The era of hyper-connectivity is now giving way to a new era of hyper-automation. This is being enabled by major technological innovations such as cyber-physical systems, human-machine operational models, and clean tech. These macro trends will accelerate disruption to industries, presenting a whole new level of opportunities and challenges for service providers to meet. Metaverse and Industry 4.0/5.0 are just a couple of manifestations of these disruptions driving digital transformation across enterprises and broader ecosystems. Success however, will depend on a few foundational enablers, prime among which are 5G, cloud and automation, and Communications Services Providers (CSPs) are going to play an increasingly pivotal role in this new emerging digital economy.
For CSPs, these market trends will provide new opportunities to evolve their business models. Some CSPs may choose to continue playing to their strengths, ie, provide highly reliable connectivity services including on-demand network-as-a-service. A few others are likely to become digital service providers (DSPs) or techcos, offering connectivity based digital services. While others will evolve significantly to become Industry Service Providers (ISPs), offering industry specific solutions based on full stack vertical industry clouds with marketplaces.
By leveraging technology in new ways, techcos can seamlessly meet market opportunities where they are by providing relevant and even personalized solutions to their customers. This means leveraging cloud and cloud native applications for everything ranging from 5GC to policy engine, to network automation and analytics, to ordering, provisioning, and billing, to operations automation. These capabilities are not only going to be critical to efficiently operate and scale 5G for the new era of disruption but also to rapidly offer and monetize 5G-enabled digital services for consumers and enterprises.
CSPs see great opportunity in delivering cloud based, 5G-enabled services to enterprises, however understanding expectations and preferences, as well as identifying viable 5G business strategies for the B2B segment are critical.
As CSPs evolve to monetize new 5G opportunities it's critical that they understand the enterprises they aim to co-create with. Even though many 5G enterprise services are nascent and far from mainstream adoption, CSPs should aim to play a strategic role in enterprises' digital transformation strategies. Especially for industries that can benefit in the near-term from next-generation technologies - such as oil and gas, utilities, mining, aviation and health sciences – which are positioned to adopt 5G use cases within the next one to three years.
To strengthen their B2B value proposition service providers must hone their ability to translate technology into concrete industry value. According to recent Oracle research, improving B2B experience, capabilities, and operational speed are the top three benefits CSPs expect 5G to deliver to enterprise customers. While CSPs understand the business transformation capabilities of the fifth-generation network, it's difficult to shift from the mindset of connectivity provider to an industry solution provider and B2B partner.
With a deeper knowledge into the innovative use cases applicable in industries like hospitality and media and entertainment, service providers can better understand their customers' challenges and ensure they can deliver on agreed-upon service level agreements (SLAs) and provide the solutions that their enterprise partners want and need. To succeed in partnering with enterprises on 5G services, CSPs need an in-depth understanding of their customers industries to provide solutions that solve for business challenges.
Just as service providers are seeking out opportunities for co-creation, so too are enterprises. Enterprises are seeking CSPs to become their channel partners, giving them the ability to scale and facilitate additional partnerships. Whether that's a joint venture in selling robots, offering maintenance packages, or jointly marketing mobile applications for consumers use, there are plenty of opportunities for enterprises to make the transition to 'anything as a service' with SaaS based industry applications. However, by design this stack must consist of modular, cloud native, and microservices based applications that can be deployed in a multivendor multicloud environment.
Sources: https://blogs.oracle.com/oracle-communications/post/how-do-csps-evolve-to-industry-service-providers
