional service delivery platforms to a new level.

Converged Customer Management Solution
This offering helps companies overcome the problem of fragmented customer data, using more effective and timely customer insight to create competitive advantage and improve customer service.

Unified Communications and Collaboration Solution
An advanced offering that helps accelerate collaboration-intensive business processes for today's communications and high tech companies. Enables more cost-effective work among team members, partners and suppliers.

4G Accelerator Solution
Tools and features that can help carriers generate greater business value and save development time and costs. This offering includes comprehensive, integrated modeling tools to help companies plot their course to high performance through 4G and, more generally, through their wireless broadband strategies.

IP Services Accelerator Solution
Creates a standardized environment for rapid and more effective service innovation, development and operations for the IP era across multiple devices and platforms including mobile operating systems, TVs, set-top boxes, PCs and connected devices.

MVNO Accelerator Solution
Consulting, IT services and outsourcing capabilities that can help a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) reduce the risk and cost of launching operations.

Customer Portal Solution
A rich and robust set of assets, software and methods—including planning charts, task packages, sample deliverables, job aids, estimating tools and reference materials—for developing, managing and delivering customer portals based on both in-portal and off-portal propositions.

Next Generation Intelligent Network Solution
Addresses the challenges operators face in transitioning their networks to an all-IP environment while allowing for the preservation of existing services. Enables the creation of a network environment that is more open, agile and adaptable, and that can accommodate technology change with less risk.

Network Testing Services
A testing capability with an integrated end-to-end device and service testing process that can lower a company's operational costs of serving subscribers.

Solutions for Serving the Small and Medium Business Market
Proven assets and methods, and deeply experienced resources and a Global Delivery Network, to help companies improve their ability to offer compelling and innovative services not only to enterprise customers, but to small and medium businesses, as well.

Accenture Innovation Strategy Solution
If communications, electronics and high tech, and media and entertainment companies are to meet today's new-product development challenges, they must improve the speed and rigor by which they manage innovation.

Overview
New Accenture research, conducted in collaboration with the Economist Intelligence Unit, has found that companies are struggling to execute innovation initiatives effectively. The commitment to innovation is strong, even in a challenging economy, but management often lacks the operational strategies needed to create new products and services and move them through the development pipeline fast enough to meet marketplace needs and generate a positive return on their innovation investment.

Industry executives surveyed as part of our research acknowledge the critical nature of innovation. We found that 62 percent of respondents believe that their business strategy is “largely” or “totally” dependent on innovation.

Almost 53 percent of those surveyed believe their organization's commitment to innovation is stronger or much stronger than their competitors. But when asked if their innovation execution is as effective as it needs to be, significantly lower numbers said that was so. Only 36 percent believed their organization's pace and speed of innovation was stronger, and only 40 percent felt they exceeded their peers in terms of frequency of innovation.

To achieve and sustain high performance in the years ahead, companies must conceive of innovation as a business discipline, instead of hoping for an occasional lucky shot. They must then manage and execute innovation accordingly: as an endto- end process, guided by customer insight and focused on generating profitable revenue, from insight development to idea generation to development to marketplace launch.

With its Innovation Strategy Solution, Accenture helps companies put in place the vision and operational strategy necessary to guide new-product development effectively, as well as the management processes that can reduce the costs and risks of innovation.

Accenture focuses on multiple enablers for cost-effective innovation and new-product development:

Innovation processes
To create an effective service innovation capability, the innovation process must be designed to deliver a broad scope of new products and services quickly. As such, the process must be made leaner and more rigorous, guided by clear performance indicators and offering support for open innovation and multi-party development.

Business model and positioning
Accenture provides guidance in choosing and implementing the business model required for effective innovation, whether that is an internal process, or the use of “building block services” that are incorporated into another company’s service, or a model whereby services are developed by an alliance partner and then incorporated or branded by the host company.

Support systems and infrastructure
Operations support systems (OSS) and business support systems (BSS) pose one of the biggest hurdles for providers when introducing a new service. Accenture provides strategic guidance in designing a highly scalable platform that can accommodate the rapid and modular development of all services, that has sophisticated reporting capabilities (end-to-end and crossdomain), and can support multi-service, multi-access technologies and multiple end-user devices.

Organization and culture
An effective innovation strategy must be executed by people, so the organization's culture and talent management processes must be designed to incentivize and stimulate innovation. Accenture helps clients foster the development of an appropriate culture and organization structure (including relevant rewards, incentives and job descriptions) that support more rapid and cost-effective new-product development.

Benefits
The Accenture Innovation Strategy Solution can deliver multiple benefits to communications, electronic and high tech, and media and entertainment companies:

Reduced costs
In a challenging economy, Accenture helps companies lower their costs for new-product development. Accenture can help companies avoid the risks of abandoned development projects, which constitute a major cost drain, as well as improve the overall efficiencies of innovation processes.

Higher revenues and a more customer-centric focus
Innovation is not a goal in itself; it is targeted at serving current and future customers and generating revenues. Accenture helps with advanced customer segmentation techniques, cross-market insights and ways to involve customers in the innovation process to maximize their input, understand their priorities and increase their acceptance of and interest in new services.

Better management of the innovation process
Accenture helps companies generate measurable improvements in business value through more effective newproduct development by using a set of key performance indicators and a rigorous metrics program.

Faster time to market
By enabling more effective collaboration in an environment of open innovation, Accenture helps companies shorten the pipeline from idea to prototype to profitable service.

High performance delivered
Accenture combines in-depth industry knowledge and consulting capabilities with extensive experience helping our clients drive toward high performance through more effective service innovation and delivery. Our patented and award-winning Service Delivery Platform Solution (see next section for more detail) has demonstrated a consistent ability to lower costs and speed new-product development for a range of clients around the world.

One particularly noteworthy asset is the Accenture Collaborative Innovation Solution—a “mass collaboration” technique used to manage the innovation process. The solution begins with an issue of focus (a "seed" idea or request) for the organization. That request is then passed initially to a set of participants who add their individual insights and perspectives. Those versions of the document are then read and enhanced by successive waves of participants, each handoff taking the preceding ideas in new, diverse and potentially high-value directions based on the individual’s perspective of the issue or potential solution.

To keep these dozens, hundreds or even thousands of resulting ideas manageable and actionable, the Accenture Collaborative Innovation Solution employs the same group of participants to rate and rank individual ideas. This mass evaluation technique, supported by Web 2.0 technologies, helps separate the highest-potential ideas from others, leading to a winnoweddown list of the top ideas.

Communications and high-tech companies are looking at this solution as a means to deliver benefits that have already been realized by a host of other companies, from retailers to products companies to financial institutions.

One major U.S. bank used the Accenture Collaborative Innovation Solution to help the organization improve its ability to deliver high-quality customer experiences more consistently. The Accenture solution helped the company advance toward high performance by generating a pipeline of more than 50 ideas highlighting specific product and process issues, as well as ideas for improvement in the end-to-end customer experience. Implementing the solution also helped foster higher levels of employee engagement and a more effective culture of innovation. More than 250 employees—representing more than 21 U.S. states and 90 job titles—submitted substantive ideas, resulting in seven high-quality innovations for the company.

