As telcos diversify from offering communication services to working with partners to provide digital services and solutions to consumers and enterprise customers, their legacy business support systems can’t keep up. The systems, which have been focused on the monetization of communication services, are unable to provide the agility and flexibility required by the new approach. The power of an agile and ecosystem-friendly lead-to-cash platform becomes apparent.

SAP provides integrated, cloud-native applications for intelligent monetization, allowing telcos to transform their end-to-end lead-to-cash process. These applications enable telcos and all participants in their ecosystem to configure, price, and quote complex offerings together intelligently by combining connectivity, infrastructure, solutions, and services. They help ensure that incentive and commission plans are intelligently optimized and accurately executed for both telco-internal and partner and dealer sales forces.

They also provide cutting-edge mediation and charging capabilities, which are required to monetize new network capabilities from 5G, such as network slicing; and new business models, such as B2B2X, which telcos would charge and bill on behalf of their enterprise customers in serving end consumers. Last but not least, they enable flexible pricing mechanisms and proper billing and revenue distribution along the ecosystem for complex bundling of new digital offerings.

The potential of 5G when combined with new technologies such as AI, machine learning, and edge computing will be significant. And as we move from a 4G to a 5G world, the size and quantity of data streams will grow exponentially. As a result, there are significant challenges for enterprises regarding data management and data strategy.

SAP’s data management platforms will be key components of how we enable 5G adoption for our customers across 25 industries. And with the growth of edge computing, telcos are well positioned to deliver data management as a service and platform as a service, so the value chain for SAP’s software stack and telco’s infrastructure capabilities will be closely tied together.

Intelligent connectivity services enable telcos to bundle SAP’s data management platform, including edge services, with next-generation connectivity, providing enterprises the technology foundation to scale from on premise and cloud to the edge of the network for data transmission optimization, latency-sensitive use cases, and deterministic performance of business processes. Enterprise customers can make their assets and employees at the edge operate more efficiently by processing business semantics from mission-critical applications such as SAP S/4HANA® at the edge for real-time action.

For example, a 5G network coupled with intelligent connectivity services from SAP can help ensure the level of connectivity, latency, and coverage that is required for scenarios from remote equipment diagnostics to novel retail experiences. And the telcos can wrap a new business model around this and charge it as a service.