Private network and enterprise edge deployments are viewed as a vast untapped market that is drawing interest from just about every corner. However, it's also a complicated new arena for enterprise IT decision-makers, which may be slowing the technology's broader adoption.

The market itself has evolved rapidly over the past 18 months, with players from diverse industry segments staking claim to a piece of the private network ecosystem.

Yesmean Luk, principal consultant and practice lead at STL Partners, noted as part of a presentation during the recent Red Hat Open5G event that the current players include traditional network equipment providers, hyperscalers, firms that specialize in vertical and horizontal enterprise connectivity, system integrators (SIs), traditional telecommunication providers and industrial automation providers.

Luk said that each brings its own areas of expertise to the market.

“You have some of the traditional network equipment providers who provide some of the network hardware, software, etc. You've got the hyperscalers, which bring their cloud computing capabilities and increasingly their edge computing capabilities. You've also got some of these more specialist players who manage enterprise connectivity and bring that vertical expertise. You've then got the platform providers as well who provide that horizontal infrastructure platform. You've got SIs who do a lot of the systems integration, provide them the professional services. And you've got a whole host of some of the traditional carriers through to the industrial automation solution providers and the names like Siemens and Bosch,” Luk said.

This number of choices is good for those that need it, but can be daunting for a decision-maker who is tasked with picking a long-term private network path for a large-scale organization. This difficulty is further enhanced by the private network market’s lack of maturity, which means a decision made today could run into a support void tomorrow.

“The big challenge is each deployment pathway then plays to certain strengths and capabilities of the different types of partners, which means, ultimately, ecosystem collaboration is particularly critical here,” Luk said.

Collaboration is beginning to take hold, with operators, vendors and SIs attempting to coalesce around more standardized private network deployment models based on different verticals or horizontal use cases. This is viewed as important as it means processes can be reused, bolstered and easier to manage.

“A lot of what is being driven today is a fair degree of bespoke, and the challenge is that this is not scalable in the long term, particularly for the longer tail of customers,” Luk said. “The ability to be able to leverage other strengths and understand as a partner how do you add value into an overall solution and ultimately focusing on the ease of partnering, putting together solutions and an ease of experience also for the partners and the customers' point of view.”

Analysts have noted that the bespoke nature of initial private network deployments has led to more opportunities for SIs and toward the need for as-a-service models, which could account for half of the market by the end of the decade.

“This underlines that a private cellular network for enterprises is a highly customized deployment that requires a high degree of expertise in integration and orchestration capabilities,” Leo Gergs, senior analyst for private networks and enterprise connectivity at ABI Research, noted in a report. “Consequentially, system integrator capabilities will remain pivotally important for the success of private cellular deployments.”

This bespoke challenge, while lucrative for some, remains a hurdle toward broader private network adoption.

“The only way that we're going to be able to address this market at scale is if we move toward a world where we have more preconfigured, pretested solutions,” Luk said. “Open ecosystems where we are able to pick-and-mix different solutions to package and meet enterprises' specific requirements, whether that be in more horizontal use cases or more capabilities like computer vision. And then tailoring that to things like quality assurance in a manufacturing perspective, or flow monitoring in an oil and gas perspective, or something quite horizontal and applicable to others like security and surveillance, and making sure of ease of use. As I mentioned, this is critical for the customer at the end of the day.”

Beyond the scalability challenge, Luk said it’s important to engage with enterprises to understand what their specific needs and goals are, and let that then guide what type of private network architecture is needed.

“As a result of that, identifying potential trigger points that have particularly stringent use case requirements,” Luk said. “Whether that's around the reliability or the outdoor coverage when it comes to the connectivity point of view, or in many cases is this about regulatory compliance from a health and safety perspective?”

Luk said it was also important to work with enterprises on initial deployments targeted at these “trigger points” to find “stackable use cases” that can further monetize private network deployments.

“What are the other areas of the business and stakeholders that you can support with the existing private network and edge solutions? Also, in this case, factoring in that ecosystem readiness and maturity,” Luk said.