Axiata’s platform ecosystem empowers developers

In 2012, South-east Asian telecoms operator group Axiata began leveraging its IT and network assets via APIs and partnering with third-party developers, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Since then, the company’s platform ecosystem has grown to serve 70,000 developers. It is delivering meaningful revenue that is shared with partners – well over $100 million in 2021, according to Axiata Group CIO Anthony Rodrigo.

Ideamart is the umbrella term given to the products, services and partnerships that sprung out of this initiative to build platform businesses by leveraging Axiata’s telco assets via APIs. Axiata has operations in 11 countries serving more than 160 million subscribers. The company has transformed from a holding entity with a portfolio of pure-play mobile assets into a business with a “Triple Core Strategy” focusing on digital telco, digital businesses and infrastructure. Today Axiata’s operations include providing mobile connectivity, enterprise business solutions, digital financial services, digital advertising and a global digital platform.

For the past decade, the Ideamart initiative has been spearheaded by a ten-person team within Axiata’s Sri Lankan operating company, Dialog, but its goal is to help all Axiata’s operating divisions build digital relationships with customers. The platform has evolved in three overlapping phases, from experimentation to scaling in the B2C market to transitioning to a focus on B2B (see infographic).

Viranga Seneviratne, Senior General Manager at Ideamart, explains Axiata’s move into B2B: “We realized that a major portion of the SME market remained underserved in terms of going digital. It provided the perfect opportunity for Dialog to deliver services beyond connectivity, reusing our platform capability and the building blocks that we made available to our partners. So, that’s when we created… Enterprise Marketplace.”

In doing so, Dialog tapped into pent-up demand from small businesses to use digital and social media marketing channels to reach their own clients and receive payments electronically. This coincided with Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, which increased businesses’ need to go digital. “We wanted these companies to quickly go digital, to empower them in their digitalization journey,” says Seneviratne.

How Ideamart works

The graphic on the left shows Ideamart’s layered platform architecture. Dialog targets SMEs that lack the digital skills companies would normally need for online commerce by offering easy-to-use web widgets that require no coding. Using these tools, a small business can design a service online by simply checking boxes to meet their requirements, while Axiata configures the back-end software automatically. Even though the tools are easy to use, Dialog found that some businesses needed help on the ground. So the company contracted with local tech “Geeks” to work with small businesses, educating them about the benefits of going online and helping to match the businesses’ needs to software and services. In addition, Dialog recruited local systems integrators and aggregators already engaged in helping SMEs go digital. Dialog looked for local experts rather than deploy its own sales team because the company recognized that its internal skills are limited to selling traditional connectivity products.

The Geeks and other local partners are incentivized through revenue sharing and sales commissions. In addition to selling solutions that embed Axiata’s capabilities, Dialog created a digital enterprise marketplace that includes products and services from companies such as Google, Microsoft and other local solutions providers seeking a new go-to-market channel. For each category of services, Dialog offered several products including lower-priced options suited to the SME and small office/home office (SoHo) markets.

Monetization strategy

Ideamart’s services are offered primarily on a pay-as-you-go basis. This removes the requirement for an upfront investment from SMEs, which is often a barrier to adoption. The business model is two-sided: Dialog generates revenue from the SME content developers that use its APIs and other developer tools, and from the businesses and consumers that use the solutions and services provided via the platform.

Content is monetized in three ways:

• Revenue sharing – Dialog uses its own charging and billing systems to bill end customers for the products and services they consume and then hands back a majority of this revenue to developers and partners through settlement
• Transaction fees – Dialog charges developers for the network resources they consume (which tend to be lower than payment services from financial services firms)
• Fees for specific ICT services – for example, Dialog may charge a content provider for helping them to achieve a targeted number of customers based on a marketing campaign.

In any two-sided business model, a platform must nurture producers (content developers) and consumers. In Axiata’s case this means helping to ensure that channel partners – Geeks and aggregators – have the tools they need to be successful. Each partner has access to a portal where it can review its sales performance and monitor the experience of its clients based on Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Ideamart’s operating costs include paying a small, full-time team to support content partners, plus the fees charged by the platform’s public cloud provider. While the Axiata Digital Labs platform supports millions of API calls every day, the calls generate only modest, incremental costs beyond those associated with running core legacy and IT functions.

Focus on developers

Dialog’s ability to learn from its early experiences engaging the developer community has contributed to its success. Taking a proactive approach to attracting developers has been key. For example, Dialog developed a go-to-market strategy for a small, select group of entrepreneurs, which helped the companies grow their customer bases. Then, Dialog showcased their stories to the rest of the Ideamart community.

Awareness and education programs have also been helpful. Dialog conducted ideation sessions at schools and universities, plus more than 1,000 events and hackathons over the span of a decade. In addition, the company hosted thousands of walk-in discussions with an open-door policy, and implemented hundreds of outreach programs at many rural schools. Dialog also continued to expand technology and tool offerings to developers.

More than 70,000 developers are using Ideamart today, and 90,000 apps have been monetized. The vast majority of Ideamart developers are local companies operating in the markets where Ideamart is active: Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Cambodia. Axiata works with a small number of developers to build new products and platforms. It gives them the opportunity to sell their content and services in other countries, but most do not choose to do so because it is difficult to source local content. Axiata is hoping to help its developers expand their businesses to new markets. Indeed, the ability for operators like Axiata to federate their platform businesses and launch services across each other’s networks is “one of the things the industry must solve”, according to Rodrigo.