The new face of Digital Services

Rolv-Erik Spilling believes that the secret to the success of Telenor Digital Services (DS) is a small dose of craziness and a whole lot of guts. In an industry in which it’s very easy to be marginalized, Telenor needs to be bold and take some calculated risks in order to be a true contender in the global digital services arena, according to Spilling.

It’s been less than a month since he was named Head of Digital Services in Telenor, replacing Kristin Skogen Lund who had led the DS unit since its inception in September 2011. Spilling’s first day on the job ended in the approval of funding for the future growth of Comoyo. “It was a good day,” he says. Since that day, Spilling has spent much of his time abroad, in meetings with the global companies with whom Telenor cooperates to realize its digital service offerings.

Finding a balance

“After three weeks on the job, my 9-year-old son Sebastian said to me, ‘Dad, it’s been a very, very bad start,’ due to my incessant travel,” says Spilling. “It’s always a challenge to find a balance between work and home, but this is an exciting time for Digital Services. Telenor’s operations today have already brought voice, SMS and Internet to nearly 150 million customers worldwide…but we can do so much more!”

Spilling explains that Digital Services is all about delivering the smart services that consumers love. With a team of engineers, developers and numerous experts behind him, Spilling’s DS unit has already seen progress, and for the first time in a long time, Telenor is taking a position in developing its own services.

Global backend is top priority

“Right now my first priority is the development and enablement of the global backend, which is our global infrastructure for connecting all of the business units to the great digital services we offer group-wide. This is in many ways the foundation for all that we do,” says Spilling.

From math to telecom

With obvious passion for the technology behind digital services and its promise to change the lives of the consumers, one would imagine that Spilling stems from a strictly IT background. But his Master’s degree in mathematics left him without many job options back in 1992, and it was by accident that he entered the world of telecommunications at all.

“I had a job interview with Alcatel Lucent shortly after I graduated, for an analyst position, studying the traffic in data and telecommunication networks. I was asked if I had heard of ‘erlang’, to which I responded ‘no’, thus confirming my true lack of telecommunications knowledge at the time,” says Spilling.

But Spilling got the job anyway, and took on a position using his math skills in the analysis of networks. From there he began the journey that would eventually lead to Telenor and his ever-growing passion for technology. In 2000, he was recruited for a position in Nextra, a now abandoned Telenor international ISP initiative, followed by several other positions mainly on the product and technology side of the business.

“I would say that I’ve always had an interest in technology, but now I’m sort of a hard core telco/Internet guy, surrounded each day by extremely competent people. What I’ve learned in my 12 years here is that this is truly an organization with competent people…people who are willing to take risks,” says Spilling.

A calculated risk-taker

When asked if he is a risk-taker himself, Spilling refers to his varied background and points out that he hasn’t exactly chosen the most stabile career path. But at the same time he likes logic and he’s a realist, he explains, so his type of risk-taking tends to be a bit more calculated.

“I think it’s important to say that what drives me is passion. I’m passionate about what I do, and that’s why I love this job. We all have to be a little bit crazy in order to meet our goals,” he says.

The time is now

The stakes are high in Telenor Digital Services, and four years from now Spilling envisions that Digital Services will have achieved its goal of 10 billion NOK in revenue, and there will be global services running across the entire group. And hopefully Telenor will have successfully outcompeted Netflix, he adds.

“We have a vision and we have to dare to be bold. Telenor from little old Norway has succeeded in doing this before and today we have millions of customers around the world. Now we have to do it again on the service layer. So it’s time for a little bit of craziness and a little bit of risk-taking. Let’s make it happen!”