In developing markets such as Latin America, cloud services constitute an important opportunity for CSPs to extend their services as they roll out next-generation networks; public cloud services will see growth of up to 70 percent CAGR in the region through 2016. Small and medium businesses (SMBs), which are estimated to comprise as much as 95 percent of all enterprises in Latin America, are becoming the biggest adopters of cloud services, attracted by pricing and the hopes of filling organizational gaps in IT staff expertise and infrastructure. 

SMBs also benefit greatly from the portability of cloud services, which permit the same resources and applications to be accessed on the move as they would from a home or office location. CSPs that are able to bundle these services, including IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and SaaS (software as a service) applications and support, can capture new revenue streams and rapidly pay back their infrastructure investments. Regardless of the specific processes, services and cloud applications that an enterprise may have first targeted as being right for its organization, however, the demonstrable strategic and cost advantages ultimately outweigh business leaders’ initial reluctance to embrace these models.

Likewise, CSPs gain a strong advantage when they begin to capitalize on their inherent strengths in order to build, and bill for, a range of business services, from IaaS to SaaS, and fill a real need for speed, competency, flexibility, and lower costs at enterprises. They can meet that need if they have sufficiently robust processing capabilities that guarantee transparency and satisfy all the C-suite stakeholders. Partner management capabilities will be necessary to develop the broad portfolio of offerings that CEOs demand, while CIOs will expect accountability via service-level agreements (SLAs) and real-time usage information, and CFOs will expect highly detailed drill-downs at their fingertips to confirm that costs are reconciled appropriately across the business units and cost centers.

M2M: runs like clockwork

M2M is already transforming a host of industries as enterprises gain the ability to react to information and events in real time but without the cost, ambiguity or inconsistency of human involvement. Telematics seems to be the leading use case of M2M, enabling in-vehicle devices to communicate crash data, supply directions or track stolen vehicles for consumers as well as optimize fleet logistics for business use. 

An even richer array of applications covering utilities, healthcare and education is on the horizon. Tracking everything from sheep to refrigerators and packages to people, with data points small (blood-sugar readings, GPS locations) and large (high-resolution security-camera feeds), CSPs can get in on the ground floor of this enterprise opportunity and position themselves to deliver not just connectivity but also the value-added business services that enterprises will need if they hope to realize the potential of “the Internet of Things.”

CSPs’ proven track record of managing complex enterprise requirements, including hierarchies, SLAs and revenue recognition models, coupled with their ability to accurately and reliably process enormous volumes of data and transactions, is necessary to ensure their centrality in a new ecosystem of M2M partners. 

So why is a CSP’s enterprise skill so essential to its development of new M2M revenue potential? Consider the thousands of devices that could be attached to a single account, whether it’s a sheep farmer tracking his herd or a logistics company tracking its freight and vehicles. Such scenarios call for an enterprise- and customer-centric view of a business rather than a device-centric one.

Consider also the varying levels of risk associated with the information collected from those devices: one packet of lost data in a patient’s monitoring stream may require higher reliability and quality of service (QoS) than an electric meter that can store its readings locally until they’re batch-transmitted at prescribed low-traffic intervals. As M2M solutions expand across numerous industries, they will create new demands on CSPs to deliver a richer portfolio of differentiated business services and to treat data streams with differentiated levels of service depending on the context.