Dean Bubley and Benoît Felten join Gary Kim on the PTC’19 Center Stage.
Service providers cannot do everything anymore and they must make choices, claimed Dean Bubley of Disruptive Analysis at the recent PTC’19 Annual Conference. Most telcos will have to pick one to five areas where they can be viable platforms, and partner for everything else, Bubley argued.

“Telcos have been in a weird place for 10 years, between pipes and platforms, and they must decide which they want to be,” expressed Benoît Felten of Diffraction Analysis. “You can’t be everything to everybody.”

Telcos cannot sustain business models like global app providers, Felten maintained. App providers hope to earn USD .50 a year from billions of customers; telcos must plan to earn USD 30 to 35 a month from possibly millions of customers, explained Felten. Those models are almost mutually exclusive.