By Adrian Beaudin & Bruce Van Nice, Akamai
Saturation of traditional markets is forcing ISPs to evaluate new strategies to drive revenues while continuing to deliver a superb user experience and improve returns on capital. Differentiating service offerings is critical to achieving these goals. Commodity connectivity doesn’t always motivate subscribers to stay with a service or offer any incentive to pay more for it. Subscriber-facing services that enhance loyalty and increase “stickiness” can help.
Providing managed services and moving up the stack can find a receptive audience amongst business customers. Properly targeted value-add subscriber services can increase ARPU and differentiation and improve retention. But mitigating the costs of this specialty care will drive the use of more efficient, deployment solutions. One of the challenges delivering subscriber services is controlling costs to maintain margins in a world where specialized staff to oversee service deployment and operation are costly and difficult to find. Cloud services deserve consideration to reconcile these conflicting objectives Cloud services can help contain costs and improve service agility (time to market). They’ve become mainstream for enterprises, but ISP service enablement in the cloud is a different proposition than typical enterprise IT applications. This paper will offer perspectives from the developer of a cloud service that enables ISPs to deliver security protections for businesses.