For the passed two years in helping operators and suppliers innovate around the concept of the Telco API, I've built a list of web / voice / telco 2.0 application developers that could benefit from the Telco API.  Currently the list is at about 800 companies, but it's always under revision as there is significant churn, consolidation, and new companies being added.  The list is in no way a complete picture of the relevant application developer landscape, just a continuous work-in-progress.  Attached is a sample of the web / voice / telco 2.0 list which shows the companies alphabetically.  The Category and Rating sections are simply methods I use for selecting and prioritizing the list based upon specific customer needs.  I've learned through painful experience its critical to keep the categories and ratings simple to avoid the list becoming burdensome to use and manage.

Defining the categories:

• Context Based, services that use presence, location or other customer contextual information, for example location based services such as geo-tagging pictures;
• Business, services focused upon the business segment, for example business messaging;
• Social, services that create a community of users that share, for example mobile communities;
• Financial, services including mobile payments and banking, this was introduced because of several specific project needs;
• Entertainment, services that present content to customers, e.g. internet TV;
• Voice 2.0, services generally focused upon embedding voice/communications into everyday activities or using VoIP for cheap calling, for example voice to text; and
• Telco 2.0, services generally focused upon innovation within the service provider business model.

The categories can be combined, so for example you can search for applications that are both context based and business; or social and entertainment and voice 2.0.

Defining the ratings:

• Viable, objective criteria (funded, listed, profitable) and opinion (gut-feel on company and position in category) on the company's viability;
• Cool, objective criteria (clear market segment) and opinion (gut-feel on application's potential) on the application's value to customers; and
• Telco Value, objective criteria on value proposition to an operator.

The ratings provide a simple method to prioritize potential lists of application developers.

As an example, say you want to find a list of the Voice 2.0 application providers, just select the Voice 2.0 category and a rather long list emerges:
Spinvox, Utterz, Angel.com, Funkycall, Call Genie, Gearon (Fidg't), Backflip software, BlueNote Networks, Fring, Goog411, ifbyphone, Jaduka, Parus Interactive, Ringcentral, Rminder, Sitòfono, Snapvine, Evoice, Iotum, Phonetag (nee Simulscribe), Razz, Ribbit, Robocal, Sightspeed, Talkr, Tokiva, Vbuzzer, Youmail, Blabberize, Enablr, Evoca, Gabcast, Gaboogie (Lypp ), Springdoo, Trixbox, Truphone, V4s (Orb), Vapps, Cellity, Cubic Telecom / MAXroam, JAHJAH, Jaxtr, Saynow, Thinkingvoice, Voicequilt, Voicethread, Vopium, Voxbone, WaxMail, Yoomba, Challenger mobile, EQO, Gizmo5, Hullo, MobileMax, Morodo / MO-Call, Pheeder, PhoneGnome, TalkPlay, Tpad, TringMe, Truphone, Velophone, Vephone, Vyke, WiFiMobile, Yodio, Allfreecalls, Barablu, Blobber, Blogtalkradio, Ether, Gizmo, Mobivox, Resellular, Talkety, Talkster, Voipdiscount / Voipcheap, Yackpack, Zozoc, Callthefuture, Juvino, Talktrust (Numbr), Wizzl, Yeigo, and Phonefromhere.

Or say you want a list of mobile payment / banking application providers, just select the Financial category and review the list to give:
3Bill, Mfoundry, PayMate.In, Clairmail, Firethorn, Frontstream Payments, Obopay, C-Sam, gWallet, Monetise, More Magic Solutions, Paypal Mobile, Splashdata, Textpayme, Upaid, Valista, Zong, Ixaris, Mi-Pay, Payment One, Sermepa, Fe-Mobile, Paypoint, Payter, Icache, Paymate, and Kuscash.

As I mentioned at the start of this entry the web / voice / telco 2.0 list is a work in progress, if you see any gaps or errors please let me know, thanks.

