Reduced and More Predictable Costs

Corporate decision makers are adopting new strategies that allow them to reduce their CapEx and OpEx spending so they can focus on their core competencies to grow their business with faster time to value.  The benefits of moving billing services to the cloud include reduced costs (e.g., no up-front CapEx investment from hardware purchases), redeploying in-house resources (e.g., reduced OpEx spending as IT functions are outsourced), and the ability to free up management time to focus on delivering the new products and services their customers are expecting.  A cloud-based approach also delivers the benefits of more predictable costs over time, a key consideration in today’s world of thinner margins. 

Improved Focus on the Business = Enhanced Competitive Advantage

Particularly considering the requirements for more sophisticated billing, order management and customer care capabilities that the connected world requires, few organizations have the bandwidth or expertise to dedicate critical resources to these equally critical functions.  Leveraging a cloud service provider to host customer and revenue managements systems allows enterprises to focus on business growth opportunities and accelerate time to market for new services, which leads to a competitive advantage in the exploding connected world marketplace.

Increased Customer Satisfaction and Marketing Flexibility

The cloud offers organizations the opportunity to more easily deliver innovative services, pricing strategies, billing, charging and service management to customers.  With a cloud-based approach, organizations can also tailor promotions and services based on account profile and provide flexibility and self-sufficiency for complete account control.  All of this helps enterprises and service providers increase subscribers, offer more account transparency, and build satisfaction. 

Technological Advantage

Certain cloud-based solutions can now deliver the complete robust functionality and scalability that have primarily been only available to large enterprises, but now from a “lite", agile and flexible platform, offering account access and revenue management anywhere and anytime – a key consideration for certain enterprises like retail organizations.  Additionally, as cloud services have matured, certain cloud solutions have likewise become increasingly secure thanks to data center redundancy and best practices to minimize the risk of data breaches.  A sophisticated cloud solution also offers enterprises and service providers the ability to rapidly deploy new business models with confidence that the customer care, ordering, and billing system can handle any service type and scale to any volume. 

Conclusion

Whether one refers to the new services enterprises and digital service providers are rolling out to customers as subscription, consumption or a hybrid model, what they all have in common are the need for dynamic pricing, reliable fulfillment and fail-safe revenue optimization, delivered from an optimized and scalable platform. It is these new operational challenges that must be addressed to keep pace with escalating customer demands, intensified competition, and the never-ending need for organizational growth.

A proper cloud-based approach creates a win-win for enterprises and global service providers. It enables them to more nimbly satisfy consumers’ appetites for hyper-connected services, while benefiting from faster time-to-market, reduced costs, improved customer satisfaction, and a real competitive advantage. In today’s connected world, the benefits of a sophisticated cloud cannot be ignored.