In recent years, running and operating Digital Marketplaces has been creeping up the Communication Service Providers’ priority lists. Encouraged by the success of Amazon, they’ve been trying to develop their own version. However, it is not a simple task as it requires a very different business and operating model than the one CSPs have traditionally relied upon.
In order to support them on this journey, Beyond Now and Amazon have teamed up to integrate our state of the art Digital Marketplace, designed for CSPs wanting to provide advanced technology solutions that better fit their B2B customers’ needs, with Amazon’s world-leading Multichannel fulfilment (MCF) Warehousing and Distribution solutions that underline Amazon’s success. This integration will enable CSPs to launch and operate successful digital marketplaces at a faster pace, without the risk and worry about the cost of owning, managing and fulfilling digital and physical inventory.
Through the integration of our Infonova Digital Business Platform, CSPs have an interface helping them to complete digital fulfilment, and with MCF, they will be able to complete the physical shipping of orders using Amazon’s fulfilment network. As a result, CSPs will benefit from our advanced ecosystem orchestration and monetization capabilities combined with Amazon’s comprehensive physical fulfilment expertise.
What are Amazon’s Multi-Channel Fulfilment (MCF) Warehousing and Distribution solutions?
Amazon's Multi-Channel Fulfilment (MCF) helps you grow your business by giving you access to Amazon's world-class fulfilment network, operational expertise, and trusted shipping options for all orders, from wherever they're placed - both on Amazon and on other sales channels.
A key part of the AWS value proposition for telecoms, MCF allows enterprises, CSPs and their technology partners to deliver outstanding customer service by outsourcing the shipping and returns of physical devices included in their digital solutions. MCF brings fast and reliable fulfilment to a B2C and B2B business. This might, for example, include cell phones, laptops, IoT sensors, wearables, smart homes, or personal electronic devices.
Its vision is to provide reliable, cost-effective, and global end-to-end supply chain solutions for businesses around the world. The supply chain process provides an end-to-end solution from the manufacturer right through to the customer leveraging Amazon’s Global Logistics, Amazon Freight, Amazon Warehousing and Multi-Channel Fulfillment capabilities. This is demonstrated in the diagram below:
How does this integration help customers?
Currently, when CSPs or enterprises sell a solution that includes one or more physical assets or pieces of hardware, the process involves the costly overheads of engaging and signing agreements with local third-party shipping companies. This also often requires co-ordination with manufacturers. This is relevant regardless of whether they want to sell the solutions in a local market, or on a global scale.
The integration between Beyond Now and Amazon’s fulfilment network will be beneficial to customers looking to automate the end-to-end order and physical fulfilment process to create frictionless buying experiences for customers. This will save on resources and supply chain management overhead and create a frictionless buying experience for their end customers. The integration will also mitigate the need for CSPs to manage their own inventory and warehouse, while also removing a need for them to send in their own engineers.
While the Infonova Digital Business Platform helps to digitalize, fulfil and monetize solutions for CSPs and enterprises, MCF handles the physical fulfilment of any resource items which are part of a solution offering. Thanks to this integration, the process is now automated and orchestrated completely by MCF.
Critically, CSPs can focus on new business growth and revenue-generating opportunities as this integration eliminates the need to manage expensive inventory, logistics, shipment or installation. Amazon’s third-party logistics capabilities remove significant headaches that enable CSPs to optimize logistics operations, inventory management and e-commerce fulfilment from one interface.
Facilitating the launch of successful digital marketplaces
The integration extends Beyond Now’s ecosystem orchestration and monetization capabilities with the power of Amazon’s world-class physical fulfilment network, so CSPs will ultimately benefit from reduced lead time, risk and costs to help them launch successful digital marketplaces of their own.
These advanced digital marketplaces enable CSPs to co-create next-generation technology solutions with their ecosystem partners, rapidly onboard and sell through digital channels, and monetize new technologies while settling deals at scale and speed. This is accompanied by the complete automation of the digital and physical fulfilment process, including zero-touch provisioning.
Making positive strides forward to ensure revenue growth
Beyond Now has become the first platform provider to integrate its marketplace platform with Amazon’s world-class fulfilment and distribution capabilities for CSPs. At Mobile World Congress 2023 in Barcelona, both Beyond Now and Amazon demonstrated the end-to-end capabilities of the integration in a joint demo for Smart Home and the Digital Business Marketplace Hub.
For more information, visit: Propelling CSPs' digital services growth with Amazon Web Services (AWS)