Accenture Service Delivery Platform Solution
Accenture's award-winning Service Delivery Platform Solution helps communications, high-tech and media companies reduce costs and risks of new-product development while enabling the collaborative environment that results in more effective innovation.

Overview
The current economic, technology and business environment in the communications and high-tech industries poses multiple challenges to service providers and content creators. The complexity of products is increasing as multiple devices and functions emerge based on an ever-expanding range of new technologies. New competition is emerging from companies with strong brands and a loyal customer base.

Collaboration and open innovation are essential to success in the development marketplace. Multiple vendors and even customers are now participating in this open environment—large and small companies alike, in multiple locations around the world.

Over the past half decade, service delivery platforms have emerged as a critical, strategic element for service providers looking for an edge when it comes to driving faster speed to market for new products and services.

However, the service creation and delivery environment has outpaced the ability of traditional service delivery platforms to keep up. New product development must become more industrialized and predictable, reducing both cost and risks. The work of a greater variety of collaborators must be supported. Providers must create compelling consumer services that build upon Web 2.0 capabilities. Moving to a new generation of service delivery platforms is vital to dealing with this more open and complex service creation environment. What's needed is an effective platform that facilitates the development and deployment of new services from both internal and third-party sources.

The solution must mask the complexity of the telecommunications infrastructure and provide well-documented hooks into common functions such as billing, presence, location and quality of service.

That's the promise of the Accenture Service Delivery Platform Solution. In a competitive environment that requires extensive collaboration and open innovation, this Accenture solution provides the infrastructure and comprehensive technologies required to create, deliver and manage a wide range of products and services for consumers and enterprises more quickly, and at less cost and risk.------

Accenture's next-generation service delivery platform
Already acknowledged by major industry analysts as a market leader, Accenture has taken its award-winning Service Delivery Platform (SDP) to a new level—a level appropriate to the Web 2.0 era. Accenture's SDP 2.0 builds upon all the functions and features that have made service delivery platforms essential tools from the beginning:

• Support for dynamic, flexible creation of end-user services that run over networks.
  
  
• Reduced business and financial risks in service development.
  
  
• Consistent provision of services to end-users.
  
  
• Controls over the execution of those services to make them cost effective and more adaptable to evolving user needs and demands.

The Accenture SDP enables composition of services by integrating an ever increasing number of enablers across access, applications and network, as well as business support systems (BSS) and operations support systems (OSS). To these basic services, the Accenture SDP 2.0 adds two innovative components:

An open SDP capability
The Accenture SDP is based on an open infrastructure—a scalable, distributed, efficient and open architecture capable of supporting a large number of service activations. It provides a set of components that can be used to create new, easy interfaces to new services platforms. The Accenture SDP is also open in that, wherever reliable open source solutions exist, they are made available as software within the overall platform. This approach reduces costs and speeds development time by avoiding licensing requirements. By being open to third-party developers and content providers, Accenture's open SDP facilitates a more collaborative approach to product development, enabling third-party and/or internal developers to create new, value-added services faster, more consistently and with less expense.

An SDP "docking station"
A true innovation in the industry, the Accenture SDP Docking Station is a fast and cost-effective foundational SDP installation that can be up and running in as little as a week. The docking station provides easy connectivity to the back-end (open) SDP (which is typically managed by Accenture) and with a number of services and applications (such as charging, activation and assurance) that are already in the catalog and that can be executed and delivered to the company's subscribers.

A company using the Accenture SDP Docking Station does not need to implement a full-blown SDP solution, but only needs to connect the open SDP into the local network and BSS/ OSS by means of the docking station.

Benefits
The Accenture Service Delivery Platform Solution is advancing our clients toward high performance in measurable ways:

Accelerating new-revenue generation
Accenture can reduce a company's time to market for new services by up to 75 percent.

Reducing the costs and risks of service innovation and delivery
Accenture can generate up to 75 percent savings on service creation with its Service Delivery Platform Solution.

Improving customer loyalty and retention
Intuitive user interfaces and consistent branding help improve customer loyalty, increase service usage and drive revenue growth.

High performance delivered
The Accenture Service Delivery Platform Solution has already helped clients around the world drive toward high performance through a more cost-effective approach to delivering new services.

For example, Telstra—Australia’s leading telecommunications and information services company—has recently evolved from a traditional telecommunications company into a holistic, full-service media, advertising and communications company.

As it sought next-generation capabilities, Telstra realized it was constrained by the fact that its mobile and online music delivery services used separate, externally hosted solutions to manage and deliver digital music offerings. It was difficult, expensive and timeintensive to launch new content services, and it was not possible to offer on-demand media delivery services to external parties.

Using its market-leading Service Delivery Platform Solution, Accenture helped Telstra migrate existing movies, music and user data to a new platform in preparation for an integrated digital music solution that would provide a unified customer experience. The new platform has empowered Telstra on its journey toward high performance by driving changes to the digital media platform, allowing for the rapid deployment of new offerings. Accenture's service delivery platform also served as the essential foundation for Telstra's new mobile TV offering.

Because of this work with Accenture, Telstra is now better placed to lead the mobile TV sector in Australia with the delivery of interactive mobile services.

High Performance Delivered
Reducing costs and speeding service delivery at Turkcell

Using its Service Delivery Platform Solution, Accenture has recently helped Turkcell—a major European mobile communications provider and the leading operator in Turkey— upgrade its service delivery platform architecture to facilitate new subscriber offerings such as music downloads, data services and transfers of digital photography.

The architecture upgrade was targeted at:

• Decreasing product development time.
  
  
• Reducing time spent creating and introducing new subscriber services to the market.
  
  
• Providing improved coordination of the new services and offerings across multiple platforms to help facilitate an uninterrupted user experience.
  
  
• Lowering long-term requirements for capital expenditure around service delivery.

Examples of innovative applications enabled by the Accenture solution include Internet access and browsing, ringback tones, unified messaging, instant messaging and Internet "push information" services such as news, weather updates and entertainment. Turkcell's SDP upgrade demonstrates how the Accenture Service Delivery Platform architecture can act as powerful enabler of innovation between operators and the development community, resulting in a richer set of applications to benefit end-users.

Accenture has helped Turkcell advance toward high performance in today's challenging marketplace in several measurable ways:

Faster service launch
Time to market for new services was reduced by 75 percent.

Rapid campaign design
The time needed to set up a new campaign was reduced from several weeks to a single day.

Better utilization of third-party innovation
Within eleven months of launch, more than 30 application service providers and 53 content providers were offering more than 150 services through the new platform, and these numbers continue to grow.

Dramatic usage increases
Daily wireless application protocol (WAP) portal visits have tripled since the launch as a result of its intuitive design. Just one month after the launch, the daily visitor numbers had doubled in comparison with Turkcell’s former WAP site. Content sales have risen by a factor of seven and are still rising, without advertising. WAP portal GPRS usage has risen by nearly 3,000 percent, a change that can be entirely attributed to the rollout of the new service platform.

