Frictionless partnering in the pursuit of growth

In our previous blog Igniting growth with composable solutions we outlined why telecom companies need to delayer to monetize their network, but they need to solve five key challenges to return value from their network investments.

This blog sets out to explain what the industry needs to do to solve the second critical challenge of achieving multi-marketplace readiness.

What is multi-marketplace readiness

Building and deploying end-to-end solutions for vertical markets requires trusted ecosystem partnerships between network operators, Hyperscalers and other platform aggregators, systems integrators, and software suppliers. TM Forum members are taking the lead here, demonstrating how the various players, old and new, can achieve the ability to easily work together to ensure that partner functionality can be quickly and automatically integrated into the heart of any new services offering. This is what we are calling multi-marketplace readiness.

Improve your partnering capability in the pursuit of growth

As the market shifts from vertically integrated solutions to horizontal platforms enabling defragmentation and scalable innovations, the ability to create trusted strong partnerships will be a key strategic capability. As a telecommunication operator strives for more relevance against the new agile competition and create a return on investment for the millions spent on their network services, they need to become either/or:

• A NetCo – through the creation of Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) Transformation, where the operator gains business agility, functional independence between IT and networks with greater re-use of abstracted services.
• A ServCo – being able to offer Connectivity as a Service, (CaaS) which adds an intent driven dynamic realization and automated connectivity solution to the telco offering based on customer expectations. CaaS should work with no knowledge of the underlying network technology needed from the customer’s perspective.

To be able to offer these current and future ‘X as a services’ offerings, one critical aspect for them will be the ability to on-board any old/new partner’s new capabilities from any marketplace with minimal friction and cost.

Core capabilities bundled as horizontal platforms creating ecosystem customer centric solutions will provide a pathway to scalable innovation via digital marketplaces. Telcos will have to conform to a set of industry best practices. To enable this strategy TM Forum provides all the resources and process required to smoothly on-board new partners through zero-touch partnering initiative which includes the release of zero touch partnering APIs

Planning prevents poor performance and inability to succeed

Capitalizing on new value ecosystems, telco’s need a culture of experimentation to realize scalable innovation. The detailed concept-to-design framework provides a toolkit for value pool identification and value network design, leveraging a library of reusable value streams and capabilities of the telco, being captured in Business Architecture as part of a series of assets supporting portfolio management. Increasingly portfolio management will grow in importance supporting the shift from individual technology products to portfolios of co-created solutions for accelerated growth.

TM Forum’s marketplaces work recognizes the evolution from traditional monolith closed marketplaces to a new era of open federated or multi-marketplaces providing business guidance and architectures to create customer centric ecosystem solutions, derisking a Telco’s marketplace strategy and helping to navigate new business model opportunities.

Find out more by coming to our Inspire kiosk on the TM Forum Community Stand @DTW23 where you can discover your pathway to growth and we can direct you to the various Catalysts that showcase these concepts.