At the start of April I wrote about the consolidation in the service management space and the major trends of:

• Consolidation of functionality.  Just like enterprise IT, as mature functions are subsumed.  For example, once upon a time a service provider would buy a VoIP fulfillment platform, now multi-service fulfillment is the norm.
• Emergence of managed solutions.  This is coming more from the Service Delivery side of the competitive landscape.  Rather than buy a license and pay an SI, we're starting to see solutions (particularly in self-service) being managed by the technology provider on behalf of the service provider; which saves costs for the operator and the technology supplier, especially for those with scale.
• Consolidation of companies.  The 'big guys' like Oracle and IBM have recently bought some of the medium-sized suppliers; but we're also seeing consolidation amongst the medium sized suppliers, e.g. Sigma Systems buying C-Cor, and Subex buying Syndesis, as they race to achieve scale.
• Best of Breed components do not generate a Best of Breed system.  Tier 2/3 markets have generally focused upon all-in-one solutions because of limited scale and cash.  Tier 1 operators have generally implemented a 'best of breed' component approach.  However, as we've seen in several cases, which I'll not name here, having a kitchen full of Michelin chefs does not necessarily result in a meal worthy of a Michelin star.
• Strong push with most operators to control their escalating BOSS spend on both legacy and new services.

Since that article we've seen the follow consolidation:

• Amdocs is buying Jacobs Rimmel for approximately $45 million in cash;
• Sonus bought Atreus for a rumored $25m (unclear if its cash or stock as terms were not disclosed);
• Comptel bought Axiom for $7m GBP cash ($14m);
• Alcatel Lucent is buying Motive for $67.8m in cash; and
• NEC is buying NetCracker Technology,in a reported $300 million deal.

I thought by the end of this year I'd need to update the small-medium fulfillment landscape, however, with the above 5 deals being announced within 3 months, I'm updating sooner than I expected.  Generally these smaller companies have exited into the larger telecom network equipment providers or telecom software solution providers.  What will be interesting to see over the coming months is whether some of the medium sized suppliers in this space can merge and create a long-term viable independent business necessary for sustained innovation and price competition, or will they all just exit into the 'big guys.'

The VPF has become a must-attend conference for anyone focused on service innovation in telecoms, with over 200 attendees this year, its certainly bucking the trend we're seeing in conferences closing.  This conference brings together a diverse mix of the telecom value chain: the IP Exchange and data center providers (Terremark, Telx, CRGWest); innovative applications that have a communications bias (Fonolo, Vidtel); traditional mobile, fixed and broadband operators (Rogers, Orange, Telecom Italia, Verizon, Swisscom); service layer suppliers (Oracle, Telcordia); enterprise communication service providers and integrators (Backflip, ifbyphone); and good mix of the Voice 2.0 leading lights (jahjah, Jaxtr, Tom Howe).

Keynote Session was from Gary Kim.  Bottom-line was the major transformation facing Operators is changing business models.  Simply witness the focus on bundling, advertising, exposing capabilities to applications (Telco API), etc.  

Telecoms in Uncertain Times Session.  Mike Lee (CSO Rogers) captured the essence of the discussion with his three points.  The move from commoditized linear TV (broadcast) to on-demand, the culture change to open and real-time; and the critical importance of regulation to foster innovation through market forces.  Mike's point of the cable operator's focus away from commoditized broadcast highlights a perplexion a feel with mobile operators who focus on broadcast TV.

There was also an interesting discussion on why the US is relatively low on the broadband league tables.  In my opinion it's simply due to inadequate US regulation on LLU (Local Loop Unbundling) pricing that stifled new entrant broadband ISPs in the US, which have been a driving force of innovation in markets such as the UK and France.  However, on the flip-side of that issue is it has enabled Verizon to roll-out FiOS, so for about $100 I get triple play (hundreds of channels including on-demand HDTV, broadband (20/5 Mbps) and good old fixed line voice (which I still use as its good quality and reliable). If I compare this bundle to UK prices, its a fair deal.  That last point on good old fixed line voice was also raised by Gary Kim, he stated that he's changed his mind on voice, it is not a commodity, because mobile voice, Skype voice and PSTN voice are different, and the use cases are starkly different.

Carrier Hotels Session (Internet exchanges, interconnect (meetme rooms) and data centers).  These guys are witnessing the confluence of the internet going video, the flattening of the internet (as content providers connect directly to networks) and the explosion of SaaS (Software as a Service).  It's interesting to note the background of some of the exchanges, one with a property management background explained that they get $4-5 per sqft when they rent to people; and $30-50 per sq ft when they rent to computers.  The focus of this industry is concrete, AC, power and interconnect.  These exchanges provide a possible point for operators to interconnect their service delivery capabilities.

