We discuss the following topics in this blog:

1. All about the digital marketplace
2. What is a Digital Enterprise Marketplace?
3. What is the Benefit of a Digital Enterprise Marketplace?
4. What do you Need to Know to Launch Digital Enterprise Marketplace?
5. Need For Digital Enterprise Marketplace
6. Types of Digital Enterprise Marketplace
7. Digital Marketplace Revenue Models
8. STL’s Digital Enterprise Marketplace for Telcos

In addition to these topics, we shall also be answering the following FAQs:

1. What is Cloud Computing?
2. What is WiFi?

Everything on Digital Marketplace

Marketplaces are the lifeline of commerce, which is getting extended to the digital space. Marketplaces are characterized by buyers/sellers to meet, buy/sell their products and services.  With rapid digitization taking place, we see the spurt in the growth of online marketplaces and the coming of enterprise marketplaces. 

What is a Digital Enterprise Marketplace?

Digital enterprise marketplaces serve as virtual trading with a cloud-native platform for various vendors to host their products and services, and enterprises can now choose to buy products/services based on their requirements and plays the role of intermediary between buyers and sellers, without owning any assets. Enterprises are now opened to buying from any marketplace, whether from the public or private cloud or other sources. 

Organizations nowadays are seen to reinvent their business strategy. They can create enterprise marketplaces to allow third-party vendors like applications vendors to sell on the digital platforms with suitable business model offering such as pay per use to earn better revenues.  At the enterprise level, digital marketplaces are featured to offer a bundle of services. They are designed to provide seamless integration between partners and suppliers, and cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. Such platforms will enable digital technologies and business models and add cost, and quality to end-users through the existing ecosystems.

Such enterprise marketplaces will benefit more communication service providers (CSPs) benefit through cloud subscriptions and services across vendors with enterprise to retail customers.  Research firm Gartner believes that by 2023, organizations owning enterprise marketplaces for over a year will see a minimum 10% jump in their digital revenues.

Leading digital network aggregator STL offers digital marketplace solutions as well.  STL has been recognized as an Enabler for enhanced partner ecosystem support in digital marketplaces in the 2021 Gartner’s research report, ‘Expand CSPs Monetization with 5G, AI, and Edge Compute’, and also STL gets recognized as a key BSS vendor offering 5G CHF, to develop and promote newer pricing levers for CSP monetization. To create an enterprise marketplace, you need a well-developed e-commerce platform and a marketplace solution that works with it. Ideally, the digital marketplace solution will also need to connect to other applications seamlessly.

What is the Benefit of a Digital Enterprise Marketplace?

• Faster IT & business transformation of CSPs,
• Reduce risk & cost of transitioning to open based architecture
• Compliance with Open Digital Architecture (ODA[ ), and Open API standards
• Enables a platform for accessing software that is required, thereby reducing the need for a software build-out

What do you Need to Know to Launch Digital Enterprise Marketplace?

• Integrate with existing systems seamlessly.
• Offer flexible billing models built for digital marketplaces with subscription-based, pay-per-use models
• Applications catalogue offers varied applications that can be sold out of the box and featured to accommodate new applications.
• Clear product roadmap that can adopt and bring innovation with changing times.

Need For Digital Enterprise Marketplace

With growing digitization, digital marketplaces are becoming a force with various business models envisioned. The scope for products and services will be enormous considering that most of the buy/sell activities are taking place online and will open a world of opportunities.   We see digital marketplaces have key metrics like faster launch, already ready programs, better and broader outreach, and a large customer base that can be addressed that is extremely crucial for CSPs monetization on investment and service offerings

Types of Digital Enterprise Marketplace

Considering the niche-specific marketplaces that will address a particular product or service to specific customers like Etsy, Airbnb, and the horizontal ones like that of Amazon, booking.com will address a wide range of needs and has a broad customer base.  An enterprise marketplace will feature applications and services offered to its customers.

Use Cases of Digital Marketplaces

Digital Marketplace Revenue Models

The most prominent marketplace business models are set out below:

1. Commission-based models – a classic model, the commission is charged per transaction
2. Subscription/Membership fee – this subscription-based model will carry a fee for the services for using the marketplace
3. Listing fee – charge a fee based on the listings
4. Lead fee-generating revenues through introductions
5. Freemium – charge for additional features and services
6. Featured listing & ads – will be mostly free and add more visibility to the product based on more clicks peruse concepts.

