Capturing the B2B Opportunity
Industry analysts predict that by 2025, B2B revenue will represent about half of the average Communication Service Provider’s (CSPs) overall revenue. This puts a lot of pressure on the CSP’s B2B team to pursue and win that business, but they face multiple barriers along the way. One barrier is competition. CSPs must understand how to work with important enterprise players such as cloud services providers. Hyperscalers represent strong partnership opportunities but can also be a disintermediation threat.
Another barrier is an increasingly discerning market. IT and communication services are the single largest budget item for most enterprises, which are looking for providers that deliver these services in a more convenient and cost-effective way. In the meantime, most CSPs are hamstrung by legacy business systems in this increasingly dynamic market. These outdated monetization platforms cannot easily be configured and adapted to bring innovative and competitive offerings to the market quickly.
According to a survey of over 250 SMEs conducted by Analysys Mason the top three factors rated highest in the commercial engagement with CSPs are:
Access to transparent and commercial engagement where spending and usage can be tracked in real-time
The ability to configure new products or services and spending limits
Pay-as-you-use or usage-based commercial model
Growth in B2B ICT services is a strategic imperative for telcos. Addressing the current shortcomings in customer experience and commercial agility delivery are foundational to delivering that growth. This report surveyed 400 enterprises and CSP’s for their reflections on where that commercial relationship is in need of improvement.
The enterprise market is the new growth battleground for telcos. Service differentiation is everything, driving the need for a new and more dynamic commercial and experience model.
View eBookTo effectively compete, service providers must provide a portfolio of solutions available on a self-serve digital platform, complete with flexible commercial models such as pay-as-you-use or monthly subscription bundles across multiple services that include partner offerings.
A digital marketplace that includes a broad ecosystem of partners will be a strategically vital asset and competitive differentiator for service providers, enabling them to deliver new, integrated, multi-party solutions at speed and at scale. Service providers can enable the complex chain of participants to harness network resources quickly and easily, without hindering service delivery or business models.
A self-service digital marketplace enables customers to tailor services to their needs.
For service providers, the key to meeting their enterprise customer’s expectations is platform flexibility and a broad portfolio of enterprise offerings. This requires a change in basic assumptions in how business support systems are defined, because the detailed use cases that have traditionally defined a BSS will not be available. CSPs will need to embrace an agile architecture-centric design for future systems that emphasizes flexible, scalable, configurable and extendable frameworks to support dynamic commercial models and as yet unseen use cases.
A simple ‘speeds and feeds’ offering combined with a ‘wait and see’ attitude towards the 5G enterprise opportunity will result in missed opportunities from which it will be impossible to recover. Telco enterprise leaders need to seize the moment with a proactive, 5G-led revamp of their portfolio offerings and their charging approach that is unconstrained by legacy thinking and technology.
Digital-first commerce goes beyond the consumer, as the same capabilities open opportunities for enterprise in spending, departmental management, asset control and more. However, with IoT and 5G, enterprise must have a digital platform that is equipped to handle these functions.
Telco opportunity in the enterprise ICT services market is under an increasing threat from the four forces of discontinuity: competition, technological disruption, operational lethargy and changes in enterprise IT buying patterns. A new, lean approach to the monetization of mobile, fixed and application/content services, with an increased focus on real-time, on-demand services and flexible payment options, is the game changer required to repel that threat.