Accenture Converged Customer Management Solution
To overcome the challenge of fragmented customer data, this powerful Accenture solution provides the data services needed to provision, activate, execute and operate value-added services, while simultaneously improving customer service.

Overview
How well can your company manage subscriber or customer data to drive new products and services that can generate additional revenues? Companies seeking competitive advantage and high performance are now looking to develop more customer-centric capabilities that are enabled by convergence, and to delivering more effective customer experiences.

Customer-centric convergence cannot happen, however, as long as customer data resides in siloed data stores. Typically, business support system (BSS) data is separated from operations support system (OSS) data and both of those are separate from the network support system data. Moreover, those who design the processes and the methods for data gathering and storage for one type of system may not understand the goals and mindsets of their colleagues in other areas.

In that environment, companies find it difficult, if not impossible, to develop a rich and detailed understanding of their customers—one that enables them to design and sell a unique set of services based on a customer's needs and desires.

The Accenture Converged Customer Management Solution helps companies overcome the problem of fragmented customer data, using more effective and timely customer insight to create competitive advantage.

Converged Customer Management (CCM) is an important component of a company's service delivery architecture; it provides the data services needed to provision, activate, execute and operate value-added services.

In effect, CCM becomes the aggregated "source of truth" for all the data needed to provision, activate, execute and operate value-added services.

From the company's perspective, accurate and timely customer data enables deeper and more accurate insights into what kinds of products may generate increased usage and, therefore, better average revenue per user.

The Accenture Converged Customer Management Solution can also improve customer service. With a unified and complete view into the customer's relationship with a company, customers do not have to make multiple inquiries to multiple siloed functions of a company to resolve issues or ask questions. Customer support staff do not need to look at multiple data sources to serve customers quickly, accurately and consistently.

An innovative Accenture solution
The Accenture Converged Customer Management Solution is built upon two primary components. First, Business Logic Processing, equipped with business process management capabilities, manages both provisioning (asynchronous in nature) and service execution (synchronous in nature) requests, which enable complex aggregations of the underlying data. By means of process orchestration capabilities, this component is also capable of dealing with scenarios where business logic can change dynamically according to real-time information coming from external sources and according to a customer's real-time actions.

Business Logic Processing includes:

• Service request handling, which executes a task list to manage CCM transactions.
  
  
• Provision request handling, which loads all the information to provision a service on external systems such as hosted Exchange server and Web hosting.

Second, Business Logic Data Services provide a consistent way to access the underlying database, by abstracting complexity of the data model in such a way that changes do not impact the way those services are invoked and used. Data services provide the right level of performance to support real-time data requests.

Benefits
Based on Accenture's implementation experiences, CCM has been shown to facilitate the development and launch of truly innovative services—services that are targeted more effectively at specific customer segments, thus providing a richer and more compelling experience. CCM delivers a host of other important benefits to providers seeking to achieve and sustain high performance in today's ever-changing and hypercompetitive marketplace:

More rapid development
CCM can enable the kinds of data interaction that result in innovative services that can drive profitable growth. CCM provides a powerful solution for bridging different service platforms, even in different domains (network, IT, etc.). At the same time, CCM simplifies cross-platform services and enables faster deployment of new offerings.

Better targeting of customers
CCM delivers more accurate, detailed and timely knowledge of customers' needs and preferences, based on the history of their interactions with products and on real-time contextual data such as location, network/ application presence and type of device used. These kinds of capabilities enable powerful differentiators such as real-time, targeted advertising. At the heart of this customer targeting capability is a unified view of the customer, made possible by Converged Customer Management technologies and capabilities.

More compelling user experiences
The converged management of customer data can also enable new and compelling types of user experiences. For example, Accenture offers experience in "soft panel" solutions— the ability to offer a unified set of controls and a simple, powerful interface so that users can manage their digital resources more easily and effectively, and configure their user experience to their preferences.

High performance delivered
Accenture recently worked with a major North American cable and broadband services provider to launch a commercial managed services platform to support the company's expanding efforts to serve the needs of the small and medium business market segment. The solution included an end-user portal for feature management and administrative functions, as well as a service broker to coordinate and manage work flow for all service requests.

A unified directory was also a key component of the solution. It provided a central, consolidated inventory of user and service information. It also enabled an integrated view of the customer (personal data, services, preferences, subscriptions, access, etc.). Unified user management through CCM was used to quickly develop enterprise managed services, while enabling a multi-level and dynamic management of the user hierarchy.

A messaging platform using Microsoft Exchange was the initial product launched.

Thanks in part to Accenture's industrialized, factory approach to development, the client was able to advance toward high performance in several ways. Most notably, the company moved from initial concept to full commercial launch in only five months, beating all previous product launch times for a service of similar complexity.

Accenture Unified Communications and Collaboration Solution
Accenture helps companies accelerate their collaboration-intensive business processes, enabling more cost-effective work among team members, partners and suppliers.

Overview
Today's communications and high-tech development environment is inherently collaborative, with more parties working together at a faster pace to enable the kind of innovation and pace of development needed to achieve and sustain high performance. Companies are interacting with geographically distributed teams, partners and suppliers to execute new-product development and other critical business processes.

In response, the number of ways to communicate has grown rapidly in recent years: e-mail, Web conferencing, video conferencing, mobile phones, short message service (SMS), instant messaging, social networking technologies and, of course, conventional telephones and teleconferencing.

Despite these many forms of communication technologies—and perhaps because of them—effective collaboration and communication is often extremely challenging and inefficient.

The increased number of communication channels correspondingly increases the number of potential enterprise security vulnerabilities. A distributed end-user communications environment— one that is often lacking in standards and consistency—can lead to a high total cost of ownership of technologies and applications.

Many organizations have hit a wall in trying to increase productivity and the pace of new-product development through leading-edge information and communications technologies.

A powerful unified communications solution
The Accenture Unified Communications and Collaboration Solution can accelerate collaboration-intensive business processes and enable more cost-effective work among team members, partners and suppliers.

This ability to streamline business processes produces cost savings through greater efficiency, and revenue growth through faster speed to delivery of revenue-generating services.

The same technologies used for unified communications can also mitigate risk by improving security, creating unified logging across all channels (for compliance) and creating a more resilient communications environment. This Accenture solution brings together a suite of technologies and processes that enable organizations with better development capabilities and faster launch speeds. These results are accomplished through the merging of several related technologies:

Converged network infrastructures
Consolidated, Internet protocol (IP)- based, quality-of-service enabled, wired and wireless networks to transport voice, data and video communications.

End-user network devices
The large and rapidly growing number of devices used for communicating over various networks.

Communication technologies
The multiple protocols over which employees want and need to be contacted, including Voice over IP, voicemail, unified messaging and instant messaging.

Collaboration technologies
The tools to allow organizations not only to communicate, but to solve problems, regardless of time and distance. Innovation applications include social networking, profile management, content management, news and RSS feeds, blogs, wikis, identity management and information rights management.

Presence and location services
The capabilities to publish contact preferences and availability, and to search based on interests and location.

