Smart Radio and Television Group customer business solution

I. Introduction

In recent years, the individual service market almost reaches saturation. The competition between the three major operators and Internet OTT service providers is fierce. That's why the number of cable television users of China Broadnet has continuously declined, and the growth of individual user broadband services has also slowed down. The entire individual service market has become a red ocean. China Broadnet has taken the initiative in seeking changes. Recently, it has continuously devoted itself to the group customer service market and has obtained remarkable results.

II. Continuous development of China Broadnet's group customer services

H3C has participated in and witnessed China Broadnet's development of group customer services. Its success lies in three aspects.

Firstly, the revenue of group customer services has rapidly increased, and its proportion in the total revenue has continuously increased. As the individual services continue to decline, such increases have laid a sound foundation for the overall transformation of China Broadnet to offer comprehensive services.

Secondly, subsidiaries of China Broadnet in different provinces have increasingly improved organizational structures for the operation and management of group customer services and paid more attention to the development of local high-value customers. Many subsidiaries have referenced or even benchmarked themselves against the organizational structure adopted by the three major operators in ToB market expansion. By doing so, they have established an operation and technical service system for group customer services covering provinces, cities and counties. Besides, they have set up professional teams and fully reflected the characteristics and requirements of the group customer service market in service management, performance evaluation, market strategies and internal service processes. During the development of government and enterprise customers, the companies have also gained experience and paid particular attention to specific customer groups with their advantages. China Broadnet realizes the competitive advantages of differentiation in subdivided markets and finds its way out of the fierce competition with the three major operators by creating group customer service brands within different subdivided service configurations.

Thirdly, China Broadnet has continuously improved its capabilities in offering localization services and expanding customer platforms for government and enterprise customers. This forms a virtuous cycle with the continuous increase in the market share of the radio and television group customer services, laying a foundation for China Broadnet to gain better customers and offer services with higher value.

Although China Broadnet has gained remarkable results in group customer services, the way forward remains zig-zag.

III. Challenges faced by the development of China Broadnet's group customer services

Group customer services, also known as government and enterprise ICT services, are essentially provided for government and enterprises to evolve or reform their IT systems and build their new competitive advantages during continuous development. These services can be offered by IT service providers. With diverse customer groups, the group customer services have fragmented, specialized and individualized requirements. Technically, the converged delivery of multiple information technologies is the most common service required by these customers. Therefore, it is difficult to expand the group customer service market despite its huge market potential.

Currently, China Broadnet is fully competing in the group customer service market. However, compared with other competitors, it has some obvious shortcuts, including:

Single services and homogeneous competition: The current group customer services are mainly leasing services of basic resources such as lines, which are highly homogeneous and prone to price wars. China Broadnet is rarely seen in the large-scale government and enterprise cloud service market. In general, innovative services account for a small proportion of group customer services of China Broadnet.

Shortcomings in infrastructure platforms: There is a big gap between China Broadnet's key infrastructure resources (such as IDCs and cloud platforms) and those of the three major operators. Therefore, China Broadnet frequently encounters barriers or even direct elimination when competing with them in major projects of some high-value customers. Such circumstances occurred when China Broadnet participated in the early and middle construction stages of provincial and municipal projects such as government cloud, industry cloud and smart city, which are caused by the problems mentioned above.

Insufficient understanding and experience of industrial informatization projects: Due to the insufficient understanding in the requirements put forward by informatization construction of high-value industries, especially the current requirements for digital transformation, the solutions and services provided by China Broadnet are not well-targeted and are less competitive for ICP projects of high-value group customers.

Insufficient innovation of ecological cooperation: Although China Broadnet attaches great importance to the ecological construction of group customer services, the overall ecological cooperation level still needs to be improved, especially the product-related business cooperation in specific projects. It has not integrated the technological capabilities of its manufacturer partners in the industry or made full use of ecological power. The three major operators, however, have an advantage in these aspects with regard to layout and accumulation.

Given the above challenges, H3C has effectively utilized its advantages to assist China Broadnet in the development of group customer services.

IV. H3C empowers the development of China Broadnet's group customer services from multiple dimensions

As an enterprise network leader in China, H3C has served the informatization of government and enterprise customers in China for years. Based on this advantage, H3C a high-quality partner recognized by informatization service operators in China.

When H3C entered the telecom operator service market in 2008, it was mainly engaged in ICT services for the government and enterprises. When China Telecom put forward its strategic positioning of "the leader of enterprise ICT services," H3C started to focus on developing the "business leading" brand services. H3C became an important vendor for China Telecom's government and enterprise services. They cooperated on product technologies and enterprise network market expansion. For example, H3C developed a full series of Navigator gateways according to the "business leading" government and enterprise access requirements of China Telecom and widely applied the gateways in the market. Currently, H3C has developed in-depth cooperation with the four major operators, including China Broadnet, on the ICT services of government and enterprises.

H3C can provide various support for China Broadnet in the early expansion of government and enterprise ICT services.

The first is H3C's empowerment for the construction of the basic resource platform. In the construction of a series of key infrastructures of China Broadnet, H3C provided the industry-leading design consultation and solutions, and helped China Broadnet build a cloud network bearing platform that meets the needs of government and enterprise ICT services and other services.

Taking the construction of a data center cloud platform as an example, H3C has high-quality full life cycle service capabilities for data centers in the industry, covering the end-to-end processes of project planning, process design, implementation, verification and O&M. It also has a wide range of large-scale data center service cases in various industries. Besides, H3C provided the overall solution of the cloud-based data center platform, and fully adapted to the needs of various services of China Broadnet. Like the multi-service, multi-site, hierarchical cloud platform solution for radio and television operators, this basic platform can fully support the group customer service innovation of radio and television operators on a cloud platform.

