The future of data monetisation: Enabling data-driven customers

Telcos have been creating data related products and services to support their enterprise customers for the last 10 years. As this market expands into a wider range of more complex customer needs, we explore where the best opportunities are for telcos to support enterprises in their transformation into data-driven organisations.

Over the last 12 years, telcos’ data monetisation solutions have focused on the provision of aggregated and anonymised data about their customers, sourced from business support systems (BSS) and augmented with location data from the network. In our 2020 report Telco data monetisation: What’s it worth? we estimated the potential revenue opportunity for telcos in this market through a bottom-up analysis of 200 potential use cases. The data monetisation market is now beginning to change, as new data sources and evolving customer needs create opportunities for telcos to build a broader range of data services for increasingly data-driven customers.

In this research, we identify three new categories of potential telco data services which can build on existing data monetisation activities using BSS and location data:

• Network-as-a-service: Use of data from the network and OSS for control/automation use cases, enabled through the combination of control and management of IoT devices, network APIs and autonomous networking capabilities.
• A3 (AI, automation and analytics) technologies: Use of additional capabilities such as image recognition and text analytics to enhance existing services or develop standalone use cases. These opportunities are not easy to capture and will require telcos to work with an increasing number of specialist A3 providers.
• Data products: Many telcos already offer some type of data platform as a service to their customers, usually partnering with companies that have popular products. Telcos could consider broadening this range of services to cover areas such as data management, governance and data security – as provided already by some of the larger Tier 1 operators with SI businesses.
  • Telcos will be one of few parties with a view of the end-to-end movement of data across ecosystems and international boundaries.

As suggested by the figure below, there may be a degree of overlap between some of the four types of telco data services.

For previous coverage on this topic see STL Partners report A3 for enterprise: Where should telcos focus?

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Four categories of future telco data service

Source: Charlotte Patrick Consult, STL Partners

The four groups of telco products outlined in Figure 1 could potentially be offered to all types of vertical customers, but there is a high degree of complexity in establishing exactly what each customer might need and what products are most feasible for a telco to provide.

In order to create a view of the market and make recommendations on the best course of action for telcos in supporting data-driven customers, we have taken the following steps:

1. Expanded our original list of data monetisation use cases from 200 to 270 use cases:
   • We split these use cases into different verticals (e.g. government, manufacturing, etc.) and then set out the main activities within each vertical that present the best opportunities for telcos (e.g. waste management and recycling)
   • We also include a final group of use cases which are not vertical specific and include activities that many verticals are involved in (e.g. supply chain management)
2. Divided the use cases into nine categories, each with similar types of requirements. Following the previous example, the waste management and recycling use case is placed in a group of uses cases that require the extraction and management of data from IoT sensors.
3. Outlined a set of 11 potential telco products/services which could meet the range of use case requirements. For example, the sensors on the waste management solution might need assurance, data infrastructure for storage and/or data management capabilities.

In the following sections of this report, we outline the nine use case categories for data-driven customers in more detail and identify those best suited to telcos capabilities. We then cover the 11 telco data products in more detail and map the use case categories against the product types.

Table of contents

• Executive Summary
• From data monetisation to data products
• Telco opportunities to meet new data-driven customer needs
• Nine categories of data-driven customer needs
  • People analytics
  • Sensors and devices
  • Moving objects
  • Monitoring and control
  • Thing analytics
  • Complex data chains
  • Autonomous networks
  • A3 products
  • Human focused
  • Which categories of customer needs are telcos best placed to serve
• Mapping customer needs to telcos’ services
  • Data provision
  • Assurance related services
  • Other network capabilities
  • Autonomous networks
  • Insight for moving objects
  • Data infrastructure
  • Data management
  • Governance, privacy, and security
  • Data products
  • A3 capabilities
  • Data expertise
• Conclusion

Related research

• Telco data monetisation: What is it worth?
• DataSpark: Lessons on building a new telco (data) business
• A3 in customer experience: Possibilities for personalisation

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