The Challenge Facing Service Providers

Launching innovative enterprise communication services has historically been difficult for service providers. The process is time-consuming, resource-intensive, and slow to produce a return. As a result, many network operators have underutilised their existing assets—including VoLTE infrastructure and mobile subscriptions—when it comes to serving business customers.

That situation is beginning to change. A convergence of major technology shifts is opening up a genuinely new market for cloud-native communication services aimed at business users.

Technology Shifts Creating the Opportunity

Several concurrent developments are reshaping what service providers can offer enterprises:

• 5G: Higher throughput and lower latency enable richer real-time communication services.
• Cloud infrastructure: Microservices architectures allow providers to compose and release new offerings rapidly without rebuilding core systems.
• AI and Augmented Reality: Intelligent automation and AR-enabled workflows become viable for mobile-first businesses.
• IoT: Connected devices expand the communication perimeter well beyond phones and laptops.
• eSIM: Remote SIM provisioning removes friction from onboarding and device management, enabling self-service and automated ‘Try & Buy’ or ‘Multi Device’ scenarios.

Taken together, these shifts create a foundation for next-generation digital transformation and more flexible, mobile-first ways of working—particularly for smaller organisations that cannot afford traditional enterprise IT stacks.

A Framework for Delivering Cloud Communication Services

To capitalise on this opportunity, service providers should consider the following approach:

• Build or enhance turnkey services rather than pursuing fully custom deployments for every client.
• Deliver as a service to achieve scale, reduce time-to-market, and maintain quality-of-service controls without burdening the customer with on-premise infrastructure.
• Expose cloud-based microservices that can be composed into different use cases depending on the customer segment.
• Leverage existing network assets—VoLTE and eSIM infrastructure—rather than building from scratch.
• Prioritise self-service and automation, both for customer onboarding and ongoing service management.

The combination of cloud communication services with automated eSIM provisioning is particularly compelling. It allows business users to activate, manage, and expand their subscriptions with minimal friction—a genuine competitive differentiator for proactive providers.

Three Sales Strategy Steps to Revenue

Technology alone does not create revenue. Service providers also need a focused go-to-market strategy. The following three steps provide a practical framework.

1. Target the Right Client Segment

Business customers can be segmented in several ways:

• By size: Multinational companies (MNCs), large enterprises, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and microbusinesses.
• By industry: Retail, manufacturing, finance, IT, government, and others.
• By IT/communication maturity: How strategically important is technology to the organisation’s operations?

For cloud communication services specifically, the microbusiness segment is worth prioritising first. Microbusinesses are heavily mobile-first, have no in-house IT operations team, and are unlikely to demand fully custom integrations. By contrast, larger SMEs and enterprise organisations with strong internal IT departments often prefer bespoke solutions—which are expensive, slow to deliver, and frequently outdated by the time they launch.

2. Prioritise Convenience Over Feature Depth

For business users who are not IT specialists, convenience is the primary value driver. Effective cloud communication offerings should solve time-consuming and costly communication problems without requiring technical expertise to set up or maintain. When the communication layer just works, employees can focus on their actual business activities rather than managing tools.

3. Minimise the Investment Required from the Customer

Cloud communication services should not require significant upfront capital expenditure from the customer—neither in equipment and systems integration nor in specialist staff. The ‘as a service’ model is critical here: it transforms what would otherwise be a large IT project into an operational expense with a short time to value.

The Microbusiness Market Opportunity

The microbusiness segment is largely untapped when it comes to business-grade communication services. According to the original Ericsson perspective (citing a provider survey and an Ovum B2B demographics report from August 2018 covering North America, Europe, and Australia), approximately 80% of microbusinesses were found to be using consumer-grade subscriptions rather than business packages.

This creates a clear upsell opportunity. If service providers design targeted business packages with self-service onboarding and automation, they can migrate existing consumer subscribers to higher-value plans without significant sales overhead. Initial revenue modelling referenced in the original source suggested incremental revenue potential of roughly €8–€15 per user per month in Western Europe—on top of what microbusinesses already pay for consumer subscriptions.

The scale of the segment amplifies this: the Ovum data referenced approximately 28 million microbusiness enterprises and 52 million employees across the geographies studied. At scale, the addressable incremental revenue opportunity is significant—but capturing it requires automation and smart marketing rather than a large direct salesforce.

Expanding Beyond Microbusiness

A successful microbusiness launch builds the operational foundation—billing systems, self-service portals, eSIM provisioning pipelines—needed to move upmarket. The next logical step is targeting SMEs and larger enterprises, but with an important filter: focus on organisations that are not looking for custom-built solutions. These are businesses that prioritise speed of adoption and operational simplicity over deep integration with proprietary internal systems.

Service providers that establish this progression—from microbusiness to mainstream SME—will be well positioned as cloud communication becomes a standard expectation rather than a differentiator.

Key Takeaways for DevOps and Platform Teams

For engineering and platform teams supporting service providers or building cloud communication products, the practical implications are:

• Design for self-service from day one—automated provisioning, including eSIM, is not optional in a high-volume, low-touch segment.
• Adopt a microservices architecture so that communication capabilities (calling, messaging, conferencing) can be bundled and unbundled per customer segment without full re-engineering.
• Build robust CI/CD pipelines that allow new service bundles to reach market quickly—time-to-market is a primary competitive lever.
• Prioritise observability and quality-of-service controls at the API layer so that service-level guarantees can be contractually offered to business customers.
• Automate billing and subscription management to support the ‘as a service’ model at the scale microbusiness volumes require.

Original perspective: Ericsson (ericsson.com), February 2020.