Unleashing potential, part 2: take advantage of disruption

In my previous post, I talked about the gains to be made if you can unlock your potential. In this post I’d like to share a real example of the potential for trillion dollar markets and how to break down the technical and societal barriers to accessing billions of new customers.

Recently I was boarding a flight in Muscat after a family holiday when I heard a familiar ping — it was a text message from my bank asking if I had made a transfer of 30 pounds with Western Union. I replied no and immediately received a response to say thank you and that fraudulent activity had been suspected. I was invited to reply yes to cancel my card or no to not cancel it. I replied yes and received a final message saying a new card would be ordered. This is just one example of the 30 trillion A2P (application to person) messages that will be sent this year.

Of course, text messaging has been around for a long time but more and more CMOs like me are finding that it’s hard to get customers hooked on apps and that text messaging,  specifically A2P messaging, is becoming a universal platform for customer engagement. The numbers tell the story: we are all 30% more likely to respond to a text message, even one sent by a machine!

I’ve been helping several top social companies deploy their A2P strategies and have learnt that whilst digital marketing teams often kick start work in this area, the trend is towards using industry standard global mobile message platforms, managed by IT. The regulatory, security and quality factors means it’s not just a marketing activity anymore, which I can say even with my CMO hat on.

Take my Oman example – my bank needed to be able to have a message platform that could reach me globally, to be secure and not vulnerable to spam or hacks and to be 100% certain that the message was delivered to me and opened by me. As many know, regulation is changing in India and there are only a small number of providers including Tata Communications which are based on the SS7/SCCP standard, the only standard that can be used for messages coming into India.

At Microsoft’s Future Unleashed last week, I enjoyed hearing Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud & Enterprise Group at Microsoft speak of how Microsoft’s global hyper-scale public cloud platform is now delivering services from data centres in India and I’m thrilled that Tata Communications is part of that announcement.

The truth is that hyper-scale public clouds need hyper scale cloud enabled networks. In a SaaS (software as a service) world, the dynamic between the service and the network dramatically change. User experience becomes more dependent on the network delivering cloud apps as a service and we all want the flexibility to be able to pick and mix cloud services and not be tied to any one vendor. That’s why the network services industry is being so disrupted by cloud.

Similarly disruptive, it’s been projected that the IoT market will be worth 11 trillion dollars in 2020 with over 40% of that value coming from developing markets. I know that CIOs don’t want to be worrying about how the wearable or connected device that will drive new revenues for your company connects within your ecosystem. It’s the same as every time you make a mobile call, you don’t have to think about how to connect to another type of a device on another operator’s network.

For that reason it goes without saying I’m super excited that we’ve been working in stealth mode using LORA, the industry standard for low power wide area networks. Excitingly, our field trials between Delhi and Mumbai have been successful with some initial customer proof of concepts and we’re now working on delivering a universal connectivity platform for IOT in India as a managed service based on industry standards and not tied to wifi, 4G or GPRS. We are inviting customers with IoT projects to work with us to test it, end-to-end.

Imagine what that means in terms of possibilities for businesses in India? How would this technology unleash your potential? I would love to hear from any of you who have interesting use cases for your businesses that we can work on together, so please leave your comments below.

Read the third and final part of Julie’s Unleashing Potential series.