What may surprise service providers is how quickly they will have to transition from merely managing big data to realizing its value in the coming year. Another surprise may be that the secret to realizing that value will be internal initiatives.
Internal data monetization will lead to improved personalization, including proactive customer care and marketing, as well as network optimization and planning.
For the moment, though, external data monetization is probably still the hotter topic, and we can expect to see many service providers leveraging existing data assets to create new revenue sources, such as mobile ads. For instance, Sprint offers a service where hotels, restaurants and casinos are able to identify the different profiles of people around their businesses and target advertising/promotions accordingly.
A third trend is the further growth of virtualization to include network function virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networks (SDN), which refers to implementing a network function on a virtual machine that can run on industry-standard server hardware.
By re-architecting data centers and networks, service providers would be able to save huge amounts of capex by replacing costly proprietary hardware with standardized, less expensive servers. In addition, opex will be reduced, perhaps even more dramatically, because SDNs and NFV will make services and infrastructure more agile and scalable, and thereby less costly to maintain, reconfigure and upgrade.
In 2014, we will see a greater focus and more implementations of NFV and SDNs. Both concepts create a virtual control layer for the network, allowing service providers to save costs and to manage their networks more efficiently.
But that’s not all they can do. A consensus is growing that the more significant impact of virtualization going forward is helping service providers to drive new revenue streams and improve the profitability of old streams. SDN and NFV will enable services that require guaranteed, optimized, end-to-end quality of service, along with high and elastic bandwidth.
A fourth trend is that the enterprise and small-to-medium business (SMB) sector is becoming indispensable. In 2014, service providers will increasingly merge network and IT to provide their SMB and enterprise customers with complex, cloud-enabled services, moving from being a network solution provider to a true ICT player that provides more cloud-based, M2M and software service on top of network and mobile access.