My session on Telco 2.0 and Web 2.0: making Money Together? brought together Telcom Italia, Oracle, Swisscom and Orange.  Francesco Fraccalvieri focused upon describing NexTIM, their website for exposing new services for their '360 degree innovators,' their early adopters.  Ty Wang, Oracle reviewed their experiences across both operators and application developers, highlighting the importance and challenges of exposing customer profile information and charging.  Stefan Kuentz, Swisscom described both their consumer and business experiences in exposing capabilities.  Asha Vellaikal, Orange described their broad range of activities across Orange's Widget, picture sharing and OpenID APIs, which are now coordinated through the Orange Partner site.  

The discussion demonstrated the proactive approach operators are taking to foster service innovation, but highlighted the dichotomy of operators taking an approach focused on protecting customer sensitivities and experimentation; while application developers are focused upon speed to cash and the freedom to innovate.  This brought up the role of application aggregators such as uLocate, which can play an important role in managing this dichotomy.  The issue on how the diverse operator initiatives can be aligned to present a common front to application developers was left unanswered.  However, I'll take this issue up on a later weblog entry.

Voice Mashup Session: provided some specific real-world applications from ifbyphone, Jaduka, Jaxtr and Backflip on how communications can be embedded into business processes and everyday activities.  For example, improving the accuracy of lead generation for new car sales.  Many of these required customization to the specific enterprises requirements.  This raise the important role local SIs (System integrator) and how carriers need to expose capabilities that SIs/VARs can use for the SMB segment.  Here BT's relationship with RingCentral provides a small but useful proof-point.

Overall the VPF was a pleasant surprise, it presents a cost effective event to meet the main players across the ecosystem of communication service innovation.

Reviewing the financial reports of many mobile operators shows a similar story in how their costs breakdown.  There's roughly an 80:20 split between operational (80%) and capital (20%) expenditure.  Capital expenditures cover the amortized investment in the licenses and building the network infrastructure.  The bulk of a mobile operator's costs are operational expenditures, hence the importance of EBITDA (Earnings before Interest, Tax, Depreciation and Amortization) as a metric of an operator's financial performance; generally in the 25-35% range.

The operational expenditures breakdown into roughly:

• 40% Marketing and sales, building the brand, paying for all those TV adverts, sponsorship, subsidies on phones, etc;
• 25% Interconnect, cost of calls terminated on other operators, generally a regulated cost structure;
• 20% Technical operations; and
  
• 15% Other costs covering customer care, offices, etc.

Diving into Technical Operations in a little more detail, it roughly breaks down three ways between:

• 7% Transport, most mobile operators have to rent E1s or T1s from incumbent carriers.  As mobile broadband grows, operators need to find ways to have this cost grow in line with revenue not data volume;
• 7% People, hot topic and the focus of outsourced network operations a roughly $10B business, which is about breaking down organizational silos to enable better teamwork, removal of redundancy and leveraging economies of scale; and
• 6% Other (maintenance and site leasing), here we see suppliers being squeezed on maintenance contracts and options such as site sharing.

Other hot topics such as LTE (Long Term Evolution) and Flat IP are really about managing the longer term capital investment as data traffic grows.  But the part of the financial analysis I've not mentioned yet is the revenues.  A tougher nut to crack than managing costs, but nonetheless the biggest number in the financial reports, and one that is most open to competition.  Hence, just using the raw numbers in an operator's financials to weight the priorities; revenue maintenance / growth should be as important as all the cost saving measures combined.

Survival is the mother of innovation.  As customer behavior, rather than technology and competition, significantly impacts a service provider's business, threatening the core revenues; the Telco API (Application Program Interface) is one method for operators to foster innovation on their networks.  The Telco API enables operators to expose capabilities from their networks such as location, presence, charging, authentication, etc.  Based upon twelve studies [Reference 1] performed with operators around the world, the Telco API has the potential to raise ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) by 36% across operator branded, co-branded and third party services.

