Today's marketplace is a challenging one but service providers offering the right help to their enterprise customers are more relevant than ever. Develop your strengths to ensure ongoing prosperity.

A concert pianist spends very little time in the gym bulking up her biceps. And with good reason. What she's great at is playing the piano and that's what offers her the best chance of success. So she spends all of her time practising and improving her dexterity. In short, developing her strengths. The same should be true for service providers.

These are times of great flux, but by playing to your strengths, and receiving help with areas of weakness, you can embrace the new developments shaking up the industry and excel. As a provider and integrator you offer huge value to your customers. All you need to do is keep developing those elements of your business and improving the service you provide.

Play to your strengths

So which aspects of your business can you capitalize on? Here are some to consider:

• Great relationships with enterprise customers
• A carrier-class network. There will be a lot of burnt dinners and unhappy pets if flaky networks stop smart sensors from sending their data. Innovators rely on a robust network
• Central offices (COs) that could become data centers

With the right mix of strategic and technological change, you can build new enterprise offerings based on these assets.

Become an aggregator

Businesses often need a hybrid provider model. You can make things easier for them by becoming an aggregator. Partner with other SPs and vendors to offer services across distributed and centralized models. That way your customers can avoid the hassle of working with multiple providers.

Here's where your COs come into play. Turn them into cloud data centers, and you can offer co-location facilities plus scalable web hosting and other virtual managed services (VMS).

Partner-up and succeed

Ask yourself what you can outsource. Some of your services might be delivered through customer premises equipment (CPE). Others will use the cloud -your own, a cloud provider's or a combination of the two.

Focusing on what you do best, and outsourcing the rest is a great mantra -for you and for your customers. With the right technology and collaborative partnerships,  you can turn challenges into successful new ventures.

To discover how VMS could help you achieve your business objectives, take a look at Bridging the Innovation Gap, an instructive eBook for service providers. And don't miss this video explaining the benefits of Cisco's Cloud IWAN service.