Future enterprise billing: The big picture
Enterprise billing is complicated, and it is coming at a time when CSPs are trying to simplify their product portfolios and the IT systems and architectures that support them, rather than add new layers of complexity.
Future enterprise billing: The big picture
This is an extract from our recent report Future enterprise billing. For further detailed insights into the current state of telcos’ enterprise businesses and why legacy billing systems limit their ability to target enterprises, download the report now. Communications service providers (CSPs) have spent the last five years talking about delivering new services and capabilities to enterprises, enabled by technologies such as 5G, IoT and edge computing. Operators and their technology partners are espousing the potential for new use cases, vertical markets and partner ecosystems, and there is widespread agreement that the digitization of business and government represents a tremendous opportunity for the telecommunications industry. However, many questions remain unanswered: Enterprise billing is complicated, and it is coming at a time when CSPs are trying to simplify their product portfolios and the IT systems and architectures that support them, rather than add new layers of complexity. If operators and their suppliers were building enterprise billing systems from scratch, it would be possible to factor all these requirements and capabilities into cloud native systems designed for agility, flexibility and scalability. But most telcos must cope with legacy systems and processes, which in some cases are dedicated to the enterprise market and in others have been bolted onto systems designed to support consumers.
- How do use cases translate into products and services? It’s clear that connectivity will be the basis of CSPs’ value propositions, but what else will they offer – cloud, edge, security, IoT, professional services?
- What will CSPs’ commercial relationships be with their partners? Will they resell other companies’ services, or will other companies resell theirs?
- Who manages the relationship with the end customer and orchestrates the role of the other providers?
- How will the services provided by ecosystem partners be integrated technically?
- How will partners charge and bill for enterprise services? Will billing be event based, or will CSPs use a software-asa-service model with usage-based pricing? Determining this requires that CSPs understand clearly how and where they incur costs.
- And what about new capabilities such as real-time charging, zero-touch integration and automated service configuration and purchasing? Are these “nice-to-have” or “must-have” capabilities?
For the past decade, CSPs and their suppliers have been developing network strategies and capabilities that at long last enable operators to offer services that meet the requirements of specific use cases. CSPs spend more than $150 billion per year in network CapEx, and a growing proportion of that will be dedicated to 5G over the next five years. While developing new enterprise billing capabilities is by no means inexpensive, it is a relatively modest and most likely essential investment if CSPs hope to increase revenue from enterprise services.
What’s inside?
In the first quarter of 2021 we surveyed 130 CSP respondents from 74 unique companies for our Digital Transformation Tracker 5, which will also be published in April. We included a set of questions about enterprise billing, the results of which are included in this report. Survey responses came from every region of the globe, with all sizes and types of service providers well represented. About 40% of CSP respondents indicated they are working in IT operations roles. We also conducted in-depth briefings with CSP executives from companies operating in Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia. We found that they are keenly interested in learning how to enable new B2B services and how to bill for them because many must make investment decisions over the next year. In many cases, the divisions within CSPs that create products and services for enterprises have not been clear about the capabilities they want and need, which leaves IT organizations to guess.
Given the uncertainty, CSPs should look for and develop systems that provide the flexibility to change course quickly if necessary. However, achieving agility requires major changes throughout the organization, not just in the technology stack. It demands new ways of thinking, planning and working.
Many operators have legacy B2B systems in place supporting contracts signed with government bodies or large enterprises decades ago. For these companies, a hybrid approach of modernizing some systems and replacing others will be the best approach. Other CSPs that until now have focused primarily on the consumer market will have to decide how much they can afford to invest when the revenue outlook for new enterprise services is unclear.