MDS Global Survey of 110 CSPs Probes IoT Billing and Monetisation Strategies

Warrington, United Kingdom, 25 September 2019: MDS Global Ltd, a leading BSS-as-a-Service provider, in association with Heavy Reading, today unveiled the results of a survey of 110 Global Communication Service Providers (CSPs), which probed their current and future Internet of Things (IoT) billing and monetisation strategies.

Exploring the markets and decisions around IoT propositions, respondents were posed a series of questions concerning existing and future plans for billing based on their size, geography, vertical and business model. The findings, which are documented in the Heavy Reading whitepaper entitled Global Influences on IoT Agile Billing Development, highlighted the diversity in billing approaches as CSPs seek innovative ways to maximise revenues from IoT enablement and projects, including building ecosystems where they act as the lead enabler for a group of companies, collaborating to take IoT solutions to market.

With regard to go-to-market, the survey flagged that CSPs have engaged in several different strategies. When asked about their approach to getting involved in IoT projects, 37% of companies target multinationals, enterprise and SMEs directly; 28% target them indirectly with a partner such as an MVNO; and 23% use the ecosystem approach. IoT is being explored by a broad cross-section of industries, primarily looking at opportunities to improve efficiencies in their supply chain, manufacturing process, quality assurance and the performance of the product through connectivity and the analysis of data. But the industry is very nascent and many proof of concept projects initiated over the past five years have yet to turn into real operations.

Heavy Reading Senior Analyst, Steve Bell, who drafted the whitepaper based on the survey results said, “CSPs realise that the diverse needs of the different IoT markets means they don’t have the technology or know-how in house to quickly and successfully construct IoT solutions themselves.  As a result, they are building an ecosystem of providers who already have the proven technology and ability to implement it. The survey responses reflect this ecosystem approach and the increasingly prevalent challenges with regard to management, billing and execution of ecosystem based IoT solutions.”

The executional challenges that the CSPs expressed included 39% flagging issues with monetisation and the requirement for a monetisation platform that offers greater flexibility. 51% said that multi-party management, which comes with being a lead enabler, caused them strategic and operational pain, and 37% said that scaling was an issue for them as IoT services continue to grow in popularity.

This, in turn, led CSP respondents to flag the difficulty in finding a suitable and cost-effective IoT monetisation solution. 30% of those CSPs based in North America and 29% in EMEA are currently looking for a new agile monetisation platform for, by way of example, cloud-based subscription services. 47% of larger CSPs are trying to model legacy BSS platforms to fit new IoT offerings, while the move away from traditional billing systems is strongest among smaller CSPs, with 30% looking at new platforms and 16% looking at bespoke development.

Gary Bunney, CEO, MDS Global, said, “The IoT business case is evolving. The multitude of different requirements and the disaggregation of the existing industry value chains will result in varied and complex solutions. This will require an ecosystem of partners to provide all the operational capabilities needed. Connectivity is at the heart of many of these solutions and provides the mechanism to extract, transfer and action data across the multiple workflows. This puts CSPs in a prime position to provide value-added services to the many customers in numerous vertical markets.”

He continues, “This change in approach accelerates the need to tackle the issues of monetisation. Complex value chains and expanding ecosystems require billing models that enable multi-tenancy, multi-side settlements, and sometimes real-time charging. We are seeing increasing demand from the CSPs we talk to for IoT monetisation capability, and they typically want this provided as a SaaS model, or through our fully managed service, which takes away the pains of managing the operation and ensuring its success.”

About MDS Global’s IoTMonetised

MDS Global’s IoTMonetised is a low-cost monetisation solution that works for IoT innovation across verticals. It is a flexible solution that can enable any combination of IoT commercialisation models, effectively distributing revenues to all partners.

IoTMonetised enables IoT providers to:

  • Monetise business models in days and reduce cost and time to launch.
  • Bill-on-behalf of all stakeholders in the B2B2X chain for complete revenue collection and distribution.
  • Efficiently manage millions of transactions, devices and connections to reduce operational risk and customer service complexity.

Other benefits include:

  • The performance necessary to monetise vast volumes of IoT transactions.
  • Heterogeneous connectivity management for all IoT network types.
  • Contextual campaign tools to drive IoT application growth.
  • Integration with existing BSS environments for single bill generation.
  • Proven integration with industry-leading IoT platforms.
  • Fully managed so there is no need to build an operational monetisation practice or team.

For further information about MDS Global’s IoTMonetised solution, please visit: https://mdsglobal.com/iot-application-providers/

Based on the findings of the survey, and supported by the whitepaper, Heavy Reading and MDS Global will be hosting a webinar by the same name, ‘Global Influences on IoT Agile Billing Development‘, on Thursday, October 10, 2019, at 10:00 a.m. New York / 3:00 p.m. London. Register participation here: https://ubm.io/2m3ItLX

About MDS Global

MDS Global, a leading BSS-as-a-Service provider of VNO, B2B and IoT solutions, look after all aspects of monetisation, assurance and customer steering for complex products and services. We offer a digital operating model in a DevOps context, which enhances stakeholder experiences and provides unprecedented business agility.

Headquartered in the UK, MDS Global’s customers include BT Enterprise (UK), eir (Ireland), iD Mobile from Dixons Carphone (UK), TalkTalk (UK), Telefónica (UK), Vodafone (Germany, Greece and NL), Orange (Belgium), KPN (Netherlands) and Telia (Denmark).

MDS Global is part of Lumine Group, which is a Portfolio of Volaris Group, a subsidiary of Constellation Software Inc.

For further information: https://mdsglobal.com

Contact:

Martine Naughton
MDS Global
Email: martine.naughton@mdsglobal.com
Tel: +44 (0) 7909 475815