Info Image

Trends Reshaping the Communications Industry in 2023

Trends Reshaping the Communications Industry in 2023 Image Credit: melitas/BigStockPhoto.com

The communications industry is in the midst of a multi-year transformation to secure, dynamic services orchestrated across a global ecosystem of automated networks. This shift is closely tied to the exponential pace of technological change in the hyperconnected digital economy that motivates business leaders to automate wherever possible to remove friction from complex supply chains, boost productivity, compete more effectively, and deliver value in on-demand world.

With this as our backdrop, let’s focus on how developments associated with the multi-year trend will shape up in 2023.

#1: Service providers will greatly increase standards-based efforts to automate business functions between each other within the global partner ecosystem

Service providers, technology solution providers, and industry organizations are collaborating at a stepped-up pace to build a standards-based ecosystem that will accelerate service delivery across multiple providers, speed time to revenue, and improve customer experience.

For a large and growing number of service providers, automation is no longer a choice. Automation is a must have. This is the case internally and externally between service providers and their connected partners, customers, and cloud providers.

Standardized APIs are essential building blocks for automating business and operational functions and are critical for enabling parties to interact reliably and efficiently within an interconnected, automated ecosystem. Industry organizations – including MEF, TM Forum, and the Global Leaders’ Forum (GLF) – have cooperated to drive development and adoption of standardized APIs with the goal of unlocking the full potential of this ecosystem.  

One of the hottest areas of industry activity entering 2023 is associated with MEF’s business process APIs that enable service providers to “invest once” and efficiently scale implementations with many partners and services across automated supply chains that will extend to enterprises and cloud providers. These APIs are emerging as the preferred way to do business for buyers and sellers seeking to transition from costly, time-consuming, and unscalable manual processes and proprietary, pairwise APIs. The APIs automate business functions like address validation, quote, order, and product inventory.

Also look forward to the benefits of standardized business APIs extending to enterprises in 2023.  Essentially the same business APIs can automate similar business functions between service providers and their enterprise customers when selling subscriber services like Carrier Ethernet, Internet Access, and SD-WAN.

#2: Service providers will expand standards-based efforts to automate operational functions between ecosystem partners as well

In the coming year, service providers will progress efforts to standardize operational APIs for service ordering/control/provisioning, service inventory, performance management, fault management, etc. as part of a holistic approach to service automation across the ecosystem. Service providers who have implemented operational APIs amongst themselves could then offer more advanced set of API-enabled service features to enterprise customers – for example, the ability to have user-driven dynamic services orchestrated across multiple provider network, along with performance visibility on an end-to-end basis. 

#3: New SASE services and Zero Trust standards will help industry players align on common terminology and grow the SASE market faster

Today’s hybrid work environment requires a different approach to connectivity and security. In addition, the mass adoption of cloud computing and its associated increase in attack surfaces have driven the need to explore new approaches to security.

Secure access service edge (SASE) has emerged as a unified, effective way to deliver security and networking. It has become one of the hottest markets in the industry in terms of activity and potential revenue growth in strong double-digits for the next several years. But, up to now, the widespread availability of SASE managed services and overall growth of the SASE services market have been hamstrung by multiple challenges – principal among them being customer education and the lack of industry standards.

2023 will be the year in which major industry players begin to tackle these big challenges by aligning on SASE service standards.

Standards accelerate the ability of managed service providers to offer robust, unified network and security services with Zero Trust to enterprises. On the customer side, enterprises will be empowered to make better-informed choices based on industry-standard service attributes, frameworks, and definitions.

While most of the discussion of SASE has centered around specific technology components, a SASE services standard focuses on the subscriber experience irrespective of how the service is implemented.  SASE combines security functions and connectivity services with subscriber policies to meet a higher level of performance and assurance required by modern enterprises. A SASE service enables secure access and secure connectivity for subscriber users, devices, and applications to targeted resources (applications or devices). This access is independent of the location of users, devices, and applications and is authorized according to subscriber policies.

Once we have a foundation of SASE services aligned standards, we can progress to the next logical step of automating the ordering of these services via business APIs. And following this, we can expect thatui enterprises will be able to dynamically adjust or track the performance of their SASE services via operational APIs.

Conclusion

The time is now for service providers to accelerate their automation journey. Investing in standardized business and operational APIs and SASE services, like those offered through MEF, will enable companies to maximize revenue opportunities and deal more effectively with competitive threats within the emerging ecosystem of automated networks.

Author

As Principal Analyst with MEF, Stan Hubbard engages with executives and other experts from the world's most innovative communications service and technology companies. His key areas of focus include service automation, SD-WAN, SASE & more related to digital transformation. For more than 23 years Stan has been in the communications industry in various roles including strategic marketing, industry analysis, analyst relations, public relations, global event programming, and public speaking.

PREVIOUS POST

Push to Eliminate 'Digital Poverty' to Drive Demand for Satellite-Powered Broadband Connectivity Post Pandemic