Just exposing the Telco API is not good enough; operators must implement an application developer community (innovation community).  Making it easy for applications to get on the operator's network, easy to be discovered by early adopter customers, and all within an easy to use community tool that enables continuous application development to get the 'recipe right' for the local market.  Based upon extensive market surveys on forty developer communities six corner-stones of community success are identified [Reference 2]:

• Known the Audience: identify and build a strong relationship with the innovators;
• Tools and Education: there's never enough sample code;
• Communications and Marketing: Sell your best geeks, others will follow;
• Metrics linked to business performance;
• Business Model baked into the API; and
• Integration into the operators' core processes - the innovation community is owned by the CEO.

After building the brand and the network, the application developer community (innovation community) is the next most important leg of an operator's business.

Full text of the "Opening Up the Soft Service Provider: The Telco API" paper.

Technology Appraisals, a consultancy based in the UK, has recently completed a comprehensive global study on "Low Cost & Mobile VoIP."  The study profiles 30 new mobile players in detail and gives summary tables, illustrations and comparisons. It provides a clear picture of who is in this business, where they come from, where are they operating, who is backing them, and what is on offer.

I maintain a list of about 700+ Web/Telco 2.0 application companies, which includes the low cost and mobile VoIP players, and this report showed I'd missed several, so it's definitely comprehensive.  The providers evaluated include Barablu, cellity, Challenger Mobile, Cubic / MAXroam, EQO, fring, Gizmo, iSkoot, JAJAH, Jangl, jaxtr, mig33, MiNO, MobileMax, MOBIVOX, Morodo / MO-Call, Nimbuzz, PhoneGnome, Raketu, Rebtel, Skype, TalkPlus, Talkster, Tpad, TringMe, Truphone, Velofone, Vyke, WiFiMobile, and Yeigo.

About two years ago I did a report on a "Market Assessment of VoIP Bypass Roaming and Operator impact / Proposition: Regulations, Tariffs, Deployment Options / Feasibility, Market Feedback, Operator Business Case, and Operator Impact Analysis / Proposition."  As mobile broadband is now taking off we're entering a phase where the opportunities for "low cost and mobile VoIP" are increasing.  

As roaming rates increase for those outside the EU.  For example, Informa Telecoms and Media claims that in general roaming charges have risen by around 163% since the EU capped rates at 0.49 euros a minute for making calls and 0.24 euros for receiving them within the EU.  The attractiveness of these services increases.  An analogy is frequently drawn between these companies and Skype, in that it did not significantly impact the landline market, because of the inconvenience of being at the PC and have a headset connected; and to the recent failures of Jangl and TalkPlus compound this view.  As always the obvious takes longer to happen than we think, mobile access to the internet "was going to happen in 2000," and 8 years later its just taking off.  With start-ups they only have about 2 years to wait for the market, after which time the investors pull the plug.  So such failures are part of the innovation process, as investors place bets on when the market will take off.

However, given the smarts of a mobile phone and laptop, the applications can become 'hidden' from the user experience, i.e. I just select a contact in my address book and call, then the application makes the decisions behind the scenes on how the call is made.  All I see are greatly reduced roaming rates.  We're already witnessing niches adopting these applications, particularly families that are spread across several countries, small and medium sized companies with operations in several countries, and of course students.  As the usability issues become transparent to the core use case of "select contact and press green button," it will be interesting to see if these niches are able to drive into a broader segment of business customers that can impact operators into action.

Sigma Systems' first User Conference (June 4th-6th, Barton Creek Resort), explored the next generation of consumer and business oriented services, including insight and discussion around emerging trends and technology developments in the following areas:  targeted advertising, evolution of commercial VoIP & data services, global deployments in mobile broadband services, evolution to on-demand services, converged applications over video networks, data and multimedia services and IT back-office transformation.  In the OSS Consolidation article I included Sigma Systems in the Service Fulfillment Landscape.

At the user conference I ran the panel session "Where's the Mobile Industry Going?" with John Namovic, Managing Partner at Deloitte; and Wedge Greene, Industry Guru.  The session's objective was to help the audience understand how mobile is going broadband from those working on the 'bleeding edge' of the mobile industry. Providing a comprehensive global overview of the mobile operator's evolution to broadband; including network evolution, new services and applications, emerging business models (MNO vs. MVNO), and review of important lessons learned.  In particular we'll be reviewing mobile broadband services, evolution to LTE (Long Term Evolution), xVNO economics (Virtual Network Operator (where x = mobile, fixed, converged and possibly even cable)), and FMC (Fixed Mobile Convergence) successes and failures.

