Understanding Your Customers’ IT Challenges —
Today’s landscape of technology is moving so fast some of your customers’ IT teams are feeling a little whiplash. Hardware has been king for so long, and the baseline infrastructure isn’t going to change a whole lot moving forward. So, more and more organizations are depending on software and platform delivery models to achieve greater efficiencies and to gain a competitive advantage. The challenge is with this increase in software, IT teams can quickly lose control due to the explosion of data coming from everywhere and every device.
Previously companies spun their wheels to deliver services in a highly involved and manual process of data collection and analysis. Today companies are capitalizing on cutting edge automated approaches that collect and analyze the data in real time to quickly roll out new services based on usage, behavior, and context.
4 Trends and Drivers
Following is a list of the 4 trends and drivers around usage data, and how they will impact your customers.
By understanding these challenges, you will better be able to meet their telecom needs.
TREND #1
Here a Platform, There a Platform, Everywhere a Platform
As companies become more digitally focused, they will look for ways to gain a competitive advantage. CIOs will begin to look at their IT landscape as less as a set of systems and more in the context of a digital business platform. Moreover, enterprises will start to look at their own businesses in the context of platform business models. A recent MIT paper stated, "Everywhere there can be a platform, there will be a platform."
DRIVER
IoT and Digitalization have been on the minds of many CEOs, CTOs, and IT teams. The platform business model has been synonymous with companies like Apple, IBM, Google, and Amazon. Other companies are seeing this strategy as the basis of delivering their solutions as atop their own digital business platform. For enterprises that include a usage component in their business model, a recent comment from Zuora’s Subscribed Institute says it all. The source shares that "usage-based pricing making up between 1%-50% of their overall revenue grew by 28% year-on-year." The key will now be how enterprises leverage usage data as the core to monetize the digital business platform to fit customer’s needs.
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API Only Won’t Cut the Mustard
APIs are great, but the majority of integration is bulk/batch and messaging-based. In order to execute on an API monetization strategy, enterprises need to go beyond API mediation strategy and correlate a wide range of sources and automate manual processes. Moreover, API monetization strategies need to be able to cope with highly varied pricing and bundling strategies specific to larger customers or specialized offerings.
DRIVER
In 2019, organizations will look to offer something more than just a tiered API package to get higher profitability and value. Many organizations will reassess their API strategies to ensure they are able to dive deeper into integrated and automated business processes.
TREND #3
5G as an Agile Service Delivery Platform
While 5G will be launched in many of the global developed countries, it won’t be felt immediately by day-to-day users. The first use cases for 5G have been launched in very specific areas using network slicing to create seamless interconnections. By late 2019, we should see 5G help move autonomous cars and drones, and increase the efficacy of IoT.
DRIVER
Everyone everywhere wants to be connected in their homes, cars, and work. It will still take a bit of time to fully take advantage of 5G’s benefits. While the first successful implementations will be related to mobility and logistics, the market advantage will go to those companies that gather data from multiple sources and process it in real time for billing and for operational usage.
TREND #4
Electric Cars Create Energy and Distribution Challenge
Sales and usage of electric cars continue to climb. This creates challenges to distribute electricity outside of the main power grid in cities and into places with less power infrastructure. Smart grids and distribution will become vital to support the growth of the electric car trend. This is where 5G will help move the adoption and usage of innovations like connected cars.
DRIVER
With greater adoption of electric cars, energy trading will become essential to keep the network stable. In 2019, we expect to see 1 or 2 major electricity service disruptions in Europe that will lead to long blackouts due to the growth of digitalization of everything and unbalanced networks. This will require the use of real-time data exchange among all energy suppliers in order to keep the networks up and connected.
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Resources
For more information, please visit:
Subscription Magic: A Combination of Tiered and Usage-Based Pricing, by Jayne Scuncio, Feb. 6, 2019. https://www.zuora.com/2019/02/06/subscription-magic-a-combination-of-tiered-and-usage-based-pricing/
Zuora, Subscription Economy index™, https://www.zuora.com/
MIT paper 2018 Platform Strategy Summit: MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, http://ide.mit.edu/sites/default/files/platform-2018-v05_0.pdf