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E-Business Solutions For The Telecommunications Industry: January 2001
E-Business Solutions For The Telecommunications Industry: January 2001
E-Business Solutions For The Telecommunications Industry: January 2001
Telecommunications Industry
January 2001
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e-Business Trust Solutions
for the Telecommunications Industry
The purpose of this paper is to discuss e-business trust solutions for the
telecommunications industry. This paper will begin by defining today's
telecommunications industry, and reviewing the current trends and the
resulting initiatives being implemented by its members. Next, this paper
will outline the business and financial upside of becoming an e-Telco, and
how security infrastructure technology can leverage those returns. Finally,
it will provide examples of secure e-business solutions that have been
implemented by Entrust, the global leader in trusted e-business,
and the resulting benefits for the leading telecommunications companies that
chose them.
- New entrants are creating and packaging services that merge the ingredients
of both communications and information technology (IT) and blur their
boundaries.
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Trends Impacting the Industry
Five key trends are impacting the telecommunications industry today:
- The rapid evolution of the Internet: According to the June 12, 2000 issue
of Fortune Magazine, it is expected that by the year 2003, 70% of the U.S.
population will be using the Internet and per Forrester Research, business-to-
business (B2B) revenue will approach $1.3 trillion. Interest in the Internet
already spans across all customer markets and one consistent concern is
security, regardless of the customer's size or degree of activity.
- The demand for data: By next year, the demand for data is predicted to be two
times that for voice (Business Week, January 10, 2000). One of the more
pervasive examples of that demand is the customer's pursuit of high speed
Internet access.
- Demand for services: Business customers want to focus on their core business, and
procure outside services for non-strategic functions. In addition, both businesses
and consumers want to be empowered to have access to services
and information when it is convenient to them, e.g. ordering and order status.
- Develop and/or package targeted "killer" applications to further drive Internet use
and associated revenues
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- Sell services across all markets, prioritizing and packaging them differently for
each market
- Develop and provide access services to support the user wherever s/he is,
whatever communications device s/he is using, for voice and/or data
- Attract and retain more customers by improving customer service and aggressively
cross selling
Leveraging the Internet will be key, since as predicted by the Gartner Group, the
volume of business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions will reach $380 billion by 2003,
and B2B will exceed $7 trillion by 2004.
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Transaction Value
As the above figure graphically illustrates, the need for trust increases as a telecom
company and its customer mutually value the substance of a transaction.
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The Financial Benefits in Being an e-Telco
If a company can provide this trusted environment, not only will business
transactions be secure, but trusted e-business can:
- Customer Care - On-line order management, customer self-services, help desk and
technical support can dramatically decrease cost from over $700 for a field visit to
$100 for a call center contact to $7.50 for a Web site interaction (per Forrester).
- Billing- One large global Telco has stated that services such as electronic billing
and payment allow it to save $1 for every bill the customer pays on-line (per
PricewaterhouseCoopers).
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All of these savings add up. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) evaluated a residential
Telco with 10 million lines and a cost base of $5 billion. The potential savings were
estimated to be as follows:
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Security Solutions for the
Telecommunications Industry
Security solutions provide telecom companies with the capability to reap these
business and financial benefits in securely managing e-business relationships with
each employee, customer, partner or vendor in accordance with the policies,
processes and procedures that are unique to its business. Security infrastructure
products allow Telcos and ISPs to offer more secure and personalized access to an
infinite variety of applications and services, whether for internal or external use. This
scalable infrastructure provides access, authentication and authorization capabilities
with minimal administrative intervention, supporting rapid deployment of new
services to a constantly changing population of users. In summary, the
implementation of this infrastructure can facilitate the generation of additional
revenue, reduction of operating costs and the creation of competitive advantage.
Without it there is no trust and e-business potential is very limited.
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In summary, the getAccess solution provides the means for a Telco to do business on the
Internet more quickly and with greater flexibility, to support new and legacy
applications and services, and to do so for customers, employees and partners, as it
expands its business globally. The getAccess software also addresses a fundamental pain
for many telecom companies - the difficulty of integrating a vast array of backoffice
legacy systems.
