Partner Playbook

Partnerships are nothing new to the communications industry. For years, service providers have forged strategic partnerships with device manufacturers, content distributers and other service providers in order to ensure the quality and continuity of their services. But the recent increase in the number of players in the market - devices, services and communications and content channels - have caused service providers to look to more partnerships in order to stay innovative, agile and competitive.

At Amdocs, we surveyed a group of service providers, over-the-top (OTT) vendors and device manufacturers about their approach to partnering. One thing was clear from the outset: All players in our industry see partnering as strategically important and expect its importance to grow.
But seeing partnering as important and making partnerships successful are two different things. Who should I partner with, what are they looking for and what assets do I have to offer? And what about OTT? All of these questions were addressed in our survey.

Key findings include:

• All three groups say strategic partnerships are important to business growth and that importance is expected to grow over the next three years, with OTT vendors seeing the largest growth in importance (54% today to 66% in three years’ time)
  
  
• 70% of service providers see OTT players as an opportunity, rather than a threat
  
  
• There is clear consensus on the value of service provider brand strength, network quality and customer data, but the value proposition of other service provider assets needs to be developed
  
  
• Most players are prepared to expose core assets to their partners, but there is still a challenge as all players want to retain the critical customer relationship and customer experience

​​