and providing choice and reduced prices with continuous customer engagement to build trust, a community, and network effects to remove paid marketing, lower customer acquisition cost (CAC), and increase customer lifetime value with near-zero marginal costs of scaling. The whole process is automated end-to-end to manage complexity and partners, but your customers experience high value and seamless service. 

So, a portfolio of capabilities onboarded to the marketplace can be rapidly combined with partner capabilities to create new solutions and address emerging business problems that customers need to solve. This is, in essence, what the techco is aiming to achieve, exploring new revenue-generating opportunities from different technologies across any number of industry verticals. And this is achievable through promoting collaboration and shared market knowledge to take a digital-first approach to technology solutions for customers.

Building a community

Once a marketplace has been established, CSPs can evolve the model to eventually compete and scale globally with partners to generate new and consistent revenue. This is key to the techco vision and being able to scale through new services and technology solutions that allow them to enter new markets. Digital marketplaces are an elegant means of addressing this opportunity. With the emergence of technologies including 5G, IoT, and Edge, techcos need to be mindful that notechnology is standalone. The monetization potential lies in offering complete use cases for smart manufacturing, smart buildings, smart agriculture, and more. And for sellers to get the full benefit, they need to scale and grow from niche to multiple industry use cases.

Ensuring success starts by building a Minimum Viable Community of like-minded partners who can ideate and ‘solutionize’ customer challenges. Additionally, as more partners operate in the marketplace, it creates a network effect that naturally encourages more customers and businesses to join.

With this, CSPs can make use of product catalogs, APIs, multi-tenancy, and event hubs to develop highly composable solutions with high differentiation and customer value, such as pay as you go (PAYG) manufacturing. This marketplace allows the owner to connect the needs of the buyers and sellers and shift from being a digital reseller to an ecosystem orchestrator.

This is when partner ecosystem orchestration and management come into play, allowing players on a common business platform to easily and dynamically exchange, combine, and monetize their services; introduce new digital offerings at speed, sell joint offerings, and create new business models. It ensures automated orchestration and provisioning of all services across the ecosystem and facilitates the co-creation of marketplace solutions that perfectly solve customer needs, both now and in the future.

A successful digital marketplace centers on developing and selling solutions to meet specific business needs, rather than simply making multiple components and services available. It focuses on co-creation within an ecosystem to remove the complexity from the adoption of technologies that will drive improvements and solve real business problems.

As CSPs develop into techcos, they must understand—and this is a real mental hurdle—that they can’t do it alone. Becoming a global marketplace requires a collaborative and a multi-sided business model, not the linear one they’ve traditionally relied upon. Working with an ecosystem of partners has extensive benefits, and if CSPs take the necessary steps now, they can frictionlessly develop in-demand capabilities and solutions across multiple industries in a global marketplace.