Amazon, Airbnb, Uber….. Weaver Labs
Marketplaces in a Digital Age…is the Telecoms Industry next?
Digital Marketplaces have already been around for more than 20 years and have now become an essential part of the consumer journey across the world. Companies such as Amazon, Uber and Airbnb have showcased in their respective industries how the marketplace model can transform and disrupt industries for the better.
- Amazon: Changed the way people shop, taking over a huge part of the retail industry.
- Airbnb: Changed the way people live abroad or on holiday, causing a huge decline in hotel stays.
- Uber: Changed the way people book cabs, popularising ride-sharing as an effective form of transportation, drastically reducing the demand for taxi cabs.
Having said this, even though business-to-business platforms exist in many industries, there are other industries such as Telecoms where online marketplaces have yet to make an impact to nearly the same degree.
Can Weaver Labs transform the telecoms industry and disrupt the connectivity market? We believe we can and whilst you continue to read this article you may understand why that is. Alternatively you might not and you may have multiple questions bouncing around; and if that is the case, feel free to get in touch.
Before we delve deeper, it is important to explain what exactly is a B2B Marketplace…
A B2B marketplace is an online procurement network that allows an approved group of suppliers to offer products to an approved group of buyers. The decision on who is approved to do business in the marketplace can be made by a marketplace operator or can be decentralised through a blockchain governance layer. The operator sets rules on what can be purchased, by who, and at what price, enabling procurement decisions to be automated. Whether you’re a supplier or a buyer, using an online B2B marketplace should be as easy as using any online shopping platform. Suppliers should be able to market their products at a low cost and find new buyers from around the world.
Some benefits of the B2B Marketplace include; customer acquisition, competition increases supplier transparency and quality whilst also reducing costs, supplier awareness, flexible purchasing, smart contracts, management tools, data analytics & more. Some marketplaces even provide additional technical services to adapt to industry requirements in order to provide flexibility, better information, insurance, legality and other key services.
In some traditional industries such as Telecoms, there may be concerns about trust, expectations and reliability that make business leaders reluctant to change their long-standing reliance on dealing directly with suppliers but one should also ask; why would a business leader want to change these siloed relationships that have taken so many years to build?
- These long-term relationships limit ability to explore new business models and new opportunities
- Digitalisation requires flexibility and agility in order to keep ahead of industry trends
- New players that are innovating to solve industry problems and provide highly valuable services need exposure and access to the market
Surely the opportunity to be provided with more choice and options, digital and analytic tools and instantaneous data can help you make better decisions? Opening new avenues for businesses to generate value in areas outside their traditional focus has shown to have an impact on the financial projections and we believe this will be the case in industries such as Telecoms.
B2B Marketplaces offer access to a wide pool of vendors operating under a wide range of business models and providing a wide variety of services. This can include the incumbent vendors or the smaller & newer vendors — you have the choice to pick the suppliers that work best for the service you require them for. In some industries, you need to work with multiple vendors to fulfil a service; so surely it would be ideal if a marketplace could glue all these services together and transform these bilateral agreements into smart contracts which are more seamless and potentially automated. This would benefit the service you need to provide and even save you resources, time and financial costs.
Marketplaces give companies a possibility to have a more diverse supply chain that is resilient, flexible and scalable. In industries such as Telecoms, supply chain diversification is part of the UK Government strategy. The UK Government sees the undeniable importance of having more vendors in the ecosystem- so that the industry can accelerate and grow more rapidly; and more innovators can participate across the Supply chain in order to increase resilience. Increasing participation from new players will challenge business models and operations but this will more importantly create new business models and opportunities to grow the industry beyond the current ecosystem to new markets such as Industry 4.0.
The Telecoms industry requires more transparency and diversity in the supply chain; particularly since increasing demand for networks means that more suppliers are needed to bridge the supply chain gap in order to meet these demands. Building networks with a plug and play approach is flexible and cost-effective but also provides Cyber security risks that will become even more prevalent as business operations across industries become virtualised. This is an important reason why a marketplace gives consumers more transparency in the supply chain as key information and data points can be easily processed to help consumers choose the best suppliers for their network requirements. Furthermore, by increasing the number of investors in infrastructure this helps diversify the supply chain and provide opportunities for new players to contribute network resources into a shared pool of assets; this may help bring in innovative players that can transform the industry.
New applications are constantly appearing for example, smart traffic lights, IoT sensors and general smart city applications — but the status quo isn’t cut out to handle these diverse range of applications on top of connectivity networks. New networks are needed to meet the requirements for these new use cases to provide the reliability and accuracy that they depend on.
At Weaver Labs we aim to help solve these problems by enabling competitiveness and agility through the use of our connectivity marketplace. The marketplace will aggregate network infrastructure creating a more competitive, agile and dynamic pool of service offerings to the applications (mentioned above) that want to ride on top of a network. The Weaver Labs technological solutions orchestrate network services and act as a decentralised infrastructure manager to allow openness and diversity in the connectivity/telecoms supply chain. This accountability model would be known as the brokerage model where the marketplace connects buyers and vendors, but offers limited, if any, warranties or responsibility for the transaction as buyers transact and contract directly with vendors.
Our goal is to increase the number of infrastructure providers in the connectivity markets and we believe that a marketplace will be the best model to use in order to provide this service.
Author: Keyu Sumaria, Project Associate at Weaver Labs
