80% of APAC service providers expect 5G to expand enterprise revenue opportunities: Amdocs survey

Nearly 80 percent of APAC telecom service providers expect the introduction of 5G to expand revenue opportunities with enterprise customers of which 9 percent of operators plan to offer 5G services commercially to this sector by the end of 2019, that will increase to 47 percent by the end of 2020, Amdocs survey said.

"Operators of 5G networks can support mission-critical enterprise communications, with a performance backed by service-level agreements," commented John Delaney, Associate VP of Mobility Research at IDC.

Delaney said, "Our research shows that mobile operators are optimistic about the potential for 5G to support an expansion of their role in the enterprise market."

According to the survey, most operators in APAC are optimistic that they will be able to leverage early 5G deployments to enhance existing enterprise services, such as Fixed-mobile convergent (FMC) communications, fixed-mobile substitution (FMS), unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN).

Operators in APAC have identified manufacturing as the sector that offers the most revenue potential for 5G.

This is closely followed by government and public sector in second place, while automotive and manufacturing jointly occupy the third spot. These players will be exploring new routes to market for rolling out 5G services to businesses, with over 41 percent planning to leverage strategic partnerships, specifically to cultivate a 5G ecosystem by constructing a platform for industry verticals to experiment with 5G business models.

"The survey clearly demonstrates that operators see 5G as a means to restore value around core connectivity services for business customers," said Matthieu Loreille, VP Head of Consumer, Enterprise, and Technology Marketing at Amdocs.

"Furthermore, by leveraging additional technologies such as artificial intelligence, edge computing, and hybrid cloud, operators will be strongly positioned to support enterprises in their digital transformation journey. Effectively, this enables them to shift connectivity to the heart of their solutions with meaningful value-added services on top such as cybersecurity, cloud migration, hybrid cloud operations and many more," Loreille said.

Regarding Network as a Service (NaaS), Loreille added, "5G, together with complementary technologies such as cloud, network softwarization, virtualization, and automation will make this service a reality for business customers. This will enable them to build their own networks, aided by intuitive self-service portals that enhance the enterprise digital customer experience. But it is against this background that the diversity of 5G-enabled service offerings and new ways of consuming them will stretch the IT supporting stack, meaning that in many cases, they will need to be gradually modernized."