With the explosive growth of connectivity and the Internet of Things (IoT), communication service providers have an unprecedented opportunity to generate significant profit and make their mark.
According to the International Data Corporation, almost 42 billion devices could be hooked up to IoT by the year 2025, with a potential value of $575 billion USD.
However, maximising this opportunity for growth and profit generation does present certain challenges that the industry hasn’t faced before. Adapting the current business model just won’t cut it- there needs to be a clear shift from current status quo to the new monetisation models if businesses want to succeed.
In this short blog, we’ll be explaining exactly what challenges CSPs face when it comes to monetising IoT and how these are best tackled.
What is the Internet of Things?
The Internet of Things, or IoT refers to everything that can be connected to the internet, and includes everything from a smartphone, a fitness tracker, a smart door lock to your bathroom scales and your washing machine. They use specially designed software and connectivity technology such as Bluetooth and WIFI, they can be controlled remotely, and they can also ‘talk’ to each other.
Consumers love this new connected technology because it allows them to carry out everyday tasks with greater ease, customise their experience, become more efficient and save time and money. They no longer need to physically open the fridge to check what is inside when IoT can do it for them. Nor do they need to stop and take their pulse mid-run then upload it to a complicated spreadsheet when they’re trying to get fit because their Bluetooth-connected tracker can do it all for them.
Monetising the IoT: What are the challenges?
As exciting as this might be, commercialising IoT is going to be more complex than today’s familiar connectivity model.
It’s a very different world; a world in which devices of varying sizes and functionalities must work together to achieve a common goal, even when produced by different manufacturers.
High volume, low individual transactions will become the norm and new models of ‘horizontal’ services like billing will need to be created. Businesses will also need to develop new forms of vertical offerings for specific IoT apps across different markets, sectors and types of use.
Additional factors such as data security and adaptive subscription models will also play an important role in this new hyper-connected future.
If you don’t start thinking in very practical terms about how to effectively manage this shift in both consumer behaviour and technology, you will miss out on the huge opportunities IoT can bring. Given that the future of the IoT market is significantly bigger than today’s – not taking steps to evolve would be, quite frankly, crazy.
How to adapt your business model to IoT
The good news is, developing the most effective business model for IoT can be relatively straightforward with the best fact-based, actionable insights.
That’s why we’ve created the eBook “Getting Beyond Connectivity and Monetising New Services with IoT”.
It contains everything you need to start doing to accelerate your new IoT business, including;
- How to make multi-stakeholder billing in a unified view work for you
- A new and more effective approach to novel IoT use case partners
- Data and device management
- And BaaS—billing as a cloud-delivered service.
You’ll also learn how Enghouse Networks can help you provision, launch, manage and optimise a slew of exciting and profitable IoT packages. With our market leading IoT Monetisation Solution and fifteen years of industry expertise we can help make it happen for you.