Personalized e-Business Relationships-
Acquire, Retain and Grow the Customer Base
RELATIONSHIP EVOLUTION
Role = Prospect Role = Qualified Prospect Role = Buyer Role = “Gold” Customer
The Entrust/PKI™ software allows a telecom company to encrypt, digitally sign and
authenticate electronic transactions across applications, in a heterogeneous environment,
with best-in-class certified security. Entrust's managed PKI provides a cost-
effective, managed and easy to use solution that automates security-related processes
within the Telco organization. With the Entrust/PKI solution, users don't need to know
anything about security, as the PKI operates transparently on their desktops. Entrust/PKI
manages it for them.
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In regard to implementation, the Entrust/PKI solution can be flexibly deployed to meet
Telco requirements across multiple applications including those for e-mail, the Web, Web
remote access/Virtual Private Network (VPN), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP),
desktop and wireless. In addition, the Entrust/PKI solution adheres to open standards,
providing a single seamless interoperable security layer. Entrust/PKI solutions offer best-
of-breed security that is easy to use, with single sign-on for all applications, even the
operating system, from any workstation. Having a PKI security infrastructure means that
Telco/ISP offerings such as VPN, e-mail and wireless now provide the trusted
environment required to conduct B2B, B2C and enterprise e-business.
For telecom companies that want to fully e-enable their businesses, Entrust
provides an integrated security infrastructure solution, "Telco Trust in a Box", with all
the benefits of single sign-on portal management plus certified PKI security. Features of
this robust, scalable, interoperable and easy to implement system include integrated
enrollment and user management. As a result, users will only need to enroll once, and
based on their privileges, will have access to all designated Telco resources, whether they
are protected by Entrust PKI technology or other methods such as password. This
integrated solution provides the means for a telecom company to rapidly achieve both
the business and financial benefits of trusted e-business using a feature rich, more
secure, open infrastructure to support both new and legacy applications for B2B, B2C
and enterprise requirements.
4. Entrust.net Inc.
- Offer Web and Wireless security from your Web site in less than two weeks
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5. Entrust@YourService™
Non-repudiation of transactions
Confidentiality of sensitive information
Data integrity, transaction audit trails
High reliability and availability
Single point of entry and single sign on access to content and applications
Dynamic generation of a personalized menu in the user's language of choice
Rapid time to market by allowing diverse applications to share a common authentication,
authorization and administration infrastructure.
Flexible deployment and evolution of e-Telco services that plug into a single entrust
security infrastructure
Flexible administration to allow the delegation of resource and user control deep into
lines of business
Reduced deployment and administration costs for a managed security system that is
scalable to millions of users and interoperable with other security solutions
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Entrust Solutions Deployed in the
Telecommunications Industry
Entrust has significant experience providing secure e-business solutions to
a variety of telecommunications companies. Telecommunications companies around the
world have relied on Entrust products and services. The following examples
illustrate how Entrust portal management (getAccess) and PKI have been deployed in
telecommunications companies.
The Challenge:
The Solution:
As a first step, the company recognized that it needed to provide customers with a way
to order products and services on-line. Further, it needed to organize its Web sites
according to customer needs and perceptions rather than according to the company's
organization chart. An indispensable element of this first step was to provide customers
with a single point of access to the application portfolio of the consolidated Web sites.
The solution was to provide each customer, consumer or business, with a customized
entry Web page to its consolidated Web sites. Entrust provided the
foundation for this one-to-one customer interaction solution based on the getAccess
offering.
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Consistent look and feel was only the first step. The company embarked on a program
of continuous adaptation to its customer's needs by launching a variety of e-commerce
capabilities. The company was able to restructure its interactions with customers and
provide each with a more secure, consolidated, and personalized set of applications. The
following table shows the range of applications available to each subscriber:
The Benefits:
This entire effort resulted in a variety of benefits to the company and its customers. The
consolidated Website quickly became one of the top 5 most visited sites on the Internet
in the company's geographic territory. Moreover, each customer who visited the site
spent significantly more time at the new Website than they did at the former collection
of Web sites. The company's customers have shown a marked preference for this form
of interaction. For this reason, the customer loyalty benefits of this new capability are
obvious. The cost savings that resulted from eliminating duplicate computing resources
were considerable. This translated into dramatically lower customer transaction costs.
