Dhaval Vora, VP of product management at Elitecore, explains why giving enterprises the ability to self-manage and monitor their data services is vital to tapping the enterprise opportunity
Telecomasia.net: With more telcos looking to the enterprise segment to drive revenue growth, why are so many struggling to offer enterprises compelling data services that are easy for them to manage?
Dhaval Vora: For operators on the constant lookout for new revenue streams, enterprises are proving to be a very lucrative market, typically contributing anywhere between 20% and 30% of total service provider revenues. In pure ARPU terms, this translates to around $2,000 or above per month -- much higher than family/retail customers. Enterprise users are more likely to have latest smart devices, require heavy data downloads while having to roam more frequently; this tendency of heavy data usage is increasingly magnified by the BYOD (bring-your-own-device) trend.
However, despite the cash-rich opportunity, operators face critical challenges in offering compelling data plans to enterprises. One of their key demands is self managing their data services across multiple devices, which is difficult to provide unless operators transfer control over data usage to the enterprise IT admin. They also lack the ability to create dynamic data allocation based on business needs or hierarchy.
Further, operators are struggling with packet core components like policy and charging rules function (PCRF) that lack enhanced features needed to create compelling data services or the ability to differentiate data plans based on usage during working and non-working hours.
What can operators do in the short term to change this?
Operators can enhance their enterprise users' experience by offering dedicated enterprise data plans, similar to leading operators like Verizon, Vodafone and AT&T, which have launched plans to make managing employee data services easier.
According to ABI Research, smartphones will drive enterprise data revenues to $102 billion in 2016. To tap this opportunity, telcos need an enterprise policy solution like Elitecore’s NetVertex Enterprise Solution for shared data plans, which can fulfill the requirements of their enterprise customers and revolutionize the mobile data experience for enterprise subscribers.
NetVertex can easily integrate with operators' existing network elements without increasing their capex and opex. It is designed to cater to an operator’s enterprise data requirements because it offers a variety of features like hierarchy-based QoS and quota management, bandwidth on demand and promotional plans, time- and access-based control, tracking and controlling usage, SMS/email notifications.