Telco 2.0: The $50bn Enterprise Mobility Opportunity: four steps for telcos to take today

Enterprises are turning to mobility to transform their operations, creating a c.$50bn ‘Enterprise Mobility’ opportunity globally. There are four levels of engagement that telcos can adopt to start to capture a share of this market, and upgrade and repurpose their internal capabilities to deliver repeatable, high volume, customer-facing growth initiatives. They need tools, technologies and partnerships to provide the deep industry knowledge and mobile workforce expertise. This will allow them to take a defined proposition to market and evolve from being “just another channel” to originators and owners of intellectual property. (December 2013, Foundation 2.0, Executive Briefing Service, Cloud and Enterprise ICT Stream). Enterprise Mobility Framework December 2013

Executive Summary

In pursuit of agility, efficiency, new revenue sources and closer customer relationships, enterprises are turning to mobility to transform the way employees work with engaging mobile apps that harness device-specific functions and capabilities. These apps generally need to connect to and exchange data with back-office systems, many of which pre-date the mobile era. As a result, organisations are looking to partners to provide the tools, technologies and skills to customise and develop apps, do the heavy lifting of deployment and lifecycle management, and accelerate business value. STL Partners estimates the value of this opportunity to be around $50 billion worldwide.

As enterprises reduce spend on traditional telecom services, telcos have a timely opening to take an enterprise mobility proposition to market. However, to date, deployments have been niche and opportunistic rather than part of a long-term strategy. STL Partners has identified a four-step structured approach that telcos can embark on today, and gain competence and confidence as they move up the enterprise mobility stack to higher value offerings. The four levels of evolution involve:

• Level 1 – mobilising their own operations and internal processes
• Level 2 – offering a managed environment to enterprises for their apps, whether on premise or in the cloud
• Level 3 – providing hosted mobility together with off-the-shelf enterprise apps, with the option to add “last mile” customisation to the enterprise’s specific requirements and provide an enterprise app store
• Level 4 – providing hosted mobility and developing bespoke, highly differentiated apps that solve customers’ unique business challenges

However, building out these capabilities will require substantial commitment and investment – not only in platforms and tools but also in people, via a transfusion of talent from related industries.

What next?

The purpose of this paper is to stimulate telcos’ thinking around the development of a structured, short-term approach to enterprise mobility opportunities that can be transitioned to a more sustainable, higher-yield strategy.

Having highlighted the stark choices available, STL Partners are inviting telcos to participate in a research study which will delve deeper into telcos’ appetite for, and the practical considerations of, establishing a foothold in the enterprise mobility market. Among the big questions for exploration will be:

• Why are telcos arriving relatively late to the enterprise mobility party?
• What do they need to keep pace with enterprise mobility trends?
• What successes have telcos achieved to date – but at what cost and effort, and what could be done differently or better to create a repeatable framework and reusable approach?
• What are the shortest, most effective routes into specific markets and segments and what use cases should telcos be targeting?
• What are the barriers to success in the app market and how can they be overcome?
• Where, along the four-stage evolution, do telcos want to end up and why?
• What can and should mobility vendors be doing to support telcos’ efforts to commercialise their enterprise mobility propositions?

Our forthcoming paper will reveal the findings and outline the “recipe” for advancing through each of the four levels of enterprise mobility maturity.

 

 

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