Core capabilities

To generate profits from enterprise services, CSPs need to shift away from capacity-centric charging models and toward innovative, value-based offerings. However, 60 percent of CSPs, despite recognizing that larger revenue and profits will come from value-added services, believe that for the most part they will remain providers of connectivity, with many arguing that they’re just not equipped to support more complex business models.

Within a CSP’s organization there are critical processes for selling enterprise business services, but it must continue to enable the core elements of traditional enterprise services: a deep understanding of complex organizations; customized account and contract management; transparency into service levels, utilization and costs; and the ability to translate a large volume of technical data points into a business transaction. Throughout the stack, a CSP will need to enhance those capabilities to make sure it addresses:

• real-time charging;
• scalability;
• complexity (partners, hierarchies, charging parameters);
• flexibility to innovate.

Real-time charging with policy control is an essential component for the success of new business services. While consumer prepaid services drove the initial requirements for real time, enterprise business services require more than simple account decrementing and cutoff with depleted balance. Real-time service authorization, along with accounting for multiple users of SaaS services within an organization, providing “advice of charge” to allow certain users to determine the cost they’ll incur prior to initiating a transaction, etc., all become more challenging when embedded within the enterprise structure. To support new charging and policy parameters such as QoS, real-time charging requires network awareness as CSPs negotiate multiple network types.

Scalability is no small matter, and it’s challenged when exploding transaction volumes are stacked against the declining value of each individual, minute transaction. BMW estimates that its “ConnectedDrive” cars will generate a petabyte of data a day, or 106 gigabytes, by 2017, while Cisco says the number of mobile connected devices will have exceeded the number of people on the planet by the end of this year, and Ericsson envisions 50 billion connected devices by 2020. So, although your network may be built to handle connectivity for “the Internet of Things,” it will be even more critical to ensure that your business systems are able to support millions, even billions, of devices and transactions in a cost-effective manner.

Enterprises have pushed for CSPs to provide detailed, accurate information about a wide variety of users, devices, services, and geographies in complex hierarchies of business units, accounts, etc. Business services will demand an even higher level of complexity to make sense of the massive amount of information being processed; for example, managing enterprise M2M services can involve potentially thousands of SIMs (subscriber identity modules) for a single customer entity, so competence in charging and account management is of the essence.  

Increasingly complex business models will develop as CSPs seek to maximize their business-service offerings. Partnering with cloud SaaS providers or M2M ecosystem partners to better serve an enterprise requires enhanced revenue-sharing capabilities, something that’s proven challenging in the past even with the most simple partnering models. Only 1 in every 10 CSPs is actively offering revenue-sharing models to partners, and less than 1 in 10 routinely offers service-level or application-based pricing for M2M.

By leveraging business services to address enterprise market needs such as cloud services and M2M, CSPs can take advantage of their central role in empowering the connected world and grow their revenue, profits and footprint. For CSPs enterprise definitely means big business.