CSPs’ B2B success will be defined by the flexibility of their commercial models

The enterprise segment has emerged as a beacon for new revenue growth and differentiation as communications service providers (CSPs) confront the challenges of declining revenue from traditional sources, continued investment and investor pressure on margins and profitability. Indeed, emerging enterprise opportunities are expected to provide CSPs one of the largest windows for new revenue generation and margin expansion in the medium-to-long term. CSPs that successfully deepen their relationships with enterprises in the long term also stand to gain from substantially improved valuations and public market recognition. CSPs are therefore driven to expand their systemic capabilities in order to better engage with small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and large enterprises and to monetise the related opportunities.

5G remains a key driver of new opportunities, but CSPs are also exploring other enterprise-focused topics such as network-as-a-service (NaaS), edge computing and SD-WAN. However, the lack of clarity on the nature of emerging enterprise use cases remains a cause for concern for CSPs. It means that there will have to be a paradigm shift in how CSPs define and procure their support systems because this will now need to be done without detailed specifications of the use cases that will be supported, as has historically been the case. Instead, CSPs will need to embrace an agile architecture-centric design for future systems that emphasises flexible, scalable, configurable and extendable frameworks to support dynamic commercial models and as yet unseen use cases.

This perspective was commissioned by MATRIXX Software. 

For more information about this report, see this article.