Application integration
The communications interface is not restricted to clients on specific end-user devices, but can also be embedded in business applications via a service-oriented architecture, so communications can be launched from within any enabled application in which the user is working.

Communication and collaboration portal
A Web-based, single point of entry providing single-sign-on and easy access to a complete set of integrated capabilities.

Benefits
The Accenture Unified Communications and Collaboration Solution can deliver a host of powerful benefits to companies looking to reduce costs while also enabling a development environment that can push new products through the pipeline faster and more efficiently. Benefits include:

Cost reduction
Companies can cut costs in several ways. First, unified communications result in improved and streamlined business processes. The right people can be located wherever they are— and on the most appropriate channel. Communication channels can also be switched quickly as needed. Business processes can thus be routed more effectively, speeding up delivery and response times.

Second, companies can more easily streamline their supply chains. Partners, suppliers and customers can form part of the expanded communications network, each one reached in the way they prefer at any given time, removing delays in transactions. Finally, unified communications enables a more cost-effective, virtual working environment. Workers are no longer bound to the office or particular geographies, therefore reducing facilities costs, enabling virtual teams and empowering distributed, offshore delivery using lower-cost resources.

Improvements in supply chain effectiveness
Unified communications and collaboration can speed up internal fulfillment and supply chain processes, resulting in more effective workforce performance and service to customers.

Risk mitigation
In the event of disruption, the communications network is able to contact the people necessary to execute the business continuity plan on whatever channels they prefer. Furthermore, business can be conducted over alternative channels, as necessary, via a converged, fault-resilient network.

High performance delivered
Accenture worked with a major defense technology and security company which realized that its voice infrastructure was unfit for purpose, oversized and outdated. The company asked Accenture to help optimize its voice services, including unified communications.

The objectives of the program were to replace the company's many disparate legacy voice platforms with a scalable homogenous platform, one capable of driving down the total cost of ownership, and also delivering an enhanced user experience through an integrated unified communications and collaboration platform. The company sought to leverage its investment in Microsoft Office Communications Server to form a complete service, integrating both voice and video into the unified platform, reducing the numbers of devices per user and decreasing costs by simplifying its legacy infrastructure.

Based on market analysis and a close knowledge of the company's business and technology environment, Accenture advanced the company on its path to high performance by identifying a desired solution, which was a hybrid, integrated approach leveraging Microsoft Office Communications Server and an interoperable IP telephony platform.

This work is part of an initiative led by the Accenture Information Technology organization called "Collaboration 2.0," which is applying leading-edge thinking and technologies to drive high performance for clients by enhancing and improving cross-team collaboration and personal productivity. This Accenture suite of solutions provides integrated tools for organizing, managing and completing work. It improves accessibility to experienced colleagues and increases flexibility for collaboration regardless of individual team members' locations.

Accenture 4G Accelerator Solution New offerings based on 4G or wireless broadband capabilities promise to provide affordable, high-speed Internet access and data traffic for consumer electronics devices on the go.

Accenture helps companies jumpstart their ability to offer profitable 4G services. Overview The Internet is going wireless, and communications and high tech companies on the quest for high performance are positioning themselves for the next wave of mobile devices and services. New offerings based on 4G technologies promise to provide affordable, high-speed Internet access and data traffic for consumer electronics devices on the go.

With 4G, companies have the opportunity for lower-cost delivery of broadband, VoIP, video and Internet access beyond current cable network infrastructures. For satellite and cable operators, 4G represents a way of extending their footprints on a reduced-cost basis. For incumbent and start-up mobile operators, the high speeds promised by 4G provide a potential to open new markets— notably in terms of expanded Web 2.0 video capabilities, as well as providing products and services over high-speed wireless broadband.

However, 4G technologies represent significant risks and investments. Therefore, an important key to capitalizing on 4G is fully accounting for its business and technology impact, and engaging in comprehensive, integrated planning and execution to make the right wireless broadband decisions to drive profitable growth. Supporting such comprehensive planning and modeling is the purpose of the Accenture 4G Accelerator Solution. This innovative offering helps companies serve their enterprise customers and consumers better by jumpstarting their 4G strategy and implementation, guiding them toward optimal decisions to maximize capabilities at the right investment levels.

The only holistic 4G decision management, execution and support tool in the marketplace, Accenture's patentpending 4G Accelerator Solution makes decision-making easier, and then advances companies toward accelerated delivery and support for 4G networks. The most innovative components of the 4G Accelerator Solution are the proprietary scenariobased modeling tools based on advanced, multi-linear algorithms. These include:

4G business case model
A solid business case, built on analyses of both capital and operational costs, is one of the first essential steps in the transition to 4G. Accenture’s capital cost modeling tool provides a comparison between various current access technologies using data such as material costs and labor rates. Our operational cost tool helps estimate the ongoing costs of running a 4G business.

4G network cost model
The network cost models help operators estimate the expenditures associated with building a 4G network. The Accenture accelerator can base the cost model on various sets of business assumptions and product data, enabling carriers to analyze the build-out strategies most appropriate to their strategies and circumstances.

Product and services bandwidth model
Other modeling tools within this offering help companies estimate network bandwidth requirements for various combinations of products and services including voice, data and video services. Operators can factor findings from this analysis into their network cost model to provide a more detailed picture of build-out costs. Based on the bandwidth demand, this modeling tool helps set the dimensions of the transport network and predicts yearly bandwidth costs as well as spectrum requirements.

Benefits
The Accenture 4G Accelerator Solution has already proven its credibility, uniqueness and ability to deliver results. Benefits enjoyed by our clients include:

Reduced risks
The modeling tools at the heart of the solution enable companies to fine-tune their strategies to optimize their investments.

Support for decision making

Our diagnostic and assessment assets help companies sort through the pros and cons of a variety of 4G access technologies. Communications executives can strategize about their existing network investment while simultaneously making the move to 4G technologies.

Better cost control
Our cost modeling tools help companies develop a realistic assessment of the investment levels required to make the move to 4G.

The potential benefits of this Accenture solution were recognized at CTIA WIRELESS 2008, the premier global event representing the global wireless industry. The Accenture 4G Accelerator Solution v2.0 was the first-place winner in the "4G Service Creation & Development" category of the CTIA E-Tech Awards.

High performance delivered
The Accenture 4G Accelerator Solution has already assisted a variety of companies advance toward high performance by helping them model the financial, technical and business structures necessary for success:

Product line extension
A large cable operator in the United States wanted to estimate the feasibility of extending its cable-based offering into the wireless space by procuring spectrum in the FCC AWS auction. The company used the assets of the Accenture 4G Accelerator Solution to help estimate the cost of building out a wireless network and its estimated profitability, providing guidance as they determined how much they could spend in procuring wireless spectrum.

New-market entry
A prominent Fortune 500 company wanted to assess the feasibility of procuring spectrum in the FCC’s 700 MHz auction and subsequently building out its own wireless network. The company used the Accenture 4G Accelerator Solution to help develop the business case for a 4G network build-out. Guided by Accenture professionals experienced in 4G technologies, this work helped the client understand that a greenfield wireless network build-out did not best serve its business requirements and helped the company further optimize its wireless strategy.