Most of the business models discussed above are in use; more improvements or refinements take place with the constant technological innovations that are always happening.

STL’s Digital Enterprise Marketplace for Telcos

STL’s enterprise for Telco’s, powered by STL Digital Enterprise Marketplace, is the enterprise platform to select.  The platform interfaces with CSPs, customers, and partners, fostering better collaboration and sharing. The platform brings multiple vendors, partners, and customers to a service range of customers – enterprise to retail customers. Read our blog to help you learn more about our digital marketplace offerings.

Recently, STL also made a significant breakthrough at the TMForum Digital Transformation World Series, 2021.  As part of the TMForum Catalyst Project, STL won ‘Best Use of Open Digital Framework, (ODF)’ for its 5G Digital Marketplace catalyst project. With the STL marketplace offering, we empowered the project with our ‘Everything Stack’ to capitalize on the rapid evolution of Open API architectures 5G, WiFi6, cloud models platforms and make a permanent shift in end-user behavior. Our whitepaper on Cloud-Native Marketplace for Telcos also provides detailed insights to Telcos and CSP on the best practices for a successful digital  enterprise marketplace implementation.

End Note

Enterprises are now opened to buying from any marketplace, whether from the public or private cloud or any other source. The revolution in digital enterprise marketplaces will herald a new way of business, bringing with it many vendors, multiple business models, and many applications at play, helping growth and revenue. Read this Gartner report on the new approaches and key trends to CSP monetization which includes building partner ecosystems through enterprise marketplace offerings and implementing best in class BSS solution as a way of pricing levers for monetization.

FAQs

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is a paradigm that allows On-demand network access to shared computing resources. A model for managing, storing and processing data online via the internet. The three major characteristics of cloud computing are On-Demand Service, Network Access, and shared resources.

There are three major delivery models of cloud computing, namely Software as a Service (for end-users), Platform as a service (for developers), and Infrastructure as a service (for system administrators).

1) Software as a Service or SaaS is a new method of delivering software applications. Instead of accessing the software from local servers (a powerful computer system), it uses the internet to access the software applications. To be considered SaaS, the software needs to be delivered either through a web interface or a mobile application. E.g., Microsoft 365, Salesforce CRM, Google suite apps, etc.

2) Platform as a service or PaaS is made up of a programing language execution environment, an operating system, a web server, and a database. The service enables users to build, run and compile the programs without an underlying infrastructure. Apart from the data and application resources, everything else is managed by the service-providing vendor, e.g., AWS, Azure, Google App engine, etc.

3) Infrastructure as a service or IaaS is a service that offers computing architecture & infrastructure and computing resources like data storage, virtualization, servers & networking in a virtual environment so that multiple users can access them. Apart from Applications, Data, Runtime, and Middleware, everything else is managed by the service-providing vendor. For, e.g., Cisco Metacloud, Rackspace, Amazon EC2, etc.

Uses of Cloud Computing include: Developing cloud-native applications on the go; Secure, Efficient & Reliable storage capability; Audio and Video streaming; On-Demand Software, Platforms & Infrastructure; Online Test and Build ecosystem support; Data Analytics; Embedded Intelligence; Scalability & Speed.

What is WiFi?

Put simply, WiFi is a technology that uses radio waves to create a wireless network through which devices like mobile phones, computers, printers, etc., connect to the internet. A wireless router is needed to establish a WiFi hotspot that people in its vicinity may use to access internet services. You’re sure to have encountered such a WiFi hotspot in houses, offices, restaurants, etc.

To get a little more technical, WiFi works by enabling a Wireless Local Area Network or WLAN that allows devices connected to it to exchange signals with the internet via a router. The frequencies of these signals are either 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz bandwidths. These frequencies are much higher than those transmitted to or by radios, mobile phones, and televisions since WiFi signals need to carry significantly higher amounts of data. The networking standards are variants of 802.11, of which there are several (802.11a, 802.11b, 801.11g, etc.).