Is There A Business Case For A B2B Collaboration Platform?

Landry Ndikumasabo, a manager at Stockholm-based Northstream, a 20-consultant-strong think tank focused on the telecom and media industry, took to the virtual pages of Billing World to make the case for the urgent need for a B2B collaboration platform.

“Making real-time, highly relevant offers is a great vision. But an operator can’t make that happen if the most sophisticated offer its back office system can handle is a once-a-year subscription.So this idea of expanding the depth of partnering is what we explored in our research interviews and model. If a B2B collaboration platform were generally available, how valuable would it be? What are the potential revenues from that?” he said. “And we concluded that, in Western Europe alone, there’s €2 billion in additional revenue (over three years) that operators can capture by using such a B2B platform that enables such advanced partnering with OTTs. That revenue comes not only from the ability to better respond to customer needs. Another advantage is much faster time to market.”

He cited Stockholm as an example of a community filled with small entrepreneurial firms, many of whom are writing mobile apps.

“The complaint we continue to hear from these entrepreneurs is that telecoms are a very slow time-to-market channel. This shortfall is a direct result of doing things manually across multiple non-integrated back-end systems,” he said. “But having a platform that connects APIs and is open to multiple partners, we think can solve the speed problem. It also allows you to scale up the number of partners you work with and the number of content items that are part of a bundle.”