Cisco Mobility Services Platform: Enabling Digital Services Solution Overview
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Create digital services faster.
What if you could accelerate your digitization efforts while building compelling new enterprise mobility solutions and services? The Cisco® Mobility Services Platform is the platform of choice to enable differentiated digital services that are automated, powered by APIs, and easily monetizable.
The Cisco Mobility Services Platform delivers capabilities to enable digital services through prepackaged programmable service building blocks and service templates. These capabilities are powered by a services catalog underpinned by APIs, associated data schemas, and internal automation and provisioning workflows. This approach accelerates digitization of service creation and subscriber management, lowering the cost for new services deployment and activation, reducing time to market for such services, and driving a myriad of new use cases and business outcomes.
People, places, and things are more digital and information-hungry than ever before, and this growth is accelerating due to trends such as AI and changes in the way we work. Communication Service Providers (CSPs) must accelerate their own digitization and automation to meet customers where they are and carry them into a digital-first future.
The Cisco Mobility Services Platform provides a digital services enablement framework enabling CSPs to accelerate their journey to being more software-defined, automated, and scalable. The framework brings together a new breed of APIs from Cisco’s market-leading connectivity management platform, IoT Control Center, with the Open API infrastructure from TM Forum and Camara. It combines this with Cisco architecture, leveraging large-scale data management solutions and network orchestration tools to deliver a full-stack set of service-focused and intent-based API technologies to automate and simplify CSP-driven service creation and lifecycle management.
The Cisco Mobility Services Platform provides a digital services enablement framework
Increased service velocity: An API-first service catalog provides templates, bundles, and automation leverage for faster, simpler service creation, testing, and deployment for our CSP customers.
Digitization of service creation: Remove the manual work of creating, deploying, and managing digital services with an API-first, low-touch provisioning model.
Reduced integration complexity and cost: Modern, dynamic service and intent-focused APIs packaged within the digital services framework of the Mobility Services Platform streamline and simplify the services integration lifecycle, removing layers of complexity and operational cost.
New market opportunities: Service providers can explore new go-to-market models such as self-service delivery models for new account creation and onboarding, and provisioning of new SIMs and IoT devices, as well as enabling self-service subscription management for a broad range of mobile data, voice, messaging and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) service plans over any mobile network generation.
Innovation at scale: The Cisco Mobility Services Platform’s digital services framework is built on modular and modern service-focused APIs, allowing for integration with applications built by Cisco and third-party developers. This means CSPs can look beyond their own skill sets to deliver innovation to their customers at enterprise scale.
Enterprise opportunities
CSP growth is slowing, with CTIA citing a 50% reduction in Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) between 2008 and 2022, creating financial challenges for CSPs. This decline is driving innovative CSPs to expand their services to enterprise customers by servicing use cases such as connected cars and a range of smart devices and endpoints, with a global focus on fostering industrial digital transformation.
The result: The complexity of enterprise use cases, the broader requirement of products, and different business models mean CSPs need to look beyond their existing tech stacks to unlock the full promise of their networks for enterprises.
AI and automation
There is an insatiable demand for automation, with 85% of large organizations implementing automation in 2024 (source: The CFO Survey). Fast movers in the telecom industry are already reacting to this trend. The industry is moving toward supporting digitization and broader automation through Open Digital Architecture, and groups such as TM Forum and Camara are helping the industry move toward a more software-defined world.
The result: You need to look at your ability to automate, as well as your ability to accelerate customer automation, while also understanding how your vendors can support your efforts to capitalize on the need for automation and the emergence of AI.
API evolution
Legacy SOAP/REST APIs have been in use for over a decade and, while still effective for a range of traditional tasks, are not sufficient on their own to meet the requirements of the next wave of CSP-scale use cases. TM Forum and Camara are spearheading changes in CSP-grade APIs by building industry-specific standards, best practices, and frameworks such as Open Digital Architecture. These initiatives deliver new levels of standardization, interoperability, and the modernization of APIs tailored to the needs of CSPs in both wireline and wireless network solutions.
In this new paradigm service, APIs serve as more than a software component and are instead a strategic asset that empowers organizations to unlock and capitalize on cost savings and accelerate their time-to-market goals.
The result: This shift will change the way networks can be consumed and managed, highlighting the need for agility and innovation. Adapting to this trend will not only enhance CSPs’ market standing but put them in a position to drive sustainable growth and have a competitive advantage in the digital age.
The impact of tech debt
CSPs need to look deeply at their technology stack to understand whether it can scale to deliver on the complex needs of enterprises. Tech debt created by an abundance of legacy technology is a significant growth inhibitor, as 84% of telecom executives believe that their companies will miss future growth opportunities if they fail to address tech debt (source: Accenture).
