Frost & Sullivan: “Massive growth” ahead for 5G enterprise market

Frost - Sullivan's recent analysis, Mega Trends in Asia-Pacific to Drive the 5G Enterprise Market, 2019–2024, finds that mega trends across the government and public sector, healthcare, manufacturing, and telecommunications are posing new challenges to end-users in vertical industries in the region.

These changes are pushing enterprises to transform and enable new use cases that are critical in supporting and optimising enterprise business processes to improve business efficiency.

In addition to impacting mega trends, the COVID-19 pandemic is driving the need for critical and vital broadband, remote work solutions, and 5G to support remote work.

Given the strong demand for connectivity, the potential revenue for 5G enterprises in the region is expected to grow exponentially, reaching US$13.9 billion by 2024 from US$2 billion in 2019, at a staggering 46.4% compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

"5G enterprises in Asia-Pacific are undergoing digital transformation at a more rapid pace to either optimise or enable business processes to keep up with the changing consumer demand," says Frost - Sullivan information and communication technologies research analyst Sofea Zukarnain.

"However, these digital transformation initiatives will add pressure on existing networks, as new solutions will require higher bandwidth and availability to offer the necessary reliability, driving the need for enterprises to transform their network infrastructure. This will boost the demand for 5G enterprise solutions and new enabling technologies such as network slicing and edge computing.

"Network slicing will empower enterprises with end-to-end ownership of a slice of the 5G network that can be used for a specific use case. Further, there are many benefits to utilizing a slice of 5G, including the ability to provide enterprises with better control, management capability, and agility of the network so that it can optimize the usage of the network for enterprises.

5G enterprise solutions have the potential to transform services, applications, and capabilities for enterprises, presenting immense growth prospects for market participants, including:

• Implementing automation to enable an open application programming interface (API), allowing flexibility, manageability, and cost savings.
   
• Utilising edge computing to address the need to handle rising IoT-enabled use cases due to the increasing number of connected devices in the network.
   
• Offering network slicing solutions to meet the demand for more bandwidth offered with SLAs.
   
• Using artificial intelligence to help cognitive engagement to better connect with customers and anticipate their needs and potential problems.

Mega Trends in Asia-Pacific to Drive the 5G Enterprise Market, 2019–2024 is the latest addition to Frost - Sullivan's information - communication technologies research and analyses.