Why 5G ecosystem orchestration is key for CSPs

5G-enabled use-cases

5G technology ushers in a new era of enterprise usecases for industry verticals like autonomous driving, e-health, and robotics. But, even though 5G is a key enabler it cannot solve the use-case alone. Fully solving industry vertical use-cases involves a combination of other services, technologies and things – like Internet of Things (IoT) sensor networks and devices, cloud storage, AI-based/HoloLens for virtual diagnostics, drone services and devices for remote inspection and analysis; just to name a few.

Only once you combine 5G technology and network slicing together with partner services and applications specific to the vertical solution, will the use-case be fully enabled.

Orchestrating the global connected ecosystem

The biggest challenge when solving 5G-enabled use-cases is the orchestration of an ecosystem of partners and partner services on top of the fulfillment of 5G technology services. This is becoming even more complex when it involves a global business, where customers will consume hybrid services from multiple providers in multiple geographies:

• The ecosystem will need to have the capability for globally managed offerings that are delivered and consumed locally.
• Customer Order Orchestration and Service Order Management will need to cover both connectivity services and specific partner services, taking dependencies between the hybrid mix of services into account.
• End-to-end service order management & orchestration, and service assurance across multiple carriers, includes the orchestration of multi-carrier network slicing spanning different geographies – hence, service order orchestration and management will extend from being multi-partner to multi-national-partner.
• It requires an ecosystem management platform that delivers complete service order management visibility over multiple services and geographic domains.

There must be complete trust and traceability of transactions across this complex ecosystem – end-to-end SLA requirements, from multiple services on top of connectivity, will need to be monitored. 5G slices will potentially be delivered by CSPs in multiple geographies (inter-carrier slices), which means that end-to-end service assurance and SLAs will also include connectivity providers in multiple countries. Though controlled by the geographic point of origin of the service request, end-to-end inter-carrier service assurance can only be guaranteed when all local connectivity services have been assured.

Failures and breaches associated with the SLAs will need to be reported to enable customer compensation, the calculation of penalties, and root cause identification to enable regress with partners linked to the service assurance.

Remote health care services is a highly important use-case which can be enabled with 5G. Read more on our participation in TM Forum's catalyst project, Skynet: the global 5G-enabled support ecosystem in a time of crisis

But don’t neglect the complexity of monetization across the ecosystem

Customer offerings for 5G-enabled use-cases will entail multi-faceted products/services combining connectivity and specific services from a wider value-creation partner ecosystem.

The ability for the CSP to introduce at speed new, attractive packages of own and partner services, with flexible pricing options, and be able to consolidate the charges for all services on one single customer bill, with multi-currency, multilanguage invoicing, is essential to grow revenue from enterprise 5G-enabled use-cases.

But this is only a partial view of the monetization picture!

QOS agreements and contractual service-level-based charging and billing are inherent to enterprise offerings:

• SLA breaches automatically lead to direct customer compensation, and also entail the calculation of penalties for the root-case partner.
• In a global context, regress calculation for partners linked to SLA breaches not only involves multiple partners, but also becomes an intercarrier issue to solve. But most importantly, a multi-partner ecosystem must facilitate the commercial model between the ecosystem partners to monetize their services.

The business platform must be able to:

• Effectively manage the contractual partner agreements and commercial monetization agreements between the ecosystem partners for the reselling of services via other business partners.
• Support complex multi-party partner settlements, and enable revenue sharing between the partners in the ecosystem.
• Support consolidated partner settlement billing and invoicing, independent of end customer invoicing and settlement.

So to fully capitalize on the 5G-enabled use-case opportunity, CSPs must make sure that their business is ready to not only orchestrate but also monetize the new complex, on-demand, multi-partner enabled services and applications, over and above 5G connectivity services.