The business plan should also take into consideration the vertical domain knowledge necessary to properly serve a target industry such as finance, healthcare, automotive, energy, or manufacturing. Simply put, if you’re going to exploit the benefits of 5G for making money, you’ve got to be able to offer the same service, or different services, through configuration, not development.ĬSPs need to have a well-defined, practical 5G enterprise business plan in place because it’s difficult and costly to start up many services across different verticals at once.
#Closing expert target upgrade
Rather than performing a costly customization development to upgrade their existing legacy stacks, CSPs should deploy BSS platforms that are more configuration-based because it allows for greater flexibility, agility and a stepwise transformation to monetizing different 5G B2B use cases. The ability to change, grow and adapt technologically will likely be an on-going challenge for CSPs. Since enterprise 5G is more than just selling voice, text and data, CSPs now need to deploy a complete BSS ecosystem that can handle the more sophisticated tasks associated with the provision of one or more 5G B2B use cases such as creating orders, charging and billing, selling network slices and managing the partner experience.īSS 5G readiness requires that service providers address many pressing issues at once, including the following key takeaways: This is especially true for B2C, mobile-centric businesses that continue to focus most of their IT investments in defending the core business, at times to the detriment of B2B that is a true high potential sustainable growth engine.” “B2B is underinvested in terms of technical solutions. The TM Forum report quotes Adrian Matei, Data, AI & Enterprise Solutions Director for Orange Romania, who assessed the situation this way: Traditional ‘underinvestment’ in sophisticated B2B features and the need to close this substantial gap, are the most pressing problems holding CSPs back. The recent TM Forum webinar discussed this report in-depth and I had the pleasure of unpacking these research findings with TM Forum’s Mark Newman and Ed Finegold, as well as the options and challenges CSPs are facing as they shore up their business support systems (BSS) for demanding B2B 5G use cases, like smart manufacturing.Ĭonsidering that most legacy telecom platforms cannot do the heavy lifting required in B2B 5G, it’s urgent for CSPs to identify priorities, pinpoint challenges and make strides in closing the gap between their existing operations and the advanced BSS platforms needed to successfully bill, charge, scale and monetize 5G B2B use cases. The in-depth 2021 TM Forum report, Is BSS ready to monetize enterprise 5G?, revealed that only 10 percent of the communication service provider (CSP) survey respondents consider their company fully ready to deliver and monetize their planned 5G enterprise services, while roughly 44 percent were less than halfway there.