In energy and telecoms, “commodity” is an operating condition. Both sectors are expected to deliver ever-more complex services on ever-thinner economics.
Which explains why we have seen a lot of service providers turning into software vendors.
Some of it is genuinely impressive. Octopus’s Kraken is trying to scale into a serious global platform, serious enough that it’s being structurally separated to avoid conflicts of interest and serve all clients equally. Rakuten had to create distance between Rakuten Mobile and Rakuten Symphony for similar reasons: operators are understandably reluctant to buy their nervous system from another operator.
And that’s the point.
If your billing, subscriptions, product catalogue and customer journeys are your engine room… would you really let a rival design the engine?
Because beyond the optics, there is a more structural issue: software built to serve one retailer’s own operating model is rarely designed to adapt gracefully to others. It reflects roadmap priorities, commercial assumptions, and control points you only notice once you’re already dependent.
Which leads to an uncomfortable but very real question: does it truly make sense to allocate strategic budget to a platform that may, directly or indirectly, strengthen a competitor?
In regulated markets, these questions are not just theoretical. Some retailers and operators have already taken deliberate steps to avoid structural dependency, whether by adopting multi-vendor strategies, insisting on platform neutrality, or simply declining to place core systems in the hands of a direct or indirect competitor.
My view: for core platforms, vendor-neutral, best-of-breed software is usually the safer default. Because neutrality can be designed into the structure from day one, rather than retrofitted under pressure.
The real question is this: as retailers become vendors and operators become platforms, will the winners be those who adopt an operating system proven elsewhere—or those who ensure their core remains independent and neutral?