Emerging-market solution
The Accenture 4G Accelerator Solution was used to help a new entrant in the African marketplace understand the business case and feasibility of building out an advanced wireless network for voice and data services in a nonconventional frequency spectrum band. The tool was used to predict the capital and operating expenses associated with implementing a broadband wireless network while taking into account constraints associated with the non-conventional spectrum band.

Accenture IP Services Accelerator Solution
Driving high performance through faster time to market for new IP services, at less cost and risk.

Overview
For companies facing the challenge of differentiation through distinctive, revenue-generating products and services, going it alone can be time-consuming, costly and risky.

The Accenture IP Services Accelerator Solution helps service providers conceive, create and launch new, innovative IP products and services with less cost and lower risks.

Accenture’s approach, built on our industry-leading assets such as the award-winning Accenture Service Delivery Platform Solution, as well as our onshore Innovation Centers and Global Delivery Network, offers a variety of options for factory-like service environments based on an organization's existing capabilities and needs. Options include:

Development factory
Clients can leverage Accenture's multi-shore capabilities—and skilled technology developers located in our specialized development centers—to build and test services customized to their business and technology needs and integrated their existing environment. This option includes access to select pre-built, leading-edge service delivery platform components.

Managed delivery center
Clients can use our multi-shore capabilities to build and run customized services as part of a multi-year agreement. This option allows companies to use our award-winning Accenture Service Delivery Platform Solution to rapidly launch services at any scale, supported by redundant hosting environments and 24/7 access to a dedicated global support team.

Managed services catalog
For other clients, Accenture provides a catalog of IP Services with world-class shared facilities and a support staff. Companies can choose from and configure more than 50 pre-built, off-the-shelf services built on the Accenture Service Delivery Platform. This option includes flexible billing models, micro transactions, monthly/ annual subscription fees and corporate licenses.

Services available in the Accenture catalog include a wide range of offerings in the categories of customer interface, communications, information, entertainment and managed services. They include mobile and PC Web portal, leading messaging options, RSS feeds, video streaming, mobile TV and mobile device management.

Benefits
The IP Services Accelerator Solution offers important benefits to a range of companies, including new entrants, as well as existing service providers that are seeking to expand their product portfolio without investing excessive capital expense to build an infrastructure which they then must maintain.

Benefits include:

Faster time to market
Our hosted service delivery platform can help companies establish and maintain a core environment in as little as a month or two. For a European mobile operator, for example, we reduced the time to launch new services by 75 percent. We can also provide long-term sustainability of the services well beyond launch through industrialized outsourcing. Companies can reduce their overall innovation cycle by 30 percent to 50 percent.

Lower and more predictable costs
The Accenture Global Delivery Network provides access to high-quality resources, critical skill sets and lower-cost sourcing models. Whether onsite, onshore or offshore, our deep resources, leading tools and proven approaches can help companies reduce program overruns by 15 to 20 percent.

Less risk
Leveraging Accenture’s leading-edge outsourcing capabilities and relationships with leading third-party providers, companies can reduce development risks while enabling greater flexibility and innovation. Based on actual client experience, Accenture can increase a client's success rate for new products and services by 20 percent to 40 percent.

High performance delivered
At Italian wireless provider 3 Italia, the company's growth strategy required an increased ability to develop innovative services—especially in the multimedia services arena—and to generate a higher average revenue per user (ARPU). 3 Italia also wanted to offer services across a number of markets, including consumer, enterprise as well as small and medium businesses. Yet, 3 Italia competes in an extremely saturated consumer marketplace for wireless services. In addition, the number and complexity of services the company could launch was limited by the available number of skilled development engineers and by its technical infrastructure. Although the company had developed a strong roadmap in terms of the services it planned to release, it was unable to implement those services at speed while also containing service creation costs.

Accenture worked with 3 Italia to help speed up the process for more rapid service development. Accenture provided the underlying service delivery platform, hosting infrastructure, resources for development and management and a number of dedicated services. 3 Italia defined the services and controlled the overall budgets and end quality, while Accenture built and/or ran the value added services. In all, 45 percent of 3 Italia’s mobile value-added services are now developed and hosted on the Accenture platform.

3 Italia has advanced toward high performance in several key ways. The provider can now create and demonstrate a new service within two days, from the requirements phase through integration. The company has also reduced service delivery costs by approximately 75 percent compared with internally budgeted IT costs. Because of its ability to more rapidly launch innovative services, 3 Italia now leads its market in overall ARPU and non-voice ARPU.

In 2007, the IEC recognized this project by awarding 3 Italia and Accenture an InfoVision Award for their joint work in developing an innovative solution for Digital Video Broadcasting-Handhelds (DVB-H).

Accenture Mobile Virtual Network Operator Accelerator Solution
Accenture can help companies reduce the risk and time to launch for an MVNO business with a complete set of consulting, IT services and outsourcing capabilities.

Overview
The MVNO opportunity remains a compelling proposition for companies that wish to expand their sales channels by delivering unique services and content directly to customers via a branded mobile device. As wholesale models evolve in the coming 4G marketplace, opportunities exist to revitalize MVNO strategies. Accenture believes that every player must overcome a similar series of obstacles to achieving high performance with an MVNO strategy.

Getting the value proposition right
MVNOs must be clear about their value proposition and must offer a compelling reason for a customer to switch from an existing provider and buy their offering.

Managing the launch successfully
Successful launches are founded upon a strong program management office to coordinate all the activities that must be planned, tracked and measured. Negotiating the right deal is also on the critical path.

Developing the enabling operational systems
A clear strategy for back-office systems—billing, customer care, the service delivery platform—must be in place before launch. Outsourcing the development and maintenance of supporting systems is an increasingly attractive option for MVNOs. To help companies meet these challenges, Accenture has packaged its experience and market-tested assets into its MVNO Accelerator Solution. Accenture offers a rich, preconfigured set of prepaid and postpaid products, service and tariff plans that help MVNOs "hit the ground running."

Aspects of this Accenture solution include:

• Evaluating the opportunity.
• Providing input on the most effective product offerings.
• Supporting development of the business plan.
• Designing business processes to efficiently manage a customer base.
• Managing the program and launching the business.
• Implementing the supporting IT and network infrastructure.

Based on actual successful implementations, Accenture can offer the core elements needed to launch and operate a new MVNO, including:

• Business support system (BSS) functions such as customer relationship management, billing, customer portal, dealer portal and data warehouse.
  
  
• Network elements, including service control points and GPRS gateway support node.
  
  
• Service delivery platform, including such innovations as a mobile portal to enable SIM-based value-added services.

Benefits
Leveraging its Global Delivery Network, Accenture provides cost-effective operational and management services for the operational and business support systems, as well as for the infrastructure required to keep a mobile virtual network operator running. Operators choosing Accenture as their mobile virtual network enabler can realize a host of benefits including:

• Reduced time to market by shortening the launch cycle.
• Lower risk of revenue leakage.
• Reduced upfront investment and lower ongoing costs.
• More rapid innovation.
• Guaranteed service levels.

