As operators shift from telco to techco, traditional billing models are no longer enough. Expanding into IoT, fintech, gaming and other partner-driven ecosystems requires monetization platforms designed for complex, multi-party business models. In this interview, John Byrne, director of strategy at Netcracker Technology, explains why unified product catalogs, automated revenue sharing and flexible pricing are critical to supporting next-generation digital services.
Byrne also examines how agentic AI is moving beyond the hype cycle to deliver measurable revenue impact. From intelligent sales automation and hyper-personalized offers to accelerating enterprise renewals with telco-grade CPQ, AI-driven agents are helping operators identify new value opportunities and shorten sales cycles.
He also connects network orchestration, monetization and customer experience. When operators gain real-time visibility into network performance and service assurance, they can confidently monetize against service-level agreements and deliver differentiated experiences. Listen to the full interview to learn how Netcracker is aligning these capabilities to support operator growth.
Linda Hardesty:
Hi, everybody. My name's Linda Hardesty. I'm Chief Analyst for Communication Technologies at Fierce Network, and I'm here today with John Byrne, Director of Strategy at Netcracker Technology. Hi, John.
John Byrne:
Hi, Linda.
Linda Hardesty:
So we're going to talk a little bit about Netcracker for a few minutes. First, as communication service providers expand beyond traditional connectivity into digital services, partnerships, and business-to-business models, what capabilities should they expect from their monetization platforms to handle complex multi-party business models?
John Byrne:
This is an interesting area because, of course, we know that operators are frequently talking about this push from telco to techco and the notion that the traditional segments of voice and data and messaging are obviously still very important, but they take you only so far. And as we look at some of the emerging capabilities coming onto the networks, they're very eager to evolve beyond that to be able to do things like support ecosystems of partners and build higher value use cases. What they find oftentimes is that traditional ways of doing business in terms of billing and BSS are not always fit for purpose in that if you think about traditional services, it's basically a one-to-one engagement where the operator is providing you a voice service or you're providing a data service.
And it's basically on a one-to-one basis. When you think about this in the terms of an IoT application or in FinTech or gaming or that sort of thing where you have partners involved, those types of challenges make the challenge really complex for multi-sided ecosystems where you need to have partners on board that you need to be able to onboard and offboard seamlessly. You need to make sure they're compensated and paid for. All that makes things really complex. It's a fundamentally different approach to monetization than we've seen in the past. In order to be able to do that, you need a couple of really important ingredients.
One of them being product catalogs that are robust enough so that it's not just about a telecom operator services, but an operator needs to be able to partner with partner services for, let's say for example, a gaming company. All of those types of services need to be included in product catalogs seamlessly so that they come together. That's easier said than done, but that's part of the challenge is having a unified product catalog that can support all those different types of partners. And then there's a fundamentally different way of billing and revenue sharing. If you're doing revenue sharing, you obviously need to do that accurately.
You need to be doing all the billing and settlement that goes with that. More often than not, as we evolve into the future, there's going to need to be a larger element of automation that goes into that because it's going to be less practical for a human to make sure that all that is happening accurately. So there's going to be a higher level of automation. It's not going to be about voice and data services that you're billing by the month or by the megabyte, it's going to be about a different model that you have for a gaming company and a very different model that you might have for a FinTech application and that sort of thing. So flexibility in terms of the pricing models that go into that are going to be very important.
Linda Hardesty:
All right. Let's talk about artificial intelligence for a second. How are some of the emerging agentic use cases helping operators to drive revenue growth?
John Byrne:
Yeah, this is a really interesting area because, obviously, there's been a lot of hype over the past two or three years, which started out around generative AI and has evolved into an approach around agentic AI. From a Netcracker perspective, even before we had the correct language around agentic, I think we were doing a lot of things that really were agentic. The market is actually coming to us in a lot of ways. There's a number of areas in terms of revenue growth that we're focusing on right now where agentic is really important.
One of them being intelligent sales automation where you have multiple agents that go out and do their jobs around identifying usage patterns and network behaviors, understanding deeply what a customer has done in the past to anticipate what they're going to need in the future. So then you get into this notion of hyper-personalization where traditionally, as I said earlier, it's been a situation where it's one service that you're offering to a customer and now you have the ability to really understand what a customer is wanting and through agentic, be able to spin up the network assets that you need to deliver to that customer to deliver what they're looking for.
We're seeing other areas around sales automation where you can actually use agentic to speed up the... If you think about a large enterprise that's up for renewal, and sometimes that contract negotiation process can take months, by analyzing past behaviors, by analyzing usage, by understanding what it is that are the value levers for that contract, you can maximize the revenue that you're getting into a renewal, but also accelerate the process of spinning up the marketing collateral that you need to go into a customer with to get the renewal, that sort of thing.
Part of that, and this plays to the Netcracker strengths, is CPQ. Telco-grade CPQ that really can get into configure pricing quote, sorry, is really important to that. And it's important that you have telco-grade CPQ and not sort of generic CPQ that you see out there that are multi-industry. The unique requirements of the telecommunications industry means that the CPQ needs to be robust enough to support the peculiarities of this industry.
Linda Hardesty:
What is the connection between network orchestration, customer experience, and revenue growth, and how does Netcracker integrate all these together for operator business success?
John Byrne:
I think this is an area where Netcracker is uniquely well-positioned due to the depth and breadth of our portfolio because I think for the longest time, those things that you mentioned around network and monetization and customer experience have kind of been in their own little silos. You have the OSS and the network operations part of the business over here, and then you have monetization over here. But the reality is, as we talk about new use cases, you need to be able to have network performance that you can have visibility over and that you can have assurance over to make sure that what you're delivering is getting to the customer.
If you don't have good inventory on where your network resources are, then you're not going to be able to, on the other side, monetize for that because it's ultimately getting to a point where you need to be able to deliver to an SLA. That has not traditionally been how, for example, mobile operators have done business, but now increasingly because of the weapons in our arsenal, you have the ability to do that. When you can see that you're delivering what you said you're going to deliver, you can monetize better. And all of those come together as opposed to being in silos, that's kind of where the magic is.
And then on the third leg of the stool here being customer experience, so you have monetization, but if you want to make sure that through the magic of agentic AI that you're getting a deeper understanding of customers, there's an element of CRM that goes into that when you combine billing and charging and all of the monetization assets into understanding what customers' requirements are on the CRM and the customer experience side. When you put those three legs of the stool together, that's where the magic is in a lot of ways.
Linda Hardesty:
Well, thank you so much, John, for chatting with us today. I appreciate it.
John Byrne:
You're welcome. Thank you.