The second is H3C's empowerment for government and enterprise service solutions. For the ICT products and solutions of all kinds of government and enterprise customers, H3C can deeply cooperate with China Broadnet and even customize the development. H3C has over 30 years of experience in government and enterprise informatization and has been committed to the research and development of government and enterprise ICT products and technologies. The expertise can not only accelerate the improvement of the solution system of China Broadnet's government and enterprise ICT products, but also create more opportunities for the promotion of H3C's products.

The digital solution system of H3C covers three layers. The bottom layer is the digital infrastructure layer composed of the technical elements of products such as computing, storage, network and security. The middle layer is intelligent digital platform solutions based on technical innovations such as cloud computing and big data. The top layer is H3C's intelligent application solutions for all trades and industries based on its long-term in-depth industry insights and unbounded ecological cooperation. All these three levels can directly empower the government and enterprise ICT product and solution systems of radio and television operators. The empowerment focuses on the integration of intelligent applications and intelligent digital platform solutions to China Broadnet's group customer ICT products and solutions.

The third is the empowerment for project cooperation and operation. For major projects involving intelligent applications in high-value industries, such as government and enterprise cloud and smart city, H3C cooperated with China Broadnet on project operation, which is an innovative cooperation mode of China Broadnet. Through the collaborated operation of the major projects, China Broadnet can use H3C's digital capabilities to effectively compensate for its current shortcuts in the construction and operation of major projects.

The collaborated operation of major projects is the key point of the innovative ecological cooperation between H3C and China Broadnet. Taking the construction of government clouds and industry clouds that are popular these days as an example, the implementation of an industrial customer's cloud strategy needs to go through at least seven important links such as cloud strategy planning, cloud project design, cloud project implementation, cloud service migration, and O&M. The delivery of each link needs professional capabilities. However, China Broadnet lacks sufficient capabilities to complete the entire process at present. Besides, many cloud computing manufacturers are only capable of completing part of the process. China Broadnet needs an ecological partner who has full life cycle service capabilities of cloud computing, and H3C is the best choice.

The fourth is the empowerment for the training of ICT technical professionals. H3C adopts flexible and various forms to help China Broadnet conduct innovative training for its ICT technical professionals. Currently, the skills of internal technical talents of China Broadnet are restricted to fields such as digital television and IP broadband network. Continuous training of the talents in emerging digital technologies such as cloud computing, IoT, information security, new network and 5G should be enhanced so that they can undertake the innovation of group customer services. H3C has continued exchanging with China Broadnet's network customers through various forms. Therefore, H3C can conduct regional lecture training on technical solutions according to customers' needs. H3C university can also conduct in-depth, normative and systematic ICT technical training and necessary technical practice assessments. H3C also provides long-term IT management and ICT technical training for the other three major operators.

The fifth is the empowerment for industry market expansion. H3C and China Broadnet cooperated on project expansion of the industry market and give play to their advantages. H3C has successful application cases in some provinces. H3C has over 3000 market development personnel throughout China. It also has 20 industrial departments that are engaged in all government and enterprise industries such as government, education, health, finance, power, energy, transportation, and enterprises. China Broadnet has realized its marketing, technical service support and basic network resource coverage in provinces, cities, counties and towns. In addition, it has natural internal relations with local party and government groups, which allow it to expand services to group customers. Based on this complementarity of advantages, H3C and China Broadnet have successfully collaborated on important projects in several regions.

V. Cooperation case of H3C and China Broadnet on group customer services

In the first quarter of 2020, Shanghai Oriental Cable Network Co., Ltd. and H3C cooperated and won the project to construct the Shanghai e-government extranet by giving play to their collaborative advantages. The Shanghai e-government extranet constructed this time further promoted network interconnection, data sharing and application collaboration according to the state's requirements of "further promoting the construction of the e-government extranet and strengthening collaborative services through unified planning, unifying security strategy, and forming a unified, complete, secure and efficient e-government extranet as soon as possible." It also deepens the implementation of the network power strategy, leads economic and social development through informatization, and meets the new requirements of this information age for e-government network infrastructure. Besides, it strengthens "one network" for Shanghai government services and "one network" for city operation, improving the modernization level of urban governance.

As a local radio and television network operator, Shanghai Oriental Cable Network Co., Ltd. has the market advantage of having served the informatization of local government affairs for many years. H3C has also served the government industry for a long time. With its extensive knowledge of digital services in government affairs, it can provide mature and advanced solutions. In addition, H3C has extensive experience in e-government networks and government clouds, with a leading market share in these areas. The H3C team fully comprehended the construction requirements of the project, conducted an in-depth analysis, communicated and cooperated fully with Shanghai Oriental Cable Network, and presented an ideal solution for the e-government extranet utilizing the core technologies of SDN, segment routing, and comprehensive security protection, earning the recognition of government customers.

This project represents another successful practice in the field of high-value group customer services by H3C and China Broadnet. By combining complementary advantages and working cooperatively, H3C and China Broadnet can achieve a win-win in the high-value group customer service market.

VI. Conclusion

The group customer services of China Broadnet have promising prospects, especially in this 5G era. New demands from government and enterprise industries will emerge continuously. Relying on the innovative ICT services integrating 5G, China Broadnet will grow faster. H3C is willing to fully support our customers in realizing the great development of group customer services in the 5G era with our leading digital technologies and achieve a win-win.