Over the long term, the provision of a single point of entry has provided a mechanism to
collect data that will be used to provide better customer service and to help cross sell
more products and services. Finally, the company's brand was strengthened in relation to
its competition. Currently, the company's Entrust infrastructure supports
hundreds of thousands of users, growing to a planned user community of 5 to 10
million in the next few years.
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Case #2: Leveraging Trust for Competitive Advantage
The Challenge:
The specific requirements for this offering included secure remote access, secure remote
office connectivity, and secure extranet connectivity. Its customers needed remote
desktop access to corporate LANs using dial-up, ISDN and broadband. They also needed
to have access to high bandwidth connections between remote offices and existing
corporate networks. Finally, these customers needed to support access to their networks
by their customers, partners, and suppliers. Security and encryption were basic dominant
requirements for all of these forms of access.
The Solution:
During the planning process prior to launch of this VPN service, the company researched
virtually every PKI product on the market. In addition, since it had extensive IT and
security expertise, it also considered developing its own PKI infrastructure. After
thorough analysis, the company opted not to develop internally and chose Entrust over
all other external alternatives, since Entrust/PKI was the only solution that could
support the growing scalability requirements since the automated key lifecycle
management features of Entrust/PKI allow it to scale to millions of users. In other words,
as users' keys expire, the ability of Entrust/PKI to automatically generate new keys
transparently to the end user was an important benefit. As a result, since this process
was automated and did not require any end user intervention, the company was able to
avoid the cost of building and maintaining a key management call center and its
supporting computing resources.
The Benefits:
Customer response to this VPN offering has been extremely strong. Since the
introduction of this secure VPN service, the company has consistently exceeded its
internal goals for deploying new customers. This service has also positioned the
company for strong growth as VPN continues to be perceived as the best alternative to
private networks.
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Case #3: E-Enabling Business for Easy, Efficient Operations
The Challenge:
The Solution:
The company chose Entrust for a variety of reasons. First, it had a crucial
need to get to market immediately across Europe and Asia. It decided, after evaluating
Entrust and several other vendors' offerings, that the Entrust/getAccess
solution was not only functionally complete, but could also be deployed rapidly. It also
made a detailed examination of the references provided by all vendors and concluded
that other Entrust customers were highly satisfied with both the
technology and support. Entrust was able to integrate its products into a
large scale IBM operating environment in a way that fully satisfied this company's
requirements.
The Benefits:
Ultimately, this strategy will allow this telecom company to support the e-business
information needs of customers, employees, and business partners. This company
expects that over 150,000 of its staff will access applications over its intranet. Eventually,
this system will also support 500,000 customers and suppliers as well as over 1 million
consumers on an extranet. Over the longer term, tens of millions of the company's
wireless customers will also use this solution to access various business applications over
a variety of access devices including Wireless Application Protocol-enabled (WAP)
phones.
The Challenge:
A major North American provider of business data services wanted to offer a variety of
customer service applications on-line for its customers. These B2B applications, which
would be made available in phases, included bill presentment and payment,
collaboration, reporting, account management, order status, inventory, and trouble
ticketing. All of these various applications were hosted, however, on a variety of servers
such as Lotus Domino and Weblogic. An even bigger challenge for the company was the
need to cutover Phase I of its applications in less than six weeks time.
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The Solution:
The company selected getAccess, obtaining proof of concept while preparing for the
Phase I implementation. getAccess provided a feature rich infrastructure that would
support all the company's applications and the variety of servers in its environment.
When Phase I went live, each business customer of this company then had the option of
receiving and paying its bill over the Internet. The applications also allowed customers to
order more telecommunications services. In addition, the getAccess solution enabled
individuals in the end customer's organization to obtain a complete picture of its
company's use and interactions with the company. This capability was facilitated by a
set of reporting applications that are presented to the authorized user.
The Benefits:
Cases #5 and #6: Enhanced Customer Loyalty and Scalable Customer Care
Entrust PKI/PMI products have also permitted several large North American
telecommunications companies to scale to meet the demanding needs of consumers by
allowing them to access to their internal systems. For example two of these companies
have implemented getAccess configurations that will support over ten million
consumers. The applications that will be provided to consumers include customized
portal navigation menus, self-service user registration, profile management, and the
ability to present billing on-line. In the case of both of these companies, Entrust
was able to meet stringent standards of scalability and performance. In
addition, these companies both believe that extending their infrastructures to consumers
has enhanced customer loyalty.
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