High performance delivered
Poste Italiane, which provides postal services as well as other value-added services throughout Italy, has an established reputation as an innovator and aggressive competitor. In early 2007 the company announced its intention to begin selling mobile phone services as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) under the name, "PosteMobile." With this service, Poste Italiane planned to extend the number of distinctive services it could make available by leveraging the company's wider service portfolio and by making mobile financial service capabilities available to customers with bank accounts at other financial institutions.

Poste Italiane chose Accenture for the important role of Mobile Virtual Network Enabler (MVNE), based on Accenture's deep industry experience and its proven assets, including its MVNO Accelerator Solution.

In this MVNE role, Accenture built and maintained all the IT infrastructure needed to support PosteMobile’s core business processes. In addition to providing and maintaining the IT platform, Accenture was asked to provide operations and management services as well as business process outsourcing services that included service configuration and testing of the handsets.

Thanks in part to the ability to leverage its Milan Communications Industry Solution Center for systems integration skills, Accenture was able to complete the design and implementation of PosteMobile’s infrastructure in less than five months.

PosteMobile and Poste Italiane have achieved dramatic business results that are propelling them toward high performance. In the first month of operation as a startup company, PosteMobile attracted 100,000 subscribers and captured 7,000 activation orders per day at the peak of this growth. Within two months of the launch date, PosteMobile became the leading Italian MVNO in terms of customer base.

Accenture Customer Portal Solution
If communications companies are to achieve high performance in a converged digital ecosystem, they must provide compelling ways to capture a consumer's “first screen”—the primary entry point to multimedia and communication services. Creating robust and easy-to-use customer portals is essential.

Overview
Customer-centricity is critical to achieving high performance for today's communications, high-tech and media companies. Organizations must compete more than ever on how well they understand their customers, how they enable customers to interact in a Web 2.0 world, and how they harness the information and data about those customers across multiple touchpoints.

A key aspect of a customer-centric strategy is the customer portal. These multi-channel applications enable the creation, sharing and distribution of personalized content, as well as access to social networking and self-service capabilities. From a service provider's perspective, portals enable the segmentation, aggregation and delivery of rich media, communications and service experiences while driving customer service costs down.

Portals are a means of supporting growth through increased usage of data and services, targeted to a consumer's needs, interests and location.

Yet creating a compelling and profitable portal is no easy task. Consumers expect simpler interfaces, easier access, more flexibility and greater convenience. They want to see what they want, where they want and when they want it. This means content that is unbundled and device-independent. Consumers want to serve themselves as much as possible, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

To help carriers compete more effectively in this customer-centric environment, Accenture offers its Customer Portal Solution. This comprehensive offering contains a rich and robust set of assets, software and methods for developing, managing and delivering customer portal solutions in both a Web-based and mobile environment.

The Accenture solution supports two major portal propositions essential for driving high performance through greater customer centricity. On the one hand, in-portal propositions grant users access to dedicated content and communications services controlled by the carrier—delivered through the first screen a user sees when turning on a mobile device. On the other hand, the off-portal proposition opens up the gates to the outside world of the Internet, where control of what a customer does or buys would instead be shared by service providers such as Amazon, Google, YouTube and Facebook, to name just a few.

Benefits
An effective customer portal strategy and implementation can advance companies toward high performance by delivering a host of important benefits:

Lower costs and higher productivity
A customer portal can help carriers reduce their operating expenses, thanks to more rapid development times and self-service capabilities that streamline customer support processes.

Improved customer control over rich and relevant content
Accenture's portal solution enables the delivery of today’s most important Web 2.0 capabilities, including mobile social networks, rich Internet applications, blogs, wikis and mash-ups.

Better customer segmentation and delivery of relevant services
Portals can enable carriers to target multiple customer segments with as many differentiated and constantly evolving product and service bundles as possible.

Powerful aggregation
An effective portal strategy enables providers to aggregate and control innovative suppliers and third-party services, extracting value beyond data traffic.

An improved customer experience and better service
Portals can help carriers offer differentiated customer service capabilities while keeping costs under control. With advanced self-service capabilities built on easy-to-use interfaces, customers can complete transactions without the need for assistance.

High performance delivered
At Telenor, the Norwegian provider of broadband, TV, satellite and mobile services, executives initiated a new Internet portal program for its customers called “eChannel.” The new portal, developed with Accenture, provides customers with personalized information about available services and helps them make more efficient inquiries about their accounts. The portal has proven very popular with customers, who are now more likely to interact online than to call for assistance.

By enabling its customers to get a wide range of new and personalized services online, including special offers, recent statements and the ability to pay bills, Telenor has cut traffic to its call center by 10 to 20 percent—reducing its cost base while improving customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Telenor has advanced toward high performance in part because of its greater ability to develop customercentric offerings. The eChannel allows Telenor to have greater access to timely information that shows what its customers want, enabling the company to tailor products and services accordingly. The customer portal also gives customers a better way to access and pay for services when they become available.

Accenture Next Generation Intelligent Network Solution
To overcome the challenges operators face in transitioning their networks to an all-IP environment, this solution allows for the creation of a network environment that is more open, agile and adaptable, and that can accommodate technology change with less risk.

Overview
A service provider’s intelligent network is critical to innovation and profitable growth today, supporting the costeffective development and provisioning of new network services. For many companies, however, legacy intelligent networks are reaching the end of their life; some platforms are no longer supported by the vendors who implemented them, and costs for maintaining the network are high. Companies are looking for ways to increase margins and stay competitive by reducing their operating expenses.

The need to create differentiated services is another important driver today. Today’s vertical network environment is a constraint, resulting in numerous single services based on separate networks—mobile, fixed telephony, fixed broadband and WLAN. That network environment is gradually evolving to a more horizontal one, where services can be delivered on multiple networks, enabled by a service delivery platform. But a legacy intelligent network cannot adequately operate in that kind of horizontal network environment, supporting development of the types of services needed for operators to achieve high performance.

Overcoming the limitations of legacy networks
Some operators are looking to replace their legacy intelligent network with another proprietary platform, but a potentially better option is available today. To address the challenges operators face in transitioning their networks to an all-IP environment while preserving existing services, Accenture provides an IT-based next-generation intelligent network solution.

With this offering, Accenture helps provide a controlled and flexible service migration to an IP-based intelligent network built on an open platform. Our solution can give an operator more options to create additional applications and functionality at less cost. The solution can also support technology consolidation and standardization in service creation and maintenance, which helps simplify the environment and also drive down cost. The solution can deliver competitive advantage to early movers because of the considerable cost savings. Operators are enabled to create a network environment that is more open, agile and adaptable, and that can accommodate technology change with less risk.

Benefits
The next-generation intelligent network solution from Accenture provides operators with a practical approach to migrating their networks toward an all-IP service layer supporting both IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and legacy SS7 networks.

A faster, flexible and cost-effective approach to migrating to an all- IP network?
The solution is based on two components: next-generation application servers and a service broker. The service broker serves as a connecting layer or a “service mediation and orchestration” capability to help enable intelligent network service execution environments to interact with different core networks in a way that is transparent for the underlying technologies. This mediation capability is a key benefit of the next-generation intelligent network solution.

