Service Providers Must Consider the Entire Value Chain Around Services to Succeed
Global service providers operating in the 5G world will need to take advantage of emerging technologies in order to produce a set of new services that deliver unique value propositions to their end customers. Customers are unwilling to pay more for enhanced connectivity without additional value.
To deliver new game-changing services, network operators must look at the entire value chain around services and pay close attention to what is happening at the edge of the network to take greater ownership of the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the proliferation of connected devices that will soon have access to the network via 5G connectivity.
Service providers should not be deploying new technology for the sake of deploying new technology. If monetizing services is the goal, providers need to make intentional infrastructure investments that are propelled by business outcomes to better deliver truly remarkable experiences for their enterprise customers.
New service offerings need to be deployed faster than ever before to meet customer demand. Service providers are competing against the likes of Amazon, Facebook and Apple, which are bringing new services to market in a matter of weeks, not months or even years. Network operators need to identify and embrace new technologies more rapidly to transform themselves into a more agile provider that can monetize both the network and the products and services that activate the power of the network.
New solutions are not being delivered as a thing, but a component of things. Solutions today are a combination of multiple services within the network that live in the cloud or at the edge, including not only the applications, but also the IoT devices that feed those applications, the analytics in the cloud and a host of other microservices that add incremental business value to specific use cases.
As service providers continue to adopt a more virtualized and disaggregated network architecture, integrating these components will be a challenge.
WWT is working in several ways to help make this integration easier for service provider customers.
Our Advanced Technology Center (ATC) combines hundreds of OEMs and thousands of ecosystem partners in a lab environment. Customers can design, develop and deploy best-of-breed technology solutions that are ready to turn up and generate revenue on day one. The ATC features the latest technology from leading OEMs and software providers, affording clients an opportunity to keep their ear to the ground when it comes to making technology decisions.
The ATC is complemented by WWT's deep team of engineers, software developers, security architects and cloud architects to help inform and integrate solutions into the service provider's ecosystem.
WWT is collaborating our ATC ecosystem partner, Intel, to offer service providers Intel Select Solutions for universal customer premises equipment (uCPE) that can increase business agility and bring service to market faster, thus accelerating time to revenue.
Intel Select Solutions are verified hardware and software stacks that are optimized for specific software workloads across compute, storage and network. Service providers can leverage WWT's ATC to validate uCPE solutions to speed up deployments.
WWT's partnerships can help service providers simulate their own network to understand how different technologies interoperate, but also link those solutions to business outcomes that can be monetized as soon as they are deployed to market.