The mobile network operator Kyivstar is ready to share its resources and services with the business to create new applications and services for different models of cooperation, including partnership.
“As an operator, we are a very closed system. This is largely due to the fact that for us any type of partnership is a very high risk. We are a large business and, attracting a small partner, we take risks. Therefore, for many years we were caught in ourselves… But It seems to me that on a new evolutionary stage – IT and digital – we need to open up,” Kyivstar President of Alexander Komarov said at a conference in Kyiv on Thursday evening.
According to him, at present, the mobile communications market has a huge entrepreneurial potential, with which large companies are unable to fully cooperate due to the high bureaucracy of processes. At the same time, this area is very attractive in terms of the speed of generating ideas and their usefulness for the industry as a whole.
“We have such a concept – Open operator. Now we have a very fashionable story: an open API bank, when, in the long run, the exchange of impersonal customer information allows building additional business on top of basic banking processes and services. We have approximately the same vision for the mobile business,” Komarov said.
He also recalled that earlier Kyivstar tried to attract third-party developers at the level of accelerators, selected even several interesting projects, but “strangled them with its red tape.”
“We have studied the most popular areas for business partners, prepared certain technological API stacks for them, and in principle we are ready at the pilot level in the next six months to open and see if potential partners succeed in coming up with some business models or business services that would be of interest to our clients,” Komarov said.
He said that the operator’s openness for partner companies means the ability to technologically connect to the network and anonymized data of the operator, as well as the presence of an IT sandbox where ideas and products can be tested at the stage of their development.
According to him, Kyivstar is ready to consider various models of cooperation, including partnership. “The question of dividing money always arises, but our task now is to get people to talk about money,” he said.
Komarov also noted the plans of Kyivstar to soon transform from an operator into a modern digital-IT company capable of developing its own products and commercializing partner products quite successfully in its network.
Kyivstar plans to strengthen the internal development department by the end of the year, so that to have digital divisions with 120 people and at least 70 in-house developers.