New and innovative services will be developed on next-generation application servers, while existing services on legacy nodes can be reused without reimplementation. Existing legacy services and next-generation services can also be combined into new offerings.

Operators have the option to adopt a smooth migration approach for their legacy services while also having the opportunity to start implementing new and innovative services on a flexible platform that will help them protect their investments.

An intelligent network service running on any of the execution environments connected to the service broker is available to the whole customer base, in a way that is independent from the serving network (mobile 2G/3G, PSTN, IMS, etc.) to which the subscriber is attached.

The availability of pre-built applications
The next-generation intelligent network solution also helps operators create or blend new services more rapidly, in a modular way. They can also take advantage of a catalog of pre-built applications or services provided by third parties. Pre-built applications can include such services as online charging, personal call manager, convergent VPN, mobile facilities, local number portability and much more.

By building new services or taking advantage of a service catalog, operators can lower their operations costs and can be much more flexible in blending their capabilities than they were in their legacy intelligent network environment.

High performance delivered
Because it can help provide a faster and less-risky migration to an all-IP environment, the next-generation intelligent network is a key to achieving sustainable advantage. The nextgeneration intelligent network solution can reduce maintenance costs because it is based on an open platform rather than a proprietary product. Operators may also achieve faster and less costly development of new services and service enhancements because the new intelligent network consolidates technologies and platforms, and standardizes the development environment.

In an era when network-based services will be the basis for technology and business innovation across all industry sectors, the next-generation intelligent network solution from Accenture can be a major force for achieving high performance.

Accenture Network Testing Services
Outsourcing the device testing process has been successfully demonstrated to be a highly efficient and cost-effective way to get products and services to market quickly, and to ensure they are working and reliable when they reach end-users.

Overview
The number of wireless devices, and the range of types and complexity, is increasing rapidly. The situation is causing operational and resource constraints for service providers, device manufacturers and content and application developers.

Yet, customer expectations for reliable access to increasingly complex data services and capabilities are continually rising. To respond, service providers need to build and deploy an increasing number of devices, and certify a growing number of applications on those devices. It’s a challenge that translates directly into extra operational complexity and cost.

To stay on the path to high performance even during challenging economic times, carriers must find innovative means to counter these pressures. Outsourcing testing is proving a highly efficient and costeffective way to ensure that products and services get to market fast, and are working and reliable when they reach end-users.

Accenture Network Testing Services is a testing capability with an integrated end-to-end device and service testing process that can lower a carrier’s operational costs of serving subscribers. The streamlined, efficient and costeffective solution includes an end-to- end device testing framework and software testing methodology, tools and processes; and an embedded software testing service with leading device manufacturers. Accenture provides the ability to test not only traditional handsets, but also the growing set of new networked devices.

Benefits
For service providers, device manufacturers and content and application developers, Accenture Network Testing Services delivers a number of important benefits:

Lower risk
The Accenture testing service can reduce the risk of failure for new products and services.

Reduced costs
Accenture can help companies improve product reliability and speed of launch, at lower cost.

Experienced resources
Accenture’s assets and resources include dedicated software and specialists in Accenture Labs around the world. These assets provide the scalability necessary to address the cost, reliability and speed-to-market business challenges of our diverse clients. The business-focused testing services are supported by reliable knowledge transfer and flexible business arrangements.

High performance delivered
Accenture's experience with Tier 1 clients in North America and Europe gives us the ability to design and deploy advanced and proven device testing tools and processes. We help clients drive high performance by rapidly and cost effectively delivering significant improvements in the reliability of products and services launched. Our experience includes work with:

SFR
SFR, the leading fixed/mobile alternative operator in Europe, introduces more than 100 new mobile phone models a year. By outsourcing management of phone testing to Accenture, SFR benefits from an industrialized device qualification process, and a unit cost reduction of 15 percent. Didier Sibille, SFR’s head of mobile phone device qualification testing, has said: “With Accenture we’ve found a partner to help us keep right in step with the fast pace of new service launches and maintain our competitive advantage.”

Mobile WiMAX operator
For a new mobile WiMAX operator, Accenture tested the first set of mobile WiMAX devices in the world—a total of 5 devices ranging from PC Cards to embedded laptops—and oversaw the roll-out of the first wireless operator WiMAX device certification lab in the U.S.

Accenture Solutions for Serving the Small and Medium Business Market
To support growth, providers are increasingly targeting the Small and Medium Business (SMB) market. Accenture can accelerate SMB market penetration for a provider by utilizing a proven approach and assets that bring new services and capabilities to market—rapidly, inexpensively and efficiently.

Overview
Today’s communications, electronics and high-tech companies that are journeying toward high performance with a growth agenda in mind are increasingly targeting routes to market for small and medium enterprises. As traditional enterprise markets become increasingly competitive and oversaturated, companies are struggling to grow revenues from their enterprise customer base. In response, they are looking downmarket to smaller and mid-size companies—those with anywhere from five to 1,000 employees, and annual revenues in the range of $5 million to $500 million.

There is good news and bad news when it comes to developing a strategic and operational plan for the small and medium business (SMB) marketplace. The good news is that a lot of these companies exist: more than 66 million of them globally, with estimated annual IT spending by 2009 of approximately $600B. The bad news: few communications and high-tech companies have the strategy, processes, controls and analytic capabilities in place to cope with the customer data management challenges they are encountering. And without those capabilities, a foray into the SMB marketplace could turn out to be only an expensive failure.

To help providers make the right decisions that drive high performance in the SMB marketplace, Accenture has developed a SMB Results Accelerator comprised of strategic and operational assets. The distinctive assets refined over the last few years include:

Strategic Assets

Targeted Marketing Engine
Companies must segment and understand the needs of their diverse SMB customer base before the companies can design and deliver tailored offerings that will best meet those customers’ objectives. The target marketing engine analyzes the existing customer base using statistical analysis to identify attractive customer segments. This segmentation along with the primary research and broader view of the SMB market is utilized to identify the “sweet spot” within the large marketplace.

Offering Portfolio
Most successful products and services are uniquely built for the SMB customers. To build such products and services, companies must deeply understand the SMB usage patterns, financial considerations and competitive offerings. We utilize our deep insights and benchmarks along all three dimensions to create a tailored and compelling product road map and relevant price points.

Channel Model
The SMB economic model necessitates careful design of direct and indirect channel mix and customer assignment. Accenture has utilized its benchmarks and sales related insights to design channel mix for several clients.

Partner Value Proposition Tool
As companies build the value proposition for SMB customers, equally important consideration should be given to the value proposition for partners; they play a vital role in influencing and selling to the SMB market. The value proposition tool, based on extensive partner research, enables companies to build partner value propositions into the broader channel and business plan.

Operational Assets

Operating Model Definition
With a deep understanding of the business economics, customer base, and a plan for the right offerings, Accenture has created and executed several operating models and routesto- market plans that enable the providers to profitably scale their SMB business.

