They all want some of the action - but can they really do it

Capgemini Australia is pulling out all the stops to grab a potentially vast opportunity it has identified within the NBN: the massive OSS/BSS setup that will underpin the project’s operations as a nationwide telco wholesaler.  But while the firm’s new telco VP and Telstra alumnus Christophe Bur is bullish on winning a big slice of NBN IT system integration work – in the backend areas where he believes competitors lack Capgemini’s global weight of specific expertise – his designs on the Australian telco space extend well beyond the national network rollout “We’re very keen to win the NBN OSS/BSS [business]!” Bur told CommsDay. “Our advantage is the intimate knowledge of what a telco is, of how it really works.” Capgemini is set to leverage the accumulated know-how of its 8,000 staff in the telco space globally , plus partnerships with VMWare, Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle and others, to stake its claim.

Bur’s own appointment, fresh from a three-year stint as Telstra’s strategy, planning and operations executive director, is emblematic of the specialised resources the consulting and outsourcing outfit is bringing to bear on Australia.
The NBN has already proven lucrative for other consulting firms like McKinsey and KPMG, who between them produced the A$25 million implementation study. But Capgemini is confident of carving out its own niche. “McKinsey, Deloitte, Ernst and Young are working more on the management consultancy side... it’s a very high level point of view. A company like Capgemini is working on a more operation level – product definitions, customer experience for resellers and end-users, system integration,” said telecom, media and entertainment director Laurent Byé. “The business process will be a key point... and it has to be defined up front. We have a set of about a thousand businesses processes which are already defined, and we believe 30-40% of these are directly applicable to the NBN.”

NBN Co has said that it wants to put as much operational control as possible in the hands of service providers, and is already engaging with industry as it pushes out into largely uncharted waters with OSS/BSS on a national scale. Head of network operations Steve Christian has previously urged telco players themselves to contribute their expertise to the project. However, Bur was sanguine that there would be ample opportunity for professional consultancy in the same area. “I think [NBN Co] understand the magnitude of what they’re facing; given their startup nature, they can’t possibly tackle everything. They’ll need all the help they can get for the best results!” he said. “Having said that, the great expertise they’ve got internally makes them very capable of directing resources to achieve what they want... it’s a good model.”

BROADER OFFENSIVE: Of course, a Coalition victory in the next election could see the NBN in its current form scrapped – and the carefully-guarded status of the ongoing negotiations with Telstra is another unknown factor in the project’s future. But Bur sees huge opportunity in Australian telecoms for Capgemini with or without the national network, with the local market on the brink of an evolutionary change: telco players beginning to consolidate, while the shift to cloud computing continues unabated. “I wouldn’t have joined Capgemini simply on the basis of the NBN!” he said. “There are not many times in this industry where there’s a change of the magnitude of the cloud change – virtualisation, software as a service, and so on. And those are going to happen, no matter what.”