In a keynote speech at Telstra Wholesale’s Business.Connect17 event, Group Executive, Will Irving, spoke in depth about the focus for the Wholesale business over the coming years, with co-creation being at the heart of the work with customers and partners.

Telstra Wholesale is a truly unique unbranded channel, one that we believe can help you capture and create value for your own customers. As we progress our transformation from telco to tech-co, at Telstra Wholesale we recognise that co-creation with our customers is central to our success, as well as yours. That means working with you to develop the applications and services you need to make your business even more successful, to help you grow by selling more to your own customers.

Co-creation is happening now and we have already taken steps to look at how we can work with you and enable your business in three core areas.
 

Leveraging our assets

With over 230,000km of fibre and over 400,000km of global wholesale undersea cable, we’re working with you to bring the capability this infrastructure enables to the fore so that you can leverage our assets more effectively. Over the past year we’ve worked with a number of customers to bring to life our Data Centre Interconnect and Wireless Ethernet products. From customer ‘ride-on’ programmes, through to co-creation design, DevOps, agile delivery and backlog prioritisation, this has been a significant change in the way we develop and launch products to market.

One of our most obvious and core strengths is the mobile network, which has seen strong growth with a number of partners, combined with the recent launch of Belong, running on the Wholesale platform. As we consider the decline of the fixed line business, mobile is at the core of our connectivity layer. We’re looking at how we can do a better job of growing not only the wholesale business and mobile platform, but deliver a more competitive option to MVNO customers.
 

Customer experience

Collaboration is at the core of making sure we offer your customers the best experiences on our network. Great lessons have been learned around the platform challenges experienced in the past and we’ve invested heavily to make sure we can deliver those great experiences with a new mobile interface system, for example.

We also have a very big programme of digitisation, with Telstra announcing a $1bn investment and a significant sum of that allocated to Telstra Wholesale. We recognise the competitive intensity we see in the retail business is also evident in wholesale. We need to make sure we continue to invest in our platforms to enable you to be more efficient and do more.

Strategic value over the top

While more capital is being invested into the wholesale market, the top line is not growing. We need to change that dynamic and look at the value and role of Telstra Wholesale within that. With applications and services a focal point for helping us to add value to your business, keeping us awake at night is the need to understand the enablers that will help boost that top line.

To address this, we have introduced new innovative businesses to our portfolio. One of these new businesses is Neto, an e-commerce platform that enables retailers to sell across channels. It is now a resale opportunity for our customers. It is just one example of how we are exploring ways to add more value to the network layer, which we continue to develop over the course of the next year.

In addition to this, our leadership team dedicates one afternoon a week to reviewing the work we do with our customers to understand what we can improve. I know some of our customers have also come along to these sessions, which have provided great insights to both parties and are a true example of co-creation.

There’s never been a more exciting time in the Wholesale business as the demand for what we do continues to accelerate. There is a big opportunity for us to co-create with you to grow the value of what you do with your customers and give you more reasons to say that we are your provider of choice.