Digital Procurement Trends – Part Three: The Rise of the Digital Marketplace

A new wave of digital resourcing is reshaping the way organizations work. Enterprises are embracing the benefits of digital tools as they take on the challenges and opportunities associated with network procurement. The growing digital revolution is enabling procurement teams to increase performance through better collaboration, analytics, and engagement.

Read part one and part two of our Digital Procurement Trends series to explore theevolution of digitization within the telecommunications industry.

This new approach to sourcing and selling in the telecommunications space is being driven by the digital marketplace which is transforming the entire value chain and making network procurement easier and quicker than ever.

Transforming industries through centralization and digitization

Digital marketplaces bring service providers and enterprise customers together across global platforms where buying and selling can happen in a shared space. Globally, we’ve already experienced fundamental changes in the way organizations operate across a number of industries because of centralization and digitization.

Amazon revolutionized the global retail industry by creating an online marketplace for purchasing anything, anytime. They completely changed the way we experience shopping by taking the existing brick-and-mortar-based approach, and disrupting this through a ubiquitous independent platform while bringing the industry in line with the next generation of consumers.

Amazon created their platform to be globally accessible online, provide on-demand service, and enable a simplified and optimized buying and selling experience. By doing so, they’ve dominated the e-Commerce market. In the month of March 2019, 145.2 million mobile users accessed the Amazon app and as of April 2019, Amazon.com had a total of 119,928,851 products on its platform.

In a similarly disruptive move, Uber launched their digital, on-demand, rideshare platform which propelled the transport industry into a new era, making travel easier than ever before. By centralizing and digitizing the way commuters find, use, and consume transport services, Uber has optimized the ‘taxi’ experience for customers.

On the other side, drivers also have everything they need in one digital space, they can easily connect with their customer base, and the platform empowers them with the flexibility of deciding when and how often they drive.In the third quarter of 2019, Uber’s ridership worldwide reached over 1.7 billion trips and the company generated 11.3 billion U.S. dollars in net revenue worldwide in 2018.

Why are digital marketplaces so effective?

Digital marketplaces and their connected platforms have become an essential part of the business landscape and no longer the domain solely of digital natives. Organizations and end-users now demand the agility, efficiency, and performance that comes from a centralized and digitized marketplace and platform.

At a glance, digital marketplaces are effective in solving the industry challenges faced by enterprises by:

Filling information gaps through a centralized repository for knowledge
Combining individual services and integrating them into a full service offering
Providing on-demand services which save on time and costs
Erasing manual operating efficiencies that slow growth
Enabling a self-serve approach to sourcing goods and services
Accelerating operations for the agile enterprise
Encouraging innovation through heightened performance and efficiency
Bolstering digital transformation

And delivering benefits to service providers by:

Enabling them to develop a larger base of customers at scale
Connecting them with a community of engaged target customers
Allowing them to leverage customer data generated from the platform
Providing data aggregation capabilities to spawn new and adjacent opportunities

Cloudscene’s Marketplace drives digital procurement

Cloudscene is transforming the procurement of telecommunications and cloud through our digital global Marketplace. Businesses are empowered to connect across a neutral platform and fulfil their sourcing and selling requirements in one centralized place. From colocation space to cloud connectivity, our next-generation solution is enabling the discovery of critical network services, and facilitating the process of procuring these, digitally. In doing so, our platform is driving the new wave of digital procurement.

Based on findings from their 2019 ‘Global Chief Procurement Officer Survey’, Deloitte weighed in on the shift to digital procurement, saying, “…while digital transformation is currently de rigueur, procurement can’t do any of this effectively without its talent proactively learning and adopting the most flexible and intuitive technology approaches and tools. As such, the procurement operating model is shifting, not so much toward traditional outsourcing but instead toward more flexible digitally enabled models.”

By enabling businesses in a digital world, Cloudscene’s Marketplace is simultaneously disrupting the internet industry and solving the challenges brought about by traditional processes. The platform was purpose-built for procurement teams to empower businesses with smarter, easier, and faster capabilities so they can make stronger, more informed buying and selling decisions.

Take a deep dive into Cloudscene’s Marketplace and its recent redevelopment in our latest announcement.– –Are you ready to begin your digital procurement journey? Want to search and connect with buyers and sellers of cloud and connectivity services, as well as request quotes within a few clicks? Visit Cloudscene’s independent global Marketplace backed by the world’s most comprehensive source of data centers, service providers, and network fabrics – and get started.