5G may be in the spotlight at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, but the pre-show festivities were all about digital transformation -- which, admittedly, is largely about 5G, but also about how to create new economic value, business-to-business services, big video and transform operations.
Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd held its Global Digital Transformation Forum over the weekend focusing on these themes and how operators can accelerate their digital transformations in the "age of all cloud." The big Chinese vendor used the forum to debut its end-to-end 5G solution, including wireless networks, bearer networks, core networks, chipset and customer premises equipment. (See Videos: Sneak Peek of Huawei's 5G Vision and Huawei Preps for a Massive (MIMO) MWC .)
Outside of the equipment news, however, the forum was designed to bring together industry participants -- including the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the World Bank and communications departments of multiple countries -- to discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with 5G and the digital transformation required to derive the most value from the next-generation network.
To keep the conversation going year-round, Hong Kong network operator HKT also announced the establishment of the Digital Transformation Practice Center (DTPC), a place for it to share the lessons learned from its own digital business transformation journey. The center will open in mid-2018 in Hong Kong, welcoming operators from across the globe, who are all at different stages of the transformation process, to benefit from its experiences.
HKT has worked with Huawei to complete the first phase of its 18-month, end-to-end digital business transformation project that encompassed service and operation transformation and infrastructure cloudification for what it's calling "customer-centric ROADS," or Real-time, On-demand, All-online, DIY, social experiences. The operator says that this project has allowed it to be flexible, agile and digital enough to launch new services, automate service delivery and further transform its business digitally.
HKT will share its best practices at the DTPC. But it will also show off its digital transformation products and services on Huawei's Cloud Open Labs and work towards completing the next phases of its own transformation journey.
— Sarah Thomas, Contributing Editor, Telco Transformation