How CSP Partner Ecosystems Can Succeed with B2B2X Business Models
A next-generation BSS/OSS, including cloud support, automated partner onboarding and end-to-end service lifecycle management will be critical for a diversified business.
Telcos that want to diversify their business strategy towards digital services will face dramatically different value chains than in their traditional business. The partner ecosystems involved are more complex and have many more dynamic elements than anything CSPs have participated in previously. This presents a struggle for the software architectures currently in place to perform service delivery, revenue management and even the ordering and fulfillment of services. In addition, many digital service markets are still in their early stages, and there is no guarantee that current value chains will look the same in a year’s time.
Modernizing BSS and OSS and the E-Commerce Platform Opportunity
Automation of repetitive tasks has always been a good way to increase efficiency and speed up processes, but a piecemeal approach to service operations will likely not work for B2B2X digital services. Invariably, the partner and enterprise customer ecosystems are populated by digital native companies founded in the cloud age that seldom have to worry about integrating new stacks with massively complex legacy footprints.
The answer to these challenges is to be as modular, flexible and cloud-based as possible with BSS and OSS solutions that have end-to-end automation and intelligence.
With consumer markets saturated, revenue growth for CSPs will undoubtably come from B2B solutions, the most significant of these being in e-commerce, providing a digital marketplace platform on which a CSP’s enterprise customers can sell goods and services in a way that offers a superior experience to their competitors. While e-commerce is already ubiquitous, the end customer experience (and the operational experience for the service provider) is often far from perfect.
Software Requirements for the Future
It is possible for CSPs to provide a huge leap forward in their B2B strategy, but in order to give enterprise customers an advancement in power, differentiation and agility they need several key features in their BSS/OSS architecture:
- Fully automated partner onboarding – A XaaS gateway and partner portal are essential for integration and onboarding of third-party cloud and IoT applications and 360-degree views of service interactions, histories and product information.
- E2E service lifecycle management – Fragmented attitudes to service fulfilment will not work for digital service lifecycles. BSS/OSS have to be tightly integrated, ideally from a pre-integrated common software foundation.
- Cloud platforms – Enabling enterprise customers to address the unknown opportunity means providing them with an IT platform that is extremely flexible, secure, has unparalleled connectivity options and can be reorganized to meet any new opportunity easily and without additional coding.
- Revenue management for the digital age – Legacy billing systems cannot be forced to do what is needed to make dynamic, contextual decisions about the financial side of complex new service bundles, partner agreements and value chains.
To find out more about how CSPs can seize the B2B2X opportunity, click here.