Communications Services Provider Analyzes Impacts of Emergent IoT and Edge Computing Technologies on Core Network Services Business

Over the course of the past year, a North American cellular network provider engaged us to better understand how smart systems technologies and the IoT would impact their competitive position in the marketplace. Our client is one of two dominant wireless carriers in the region and has one the ten largest communications products and services portfolios in the world.

Being a large, established leader in operating mobile networks, our client was interested in understanding how emerging Internet of Things technologies and new edge computing innovations could potentially impact their business and market position. As part of a broader retainer agreement we configured for our client, they wanted to organize a group of technologies and players that we could track on an ongoing basis and highlight for our client’s corporate strategy team new growth opportunities as well as evolving threats to their core network services business.  As part of this configuration, we also brought forth thought-leaders and innovators into discussion forums with our client to help them better understand potential competitive scenarios and identify key growth opportunities to pursue.

We interacted with our client’s team on a quarterly basis to re-fresh the critical topics, technologies and players to be tracked. By doing so, we were able to work with our client to tie this intelligence effort to their goals and intended growth strategy.

By providing an outsiders perspective, we were able to help our client generate new insights about where the most attractive growth opportunities were and what capabilities were required to penetrate and develop these opportunities. Additionally, we were able to establish an on-going market intelligence and player tracking system for the client’s corporate strategy group to help them stay up to date with rapidly changing market conditions and the emergence of new unfamiliar technologies.

We identified, framed and validated emerging technologies for the client to consider over the next 3-5 years by providing the company with trends, forces and disruptions. The monthly intelligence tracker then highlighted competitor news and events, to track relative adoption of these emerging technologies over time. Finally, the client leveraged our use case and ecosystem frameworks to determine next steps on integrating these emerging technologies into their existing organizational structure.