Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - An update from CSG

Digital transformation is reshaping industries across the Asia-Pacific region. At the forefront of this shift is CSG, a global technology provider focused on helping clients navigate the demands of an increasingly interconnected world.

Ian Watterson, Senior Vice President and Head of Asia Pacific for CSG, has been instrumental in expanding the company's presence and impact throughout the region. Speaking from his base in Brisbane, Watterson described his extensive experience in the technology sector and the company's expanding footprint across countries including India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand.

"I've worked for CSG for about 15 years now, originally starting my career in the UK with various tech companies," he explained. "I used to run CSG's Latin American business and then North America, working primarily in the telecoms division but also across financial services and other sectors. Now, I've been here in Asia Pacific for about 11 years."

CSG's core objective is to empower businesses - from telecommunications and financial services to healthcare - to deliver world-class customer experiences. Watterson outlined how this is achieved through technology investment and close collaboration with clients. "A great way to think about us is that we basically empower companies, be they telcos, financial services businesses or healthcare, to have amazing customer experiences. We do that through SaaS-based platforms that we develop, and we have a huge investment in R&D," he said.

The company looks to address the full customer journey, from experience management to monetisation. "At our heart, we're a technology business," Watterson said. "We develop SaaS-based public and private cloud platforms. We empower ecosystems and monetisation, right down to the network edge for our telco customers, doing things like call provisioning and control."

With a workforce of around 5,000 staff globally, CSG has established a strong and growing business in Asia Pacific, Watterson said, with just under 40 per cent of the company's workforce based in the region. "It's an exciting time to be part of CSG. We're growing significantly, doing a number of acquisitions, and investing heavily in technology."

The Asia-Pacific region presents unique challenges and opportunities for digital transformation, especially with the rollout of 5G and the acceleration of business digitisation. "APAC is approaching this next phase of digitisation through significant transformation. We're working with a number of very large tier one telcos in Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, India, and even Mongolia to speed up digitisation," he noted.

A key element of CSG's approach is co-innovation with customers. "We are absolute experts in co-innovation. We bring them into the digital age through deep expertise in public cloud, SaaS-based businesses, and migration from legacy on-premise to private, hybrid or public cloud solutions," Watterson explained.

He also highlighted the importance of open, modular systems, built on industry standards. "A lot of our solutions are built on TM Forum standards, so we have open modular systems with APIs, enabling plug-and-play flexibility to help our customers digitise on their journey," he said.

The advent of 5G, said Watterson, is transforming the telecommunications landscape, particularly in the enterprise market. "5G is really interesting. It has brought a revolution in the way service providers look at their markets, both from a consumer and an enterprise standpoint," he said, emphasising the potential for low-latency, high-capacity data offerings and innovative enterprise services enabled by 5G's capabilities.

He explained that CSG is working with customers to develop systems for enterprise bundles and network slice charging, in turn enabling new services and business models: "We're co-innovating with a lot of our customers on how to develop their systems to support enterprise bundles, to bring more services to market."

Recent product launches are central to this strategy. Watterson highlighted CSG Encompass, a solution designed to help telecom providers meet the challenges of complex order management and monetisation in the 5G era. "CSG Encompass is a fabulous new approach to the enterprise market, closely linked to 5G. When you bring in a 5G network and look to monetise and take advantage of the enterprise marketplace, you really need a product catalogue-driven approach," he said.

He explained that Encompass uses open, standards-based digital architectures to bridge gaps between customer-facing systems, product catalogues, billing, and network activation. "Encompass solves that by using TM Forum standards and open digital architectures to create flow-through from complex orders, eliminating errors and enabling providers to bundle, re-bundle, price, and drag-and-drop offers."

The platform, he said, cuts time-to-market for telcos, improves customer satisfaction, and increases profitability. "We're allowing telcos to experiment in new markets like SMBs and bring innovative new solutions to market rapidly," Watterson said.

Another pivotal move has been CSG's acquisition of Digit Systems to strengthen its catalogue and order management offerings. "We spent a long time trying to find the right company to acquire, because a lot of platforms out there weren't truly modular or open," Watterson said. "We wanted to be care agnostic, open, modular, and cloud-ready, offering hybrid solutions for evolving customer needs."

After acquiring Digit, the technology was quickly integrated into the Encompass platform. "Digit was really the most innovative platform we found in the world, and now they're a critical part of Encompass, providing that core flexible catalogue," he said.

Watterson believes this integration marks a step-change for CSG's customers, offering the latest in product architecture for digital businesses. "Every time we show that to customers, they say, 'I wish we'd seen this six months or a year ago,' and we say, 'We only bought them last year!' We've brought them to market as fast as we can and are evolving the products rapidly," he said.

Looking ahead, CSG is determined to maintain its leading position. "We really have the market leading product in terms of the latest, freshest, best-architected product catalogue and order management on the market," Watterson added.

Ultimately, CSG's focus remains on helping businesses keep pace with the changing demands of digital ecosystems. "We enable that B-to-B-to-X experience, that multi-layered experience that's necessary for the enterprise marketplace and integrates with 5G," he concluded. "It's very exciting, very innovative, and great to be part of it."