Platform business models can revitalise stagnant enterprise revenues in the telecom industry. Being successful requires investing in the commercial aspects of a platform and the technical service architecture, as well as adopting a mindset that starts with the customer.

Telcos’ path towards a successful platform strategy

The telecom industry is actively looking towards the enterprise space as an opportunity to drive growth through new revenues and monetise the significant investments made in the network. Despite being many years into the 5G era, telco enterprise revenues are stagnant, so operators must reassess their strategies to capitalise on their investments. The chart below shows how the world’s top 10 telecom operator enterprise revenues have stopped growing (and have even started to fall on average), despite total revenues over the same period maintaining some positive year-on-year growth.

Average year-on-year change in revenues of top 10 telecom operators by revenue in 2023*

Prior to 2019, the enterprise segment was still a significant growth driver for telcos, so there is a need to question their potentially failing strategies to address these customers. To tackle this trend, telcos need to take a customer-centric approach to understanding what enterprises want and expect from them – not just in terms of the technology and capabilities telcos can provide to businesses, but also how these services are packaged, commercialised and delivered to them.

In search of new enterprise revenues, operators and their partners have been developing more differentiated, ‘next-generation’ B2B propositions that move beyond pure connectivity and into the integration and application layers of the value chain. Following a shift towards cloud-native operations, they have organised these services in a disaggregated, cloud-based service architecture, with modularised capabilities out of which to build complete services. In this way, telcos believe they are adopting a platform approach to enterprise services.

However, a platform model is more than just a technical service architecture. Two further pillars of a platform require development and investment:

• Revenue architecture: to support multiple monetisation streams from services and engage enterprise customers with the flexible, scalable and dynamic business models, ‘everything-as-a-service’ (XaaS). A platform revenue architecture also reduces friction to adoption and scale.
• Ecosystem architecture: to foster open and collaborative ecosystems with multiple partners, driving a multi-channel and multi-go-to-market (GTM) approach without becoming a ‘pipe’ for other, more dominant players.

A successful platform strategy considers both technical and commercial aspects, and is underpinned by a shift to a platform mindset across all three pillars. We have identified four elements of a platform mindset: customer-centric, multi-purpose, flexible and self-reinforcing through network effects.

The structural pillars and mindset of a successful platform strategy

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Table of contents

• Executive summary
• Introduction
• Platforms are an organisational model underpinned by a mindset
  • More than just a service architecture, platforms also consist of a revenue and an ecosystem architecture
  • Platforms look different, but share a common mindset
• One size does not fit all
  • Stage 1: Is a platform appropriate?
  • Stage 2: Is the approach a strategic transformation or a tactical application of the platform mindset?
  • Stage 3: Which platform pillars are the focus?
  • Stage 4: What role(s) should be adopted?

• Conclusions and recommendations

Related research

• The path to telco growth: STL Partners’ manifesto
• Lessons from telco transformations – Five case studies
• Transforming telcos’ role through managed cloud services
• Network API monetisation forecast 2023–2030: Growth beyond anti-fraud
• Managed services: Telcos must adapt to the cloud

Yannick Mayaud

Yannick Mayaud

Senior Consultant

Yannick has worked across STL’s consulting practice on projects looking at growth opportunities for the telecoms sector in 5G, edge computing and new technologies. Recently, he has worked on projects exploring 5G’s impact on industry verticals through specific use cases and intersections with trends in digital twins and satellite technology. A graduate of the University of Cambridge, he is a French national and bilingual English/French.