Setting the basis for IoT Monetization: Challenges and opportunities for Digital Service Providers

Internet of Things (IoT) has, since long ago, ceased to be a yet-another buzzword in the digital lingo and is gradually becoming a mainstream technology. Connected devices and applications continue to proliferate, nourishing expectations for multi-billion revenues. No question, thus, why more and more players from every industry get to realize that the IoT wave opens up a wealth of possibilities.

In response to declining revenues from traditional services, most Communication Service Providers (CSPs) jumped early into the IoT bandwagon, enabling connectivity for IoT devices. However, this business is being ‘commoditized’ and CSPs are challenged by alternative offerings. This, forces CSPs to transform into Digital Service Providers (DSPs), with their IoT solutions constituting an ever-growing part of their portfolio.

CSPs are, indeed, ideally positioned to bind the evolving IoT elements together, as they possess significant assets to leverage, including wide customer base, significant technology investments and large-scale service delivery expertise. Nevertheless, IoT services are inherently complex since they comprise multiple interacting items, such as IoT devices (‘things’), connectivity and domain applications, along with the supporting processes. In this respect, industry’s consensus that successful IoT monetization heavily depends on managing IoT services end-to-end, sounds less as a piece of advice to be followed and more as a challenge to be addressed.

The pursuit of IoT monetization boils down, essentially, to creating innovative products and adopting new business/pricing models. This translates into identifying and combining together IoT business parameters that bear value, which are obtained from assets connected, applications running and data flowing.

To find out more, take a look at this blog post published on TM Forum Inform.

Credits: this article was sponsored by Intracom Telecom.