Portal and Localization
An effective ingredient of successful SMB penetration is a company’s ability to directly interact with existing and potential customers and partners while creating a “localized” experience. Accenture has created multiple mobile and web portals focused on the SMB market. These assets can accelerate the efforts to increase awareness and revenue from SMB customers.

Hosting / Managed Services
Many SMBs have started utilizing a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model for consuming technology applications. Accenture tapped its global technical expertise to create a SaaS platform that can be rapidly customized for providers to launch new products and services for the SMBs. This SaaS platform has been utilized by clients to rapidly, inexpensively and efficiently bring managed services to market.

Benefits
With its deep set of strategic and operational assets, and the knowledge and experience of its industry practitioners, Accenture is already driving a host of important benefits for companies as they seek to grow profitable revenues by improving their ability to serve SMB customers. These benefits include:

Increased SMB market share
Accenture helped one client grow its SMB market share from 1% to 5% over a three-year period by developing and executing a strategic plan that covered customer segmentation, product roadmap, indirect channel and a customer service model.

Faster, less expensive launch of new products and services
Accenture worked with a provider to launch its SMB business in only five months by leveraging a SaaS platform and a unified communications solution.

Increased profitability of the SMB business unit
For one client, Accenture helped increase the profitability of its SMB unit by 10 percent over 2 years by creating and executing an effective routes-to-market plan.

High performance delivered
A major U.S. cable operator was looking for new areas of growth, one of which was the SMB marketplace. The company needed to enter this market quickly, yet lacked the skills and resources internally to develop new services at the speed required.

The operator worked with Accenture to assess the opportunity in the SMB segment, identify its “sweet spot” of customers, create an indirect sales model and develop an initial roadmap of services. Following this initial strategic analysis, messaging, mobility and hosted services emerged as key product areas for the U.S. cable operator to offer to its SMB customers.

To meet the cable operator's needs for rapid and cost-effective launch of services, Accenture leveraged its award-winning Service Delivery Platform, which enabled a factory approach for the standardized platform components. Accenture used a combination of onshore Innovation Centers and its network of global delivery centers in the United States, Italy and India.

This initiative has advanced the cable operator towards high performance in several ways. In only five months, the company was able to move from initial concept to commercial launch, beating all previous launch times for services of similar complexity. The company also realized an increase in wireless subscribers and additional bundled customers (wireless products combined with other products).

By using a standardized factory approach, the cable operator and Accenture could confidently enter into a fixed-price arrangement for the build and launch phase, which made good commercial sense for both parties.

The company has since contracted with Accenture for future service builds using this same platform and commercial arrangement.

The Accenture difference
Accenture's extensive experience, distinctive innovations and market-tested assets differentiate us in the marketplace.

Experience
We are a leading provider of services and solutions that help companies increase their ability to generate innovations and launch new products and services faster, with less cost and risk. For example, Accenture has more than 25 actual installations of our Service Delivery Platform worldwide.

We support some of the world's largest implementations for clients that include traditional telcos, as well as a growing base of non-traditional players including 4G companies and mobile virtual network operators. More than 25 million subscribers are being served—right now—by our solution.

Multiple industry analysts have recognized the Accenture Service Delivery Platform as an industry-leading solution. Accenture was ranked Number 1 in Market Share, Next-Generation Service Delivery Platforms, Worldwide, 2006–2008 (Source: Gartner, “Market Share: Telecom Operations Management Systems [BSS, OSS and SDP], Worldwide, 2006–2008,” May 5, 2009).

Accenture also received an overall “Strong" score from Gartner in their Next Generation Service Delivery Platform Scorecard for 2009. (Source: Gartner, "Dataquest Insight: Next- Generation Service Delivery Platform Market Overview and Strategic Scorecard for Vendors, 2009,“ April 3, 2009.)* In addition, Infonetics Research’s recent SDP vendor survey has also rated Accenture highly for management and for our SDP product roadmap.**

Accenture market-tested assets
Accenture offers an unparalleled set of global assets and resources to help develop and deliver advanced capabilities for service delivery. These include:

Accenture Global Delivery Network
The Accenture Global Delivery Network uses common methodologies, architectures and metrics to turn more than 50 global facilities staffed by 83,000- plus professionals into a massive engine for achieving high performance through cost-effective, high-quality solution delivery. The Communications Industry Solution Center in Milan, which is part of the delivery network, houses specialized resources and assets for the communications sector.

Innovation Centers
Our innovation centers in the United States and Europe identify cutting-edge applications for new and emerging technologies, support the development of demonstrations and prototypes, and assist clients with key technical skills. Some of our recent areas of focus include Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), mobility, IP services, digital home, next-generation consumer experience, service-oriented architecture (SOA), information management, technology infrastructures and open source technologies.

Accenture Technology Labs
Located in the United States, Europe and India, our worldwide Labs conduct advanced research and development in such areas as intelligent device integration, analytics and insight, human-computer interaction and systems integration.

Digiplug Content Factory
A recent Accenture acquisition, Digiplug enables access to a large number of content and context processing capabilities.

Accenture Product Development/ Lifecycle Management Solution
This innovative offering helps companies realize an increase in their return on innovation investment by allowing for faster product launches and streamlined processes.

1st place winner at 2008 CTIA Emerging Technology Awards
Accenture was awarded first place in the 4G Service Creation & Development category in this year's 2008 CTIA Emerging Technology Awards. This is the second time that CTIA, the leading North American wireless industry association, has honored Accenture for its innovative work in a number of categories representing the wireless industry.

Winner at 2007 IEC InfoVision Awards
The Accenture Service Delivery Platform Solution is the foundation for empowering service innovation at 3 Italia, a project that was a finalist in the IEC’s InfoVision Awards, 2007. “We’re pleased to recognize the joint work of 3 Italia and Accenture as an InfoVision finalist for their Digital Video Broadcasting-Handhelds (DVB-H) Solution,” commented IEC President John Janowiak.

Accenture is globally acknowledged as an outsourcing leader
For the second consecutive year, Accenture has been named number 1 in the Global Outsourcing 100 by the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (2008, 2009).

1st place winner at 2006 CTIA Emerging Technology Awards
In 2006, Accenture was awarded first place in the Enterprise ROI category at the CTIA Wireless Convention, further validating the benefits wireless customers may achieve in creating and managing data services through Accenture Communications Solutions featuring the Service Delivery Platform.

Copyright © 2010 Accenture All rights reserved.
Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.

Contact us
For more information about how Accenture's distinctive solutions and services can help you achieve high performance through less costly and more effective new-product development and service innovation capabilities, please contact:

Emmanuel Lalloz, Marketing Lead
emmanuel.lalloz@accenture.com
+33 4 92 94 88 15 (France) www.accenture.com/NPDI

About Accenture
Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 176,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$21.58 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2009. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

^*The Gartner Scorecard report is copyrighted 2009 by Gartner, Inc., and is reused with permission. The Scorecard report is a representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the report and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with a "Very Strong" rating. The Scorecard report is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

^**Infonetics Research, “SDP Deployment Strategies and Vendor Ratings: Global Service Provider Survey,” Shira Levine, October 2009