Critical Capabilities for the Reinvention of Telco 

The MATRIXX team recently returned from a week in Las Vegas at AWS re:Invent, one of the largest and most impactful tech conferences of the year. With over 50,000 attendees, this was definitely the largest event our team attended in recent memory, and it was exciting to see the level of engagement with a community primarily focused on adopting cloud computing to transform businesses of all sizes and in every industry. The telecommunications industry is no exception, and we had a chance to speak to several practitioners at the forefront of deploying 5G networks in the cloud, from developers to architects to chief strategy officers.

Viva Las Vegas

Throughout the event’s keynotes, chalk talks and solution demos, there were numerous opportunities to glimpse into the future of telco and discuss the transformation towards that future with our customers. MATRIXX, along with the team at Blue Planet, a division of Ciena, were invited to be a part of the AWS Industries Interactive Demo Plaza. This dedicated space featured AWS solutions showcasing next-generation capabilities in industries including telco, energy, automotive, manufacturing, media and sports, among others. Picture this: a display of robotic arms, autonomous vehicles, Oculus VR goggles, interactive games and media, and even footballs (soccer balls for those of you in the USA) rocketing into a goal to test wannabe World Cup stars’ speed and accuracy. The MATRIXX-Blue Planet demonstration was part of a collection of solutions illustrating the relationships between cloud, edge and private 5G networks.

Dynamic Monetization of Edge-Based Services

In our Simplifying 5G Monetization solution, MATRIXX and Blue Planet together demonstrated integrated, automated orchestration and monetization of complex networks and multi-party offers, including cloud resources, that will drive efficiencies and economies of scale. Communication Service Providers (CSP) today face the dual challenge of reversing the industry‘s declining growth trend while simultaneously rolling out 5G by spending nearly 2x what was spent on 4G, according to some estimates. The promise of 5G is innovation driven by the ability to deliver guaranteed service levels for numerous and diverse use cases, all at the same time. The combination of 5G core networks, network slices and edge resources creates an extremely complex connectivity ecosystem.

This degree of complexity requires advanced automation, and that’s where Blue Planet comes in. The Blue Planet Intelligent Automation Portfolio is purpose-built for unified service lifecycle management across multiple domains including RAN, transport, core and cloud/edge. In our demo, we illustrated how a mobile gamer experiencing degraded video quality requests an upgraded experience through the game, and how Blue Planet automatically identifies the best edge resource from among the available AWS Local Zones, and provisions the gaming server at the edge to deliver a higher quality experience for a designated period of time.

“5G promises more dynamic and immersive experiences. To deliver that vision, CSPs are looking to build 5G marketplaces that expose new and innovative capabilities from their ecosystem partners. Orchestration is critical to monetizing these experiences by enabling the delivery of real, automated outcomes that leverage both 5G network and edge applications,” said Marc-Antoine Boutin, VP product management, Blue Planet.

By integrating with Blue Planet Orchestration, MATRIXX provides dynamic monetization capability, assigning value to the experience and allocating revenue sharing across multiple parties in the ecosystem. To increase their position in the value chain, CSPs must break the pattern that has been engrained in them for decades of selling connectivity as a utility. As they invest in advanced network capabilities and the ability to dynamically orchestrate them to fit a particular purpose at a particular point in time, they must be able to monetize the resulting experience in innovative ways. And that’s where MATRIXX comes in.

In the demo, MATRIXX monetizes numerous elements of the customer experience in real-time — charging the gamer for a boost, charging the gaming/app provider for the corresponding network and edge resources provisioned for the “boost” and settling for the AWS Local Zone resources enabling the “boost.”

Moving Up the Value Chain

In one of the re:Invent industry track sessions, AWS shared the outlook that the value of connectivity, as part of a complex value chain that spans devices, platforms, applications and managed services, is a mere 10%. So CSPs who seek to move up the value chain as an enabler of the more complex ecosystem must take a holistic approach to orchestrating the end-to-end value chain and then monetizing it. And the orchestration and monetization must adapt to the 5G and cloud environment — it must scale, be highly available and secure, and bring automation and flexibility.

“Increasingly diverse network topologies are needed to better serve customers, driving innovation in management and orchestration,” said Marc Price, MATRIXX Software chief technology officer. “To deliver enhanced experiences and secure new monetization opportunities, CSPs must coordinate infrastructure, applications and services seamlessly in new ways — and differentiate pricing accordingly.”

Blue Planet shares our philosophy for cloud native, agile platforms and together, Blue Planet and MATRIXX demonstrated the critical capabilities that a CSP will leverage to provide differentiated customer experiences and innovative revenue streams in both their B2C and B2B lines of business.

To learn more, download the MATRIXX Playbook for 5G Monetization.