With consumer markets saturated, communications service providers (CSPs) are eyeing the enterprise for ways to monetize the 5G networks they’ve poured billions into building.
The good news: The opportunities are plentiful. From drones that inspect overhead power cables to robotic production lines that spot manufacturing defects in real-time, the future of business will rely on the high-speed transport and analysis of data from billions of sensors.
Not in Kansas anymore: The enterprise 5G market is a whole new world
But tapping into this market isn’t easy, especially as use cases like these have a lot of complex moving parts. They need ubiquitous, reliable and secure high-speed networks to transport the data. Likewise, they need compute resources everywhere (on the device, at the network edge, in the cloud) to process it, and they need apps to make the data usable for its intended business purpose. And all of this must be easy to buy for enterprise customers.
Take power line inspection drones. A utility provider will likely want a solution that includes not just the drones but also guarantees 5G connectivity; edge compute power and analytics to crunch the video data; AI to spot anything that needs fixing; a user interface to visualize the data; and the ability to integrate the inspection app with other business apps such as maintenance scheduling.
The enterprise 5G market is made up of thousands of niche use cases like this one, each with its applications, services and network requirements. It’s very far from the straightforward connectivity packages that CSPs sell today — and that creates a huge obstacle for CSPs keen to get a share of the enterprise 5G pie. Their core business systems simply weren’t designed to serve markets like this.
Can’t get there from here: The limitations of legacy BSS/OSS
The business support systems (BSS) and operations support systems (OSS) that most CSPs run today were built for different times. They’re typically monolithic, on-premises software applications whose functionality is fixed and only get upgraded once every few years.
BSS are typically designed for a model in which the CSP is fundamentally a connectivity provider, with a direct, one-to-one relationship with the customer. Order management, billing and charging are based on a relatively small set of fixed, packaged bundles and customers have limited options in the choice of bundles available to them.
Anything more complex — an enterprise customer requiring a private wireless network, for example — has to be negotiated individually and likely billed through the CSP’s professional services division. Putting up a “digital storefront” that allows customers to order a private wireless network, a 5G network slice or a drone inspection solution, simply isn’t possible with legacy BSS.
The same goes for OSS. While there has been steady progress towards automating network operations, many OSS still require a lot of network provisioning, configuration, fault management and repair work to be done manually.
That worked when there was one single network serving a mass market of customers, but the enterprise 5G vision indexes heavily on organizations being able to get their high-performance slice of the network, complete with no-downtime guarantees. Manually managing hundreds or thousands of — to stringent SLAs — is not something any CSP would want to contemplate.
Talkin ‘bout a revolution: From BSS/OSS to Digital Enablement Platform
For CSPs to capture the full promise of enterprise 5G, BSS and OSS need to undergo not so much an evolution as a revolution. They need to move from monolithic, rigid and functionally-limited systems to systems that can easily flex and adapt to every emerging use case.
They need to work in a world where CSPs aren’t just selling connectivity but a whole array of building blocks such as managed network slices, sensors, edge computing and AI that can be integrated into business applications to create niche enterprise 5G services.
And as a CSP is highly unlikely to provide every component of a complex solution like a drone inspection service, the new-style BSS and OSS need to make it easy for ecosystem partners to combine these building blocks with their own parts of the solution. This can be done not through cumbersome partnership agreements and manual integrations but as on-demand services delivered in the public cloud.
In short, the BSS and OSS need to morph into something new with flexibility, speed, zero-touch automation, on-demand availability in the public cloud, consumption-based pricing and open APIs.
Digital Enablement Platform enables business intent-driven operations
While few CSPs have the right systems in place today to monetize 5G, more are starting to leap to a Digital Enablement Platform. KDDI in Japan, for example, is deploying new cloud-native monetization capabilities as it moves to offer 5G network slicing and network-as-a-service APIs for its ecosystem partners.
These CSPs are stepping closer to what is thought of as “business intent-driven operations” — the ability to translate an order like “I want connectivity for drone inspections” into a seamless, on-demand service that’s delivered, managed and charged for by the Digital Enablement Platform.
It may take some effort to get there from today’s legacy OSS and BSS, but with a lucrative opportunities up for grabs, the rewards will be well worth it.
