Frost & Sullivan's recent analysis, Growth Opportunities in the Next-Generation Wireless BSS Market, reveals that business support systems (BSS) are necessary to provide the fast-changing requirements in 5G and enhance customer experiences. They also help communication service providers (CSPs) deliver personalized service experiences for consumers and businesses. The research profiles three leading BSS providers and their solutions. Vendors have introduced advanced BSS features, including the ability to support flexible deployments (core and edge) and options for network slice lifecycle management, which are critical in helping CSPs deliver on multi-partner business models. However, due to COVID-19, the global BSS market is estimated to experience a slowdown in the short term, whereas the long-term outlook remains positive.

"It is evident that BSS can significantly drive efforts to help organizations address key concerns such as introducing digital services and enabling customers to personalize their service experience," said Vikrant Gandhi, Senior Industry Director, Information & Communication Technologies at Frost & Sullivan. "However, businesses from across many other industry verticals are still relatively early in their digitization efforts and are facing issues similar to those of CSPs in the early days of their digital transformation efforts."

Gandhi added: "Given the evolving situation, it is more critical than ever for wireless networks to function reliably and support the connectivity requirements across the board. BSS vendors are supporting existing 4G (and earlier generations) network services that currently drive the majority of their revenue. Going forward, while the wireless industry remains a priority for BSS vendors, they are also able to align BSS solutions to meet the needs of communications, financial services, healthcare, and media and entertainment companies, as well as government entities."

Frost & Sullivan firmly believes that BSS vendors can partner with CSPs to create immense growth prospects, including:

• Pioneer new price plans and partner-based business models such as B2B, B2C, and B2B2X for 5G success.
• Introduce AI-driven BSS and customer experience solutions that help CSPs deliver differentiated 5G services.
• Leverage cloud-native principles and support flexible deployments (core and edge) to help operators monetize different features of the network and create new opportunities.
• Implement a robust 5G policy that can set performance characteristics, including Quality of Service (QoS) and latency. With 5G, the policy can control networks and services down to the device level to ensure the best customer experience while managing valuable network resources.

Growth Opportunities in the Next-Generation Wireless BSS Market, 2020 is the latest addition to Frost & Sullivan's Information & Communication Technologies research and analyses available through the Frost & Sullivan Leadership Council, which helps organizations identify a continuous flow of growth opportunities to succeed in an unpredictable future.