Talking Telecos, Marketplaces and 5G, with executives from Gotransverse, Mirakl, and Matrixx
How telecommunications companies are evolving, what we can expect from 5G, and how marketplaces can become more sticky
When you look down at your phone, do you see a little 5G symbol? Do you know what that means or what kind of service 5G is providing? To take it a step further, if you’re a business owner, are you connected to 5G? Is it helping your company move faster and operate more efficiently?
Whatever the answers to those questions are, the problem remains that many of us, consumers and business owners alike, are still mostly in the dark about what 5G truly is, how it’s different, and why we’re actually only just scratching the surface of what 5G is capable of.
On a roundtable episode of Up Next in Commerce, we dove deep into the mysteries of 5G with Geoff Coleman, Chief Product Officer at Gotransverse, Natasha Sachdeva VP Solutions Engineering at Mirakl, and Olivier Smith, Technology Lead from the Office of the CTO at Matrixx.
“When we think of 5G, we think, oh, we’ve heard 3G, we’ve heard of 4G, so 5G must be pretty much more of the same,” Smith said. “Maybe just stronger, better, faster. And that’s not entirely incorrect, but it’s a very narrow view of it. So it’s actually a lot different. And so one way to look at it is 5G is really the network that’s designed for essentially all things. So you can call it the network for all things.”
We discussed what 5G is and is not, how it’s currently being utilized, and what kind of possibilities will be opened up when 5G is made available in a more widespread manner. But to get there, it’s going to take a lot of partnership with telecom companies, enterprise software businesses, and cloud, platform and marketplace providers.
“There are limits to what ecommerce can do even at scale that it can provide,” Sachdeva said. “So as we go into this, as we think about marketplaces, it’s going to really speed up and bring that agility because there’s this whole network of sellers that can be accessed. There’s a whole host of offers, services that are being offered and provided that you can hook into a marketplace quick and rapidly and then be able to leverage expertise of organizations like Mirakl that have that marketplace experience to be able to build out the bundling of services and products that are needed to consumers quite easily and quite quickly as well.”
Ultimately, what matters most for any company is how the end consumer is being served. This is a key area of focus for all involved.
“Really, to the end customer 5G should be a material,” Coleman said. “What they’re looking for is they’re looking for a product with a service that has possibly some communication component that is carried over the network. And so how do you make that seamless to the buyer? And really that is from the opportunity to make it seamless to the buyer and then to scale that so that you can bring in hundreds, if not thousands, of different products into your marketplace so that you can sell a lot of items.”
To hear more about the future of 5G and how it will be delivered across all industries, tune into Up Next in Commerce.
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