Make it happen – Strategies for implementing NaaS

This is an abstract from our recent report Network as a service: Addressing the full enterprise opportunity. Download it today for the full insight.

Preliminary results from a TM Forum survey that is still underway reveal that nearly half of communications service provider (CSP) respondents’ companies are deriving less than 10% of their revenue from B2B services today. CSPs hope to see a significant shift upward in that ratio over the next five years, and many believe delivering networking as a service (NaaS) could be key. Simply put, NaaS is a flavor of software as a service that allows CSPs to deliver network services and functionality as a managed cloud offering.

Before considering which steps to take with NaaS, in what order, CSPs would do well to act like a millennial and consider their relationship status first. In other words, CSPs should not wait for all the complexities of delivering value-added NaaS services to be resolved before actively identifying potential partners and building deeper relationships within the enterprise community. Here are some steps they should take:

Partner with customers and suppliers

With enterprise customers CSPs will find common interest in creating solutions and solving problems. Co-developing applications and services goes a long way toward forming long-lasting, reciprocal relationships. Software vendors have discovered the reality of not being able to solve every problem by themselves and are embracing cooperative partnerships and ecosystems. CSPs should do likewise with their enterprise customers. At the same time, operators should create partnerships with suppliers. In some cases, it might make sense for CSPs to go with a hosted NaaS solution to get to market quickly.

Re-imagine OSS/BSS

Much of NaaS is about infrastructure and connectivity, but these hold little value without agile operational and business support systems (OSS/BSS) that allow CSPs and their enterprise customers to take full advantage of the flexibility, programmability and user control that is possible with NaaS. Look for reimagined OSS/BSS and management and orchestration solutions that increase automation, leverage near real time analytics and service assurance, and can equitably enforce service level agreements.

Think about differentiated services

Connectivity services are hard to differentiate beyond some guaranteed level of service. Enterprises want to monitor and generate reports for network performance and usage, and control their services through a unified, self-service portal. CSPs should begin thinking about the next step for NaaS, which is connecting to a digital marketplace that offers value added services on top of connectivity.

Embrace abstraction and Open APIs

With NaaS CSPs have an opportunity to move to intent-based management, which abstracts the complexity of the network at a high level and then uses a customer’s intent along with assurance, analytics and policy to manage it through open, standards-based APIs, such as TM Forum’s Open APIs. This delivers the agility CSPs are striving for with digital transformation by enabling flexible interaction between systems in different domains.

Figure out how to monetize NaaS

Multi-party services are difficult to monetize in a way that allows all parties to share in the revenue, and virtualization and ‘as-a-service’ business models only complicate the process. CSPs should look for a partnership management platform that can support real-time charging, multi-party compensation and license management for virtual network functions. They also should ask vendors about their roadmaps for new charging strategies such as blockchain.