Traditional South African voice services are under threat, especially from international over-the-top (OTT) players like WhatsApp.
So said Pieter van der Merwe, executive for business transformation and solutions business at Telkom, during a Q&A session at ITWeb Digital Economy Summit 2015 at The Forum, Bryanston, this morning.
"Telkom's voice services are not under threat from local players, but we are feeling pressure from international operators," Van der Merwe said.
Major global tech players are increasingly providing OTT voice services that run over data networks.
Since Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp in February 2014, both companies have strengthened their market positions. By November 2014, Facebook Messenger had 500 million monthly active users to WhatsApp's 600 million, largely due to Facebook's decoupling of the Facebook Messenger mobile app from the Facebook mobile app.
Tencent's WeChat is also closing in on half a billion monthly active users, and apps such as Kakao, Line, and Viber Media have hundreds of millions of users.
"The question now is 'how do we bring voice prices down?'" Van der Merwe asked. "We invest about R5 billion in infrastructure every year but the competition is not coming from within but from international players."
He admitted local players were not doing enough to invest in digital technologies to face off the new threat and he believes digital transformation can be the answer.
In his presentation, Van der Merwe explained that digital transformation is the re-alignment of, or new investment in, technology and business models to more effectively engage digital consumers at every touch point in the customer experience.
He pointed out that digital migration begins with understanding a company's need for a digital strategy and continues as an evolving process of incorporating digital, converged solutions into a company's business operations, while constantly monitoring progress and adjusting processes and strategies accordingly.
According to Van der Merwe, the enhancement of the customer experience to drive top line revenue and secure an organisation's continued existence is driving digitisation.
He noted that a digitally-enabled enterprise has the ability to mine through data in real-time to deliver intelligent, predictive analytics and business decision-making information while engaging with the customer.
Share