The result: It’s difficult to scale with legacy technology. Without the right digital tools, it can be challenging to adapt to market trends and get ahead of changes in customer expectations
The Cisco Mobility Services Platform connects operator Business Support Systems (BSSs) and marketplaces with broader Cisco network functions, orchestration tools, and developer APIs
Enabling digital services
The Cisco Mobility Services Platform digital services framework delivers a purpose-built API-first approach for automating and simplifying service creation and subscriber lifecycle management. It brings together a new breed of APIs from Cisco’s market-leading connectivity management platform, IoT Control Center, with the Open API infrastructure from TM Forum and Camara, plus a unique Cisco architectural platform approach, leveraging large-scale data management solutions and network orchestration tools to deliver a full-stack set of service-focused and intent-based API technologies.
This framework positions the Cisco Mobility Services Platform at the center of service creation and deployment, connecting operator business support systems and marketplaces with broader Cisco network functions (Cisco Session Management Function, User Plane Function, etc.), orchestration tools, and developer APIs.
Framework characteristics
A new approach to integration
The digital services framework delivers an API-first and intent-based approach to service creation and management. It enables the Cisco Mobility Services Platform to offer new methods for accessing a wide range of services through a full-stack breadth of service APIs. Compared to a manual UI or command-line approach, this framework automates services integration and management, reducing the time to value and cost while driving higher service velocity.
Extensible delivery framework
The Cisco Mobility Services Platform digital services framework includes a range of use-case-specific service catalogs that are designed and productized to automate service management across several use cases without the need to retest and revalidate every time a new service feature is created. This allows operators to accelerate the deployment of services and add-ons over time for rich and compelling new use cases.
API-based services management
The framework takes advantage of service and intent-based APIs to create, offer, and monetize services, and to activate these services dynamically. This approach supports service providers’ goals to target new enterprise opportunities and try different go-to-market models, as well as to offer enterprise and consumer/retail user self-service and e-commerce capabilities.
The Cisco Mobility Services Platform includes a range of use-case-specific service catalogs that automates service management
The Cisco Mobility Services Platform enables digital services for a wide set of use cases, including connected things (IoT), connected places (private networks), and connected people (enterprise mobile workers).
These use cases are but a small sample of a much broader range of API-first automation-enabled capabilities of the Cisco Mobility Services Platform. Given our extensible automation and API-enabled framework, we are expanding this list of use cases and business outcomes with each new quarter of ongoing investment into our solution set for our CSP customers.
The Cisco Mobility Services Platform enables digital services for a wide set of use cases
| Use cases |
|
| Connected things |
Connected car Connected utility, smart meters |
| Connected spaces |
Connected factory Asset tracking Secure collaboration |
| Connected people |
Enterprise enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) Consumer eMBB Secure branches, home offices Fixed wireless access |
Built using Cisco’s proven portfolio of 5G, edge, and IoT solutions and cloud innovations, the Mobility Services Platform accelerates the launch of monetized services and use cases. This minimizes risks and costs while maximizing new revenue opportunities across industries like automotive, energy, logistics, and healthcare.
The platform features the world’s first fully automated, cloud-native converged 5G core with distributed edge deployment. This simplifies the evolution from 3G and 4G while eliminating complexity and time barriers. Enterprises gain the visibility and control they need.
Cisco has over a decade of experience enabling IoT solutions. Our industry-leading IoT Control Center is used by 60+ CSPs and 32,000 enterprises to manage connectivity for more than 250 million devices, including over 100 million connected cars.
This unparalleled expertise in both IT and operational technology means that Cisco is uniquely positioned to help CSPs rapidly launch and monetize innovative cellular IoT and enterprise mobility solutions over “Any-G.”
Cisco’s cloud-based Mobility Services Platform addresses the critical roadblocks hindering service providers’ enterprise growth ambitions. By radically reducing complexity and eliminating deployment barriers, the platform empowers operators to rapidly monetize innovative, scalable enterprise mobile connectivity services by leveraging Cisco’s global scale and robust partner ecosystem.
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● The Cisco Mobility Services Platform enables operators to support advanced network service creation and subscriber lifecycle management across IoT, mobile core, and private networks for both enterprise and consumer/retail markets.
● To learn more about more about the Cisco Mobility Services Platform, please visit our website.
● To schedule a demonstration of how the Cisco Mobility Services Platform digital services framework can accelerate your service deployment goals, contact your Cisco sales representative.