Summary of panel discussion:

LTE Summary
1) What is Long Term Evolution (LTE)?  

• Also know as 4G, LTE is an OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) radio system that can flexibly use radio spectrum, rather than the restrictive paired 5 MHz spectrum of old mobile radio systems.  In a 10MHz slot you could see 100-150 Mbit/s of capacity, though it's not much more spectrally efficient than HSPA+ (High Speed Packet Access).  See my Mobile World Congress 2008 article for a discussion on HSPA+.  The big advantage LTE has over WiMAX is global volume; LTE will be adopted worldwide, with DoCoMo and Verizon Wireless leading the way.  LTE also includes some useful operational features, but I'll not go into that here.

2) What are the operator's drivers to adopt LTE?  

• Utilize new frequency bands being auctioned, for 3GPP and 3GPP2 at 1.7 GHz, 2.1 GHz and 2.6 GHz. 
  
• Finally use unpaired (TDD) spectrum resources.
• CDMA operators with no future upgrade path can use LTE in existing spectrum to provide increased capacity and new services. 
  
• GSM operators without 3G licenses can use LTE to upgrade the network.
• Fixed network replacement in rural areas could use LTE. 
  
• Mobile operators HSPA coverage can use LTE selectively, building as the network needs to grow.

3) When is LTE likely to happen?

• Verizon and DoCoMo will likely have a commercial launch in 2010. 
  
• For the rest of the world, HSPA+ will be a significant impediment to LTE adoption, as well as the change-out in the core network required.  So LTE will likely be delayed until 2011-2013.

4) What should a CableCo do?

• Verizon realizes that global volumes matter, and is moving away from its "CDMA island' to LTE. 
  
• WiMAX makes sense in developing nations that lack a copper infrastructure to provide voice and mid-band internet access.  However, a lack of spectrum co-ordination leads to the creation of lots of 'WiMAX islands.' 
  
• For a MSO with spectrum, WiMAX is the only game in town at the moment, though wait 3 years and there will be a global standard that leverages global volumes which is critical for CPE cost management. 
  
• Recommendation for MSOs is to focus on what your customers want: the battle is video as Verizon and AT&T enter the market.  The mobile part of a quad play will become important in the US market (all those shared minutes plans), the battle isn't there yet and an MVNO could be a stop-gap.  Perhaps it makes sense to wait for LTE, than bet on the "son-of-LMDS/MMDS."

FMC Summary (not covered in session)
1) What is FMC?

• The most successful FMC service by far is the mobile phone, if by FMC you mean Fixed Mobile Conversion.  When consumers have unlimited nights and weekend minutes, FMC offers little benefit.  So let's take an enterprise centric perspective, there are 4 approaches to FMC:

1. The handset centric dual-mode approach where the enterprise replaces the mobile network with short-range radio (WiFi, DECT or Bluetooth) in the office.   They retain the mobile network for off-premises mobility.
2. The enterprise uses signaling and/or VPN (Virtual Private Network) functionality to give it more control over call routing and costs.
3. The mobile operators' favorite, is the substitution approach.
4. An evolution from (c) is the inclusion of femtocells in the office network, generally to offload some of the mobile traffic from its own backhaul network.

2) What are an operator's drivers to adopt FMC?

• For a fixed line operator as an attempt to stop fixed line revenue erosion, e.g. BT Fusion.
• For US mobile operators to manage indoor coverage, e.g. Sprint's AIRAVE femtocell trial.
• For a mobile operator it's to offload traffic from its backhaul network (femtocell).

3) What is happening with FMC today?

• For consumer: BT Fusion has failed, Sprint's AIRAVE (Femtocell) is still in trial after 9 months, though Orange Unik is achieved success with 500k+ customers.
• For enterprise: Most enterprises view the 'integration' and 'dual mode' approaches as unproven technologies.  When IT decision makers think convergence, it isn't about FMC; their convergence perspective is around voice and data (IP telephony).

4) What should a CableCo do?

• FMC has struggled as the benefits do not accrue to the customer; the benefits mainly accrue the operator.  So any FMC voice or internet access service must be transparent to the customer before they'll take off.  However, there are a range of FMC services that are gaining traction, for example Slingbox: watching my cable service on my PC or mobile when I'm away from home.  Accessing my home DVR from my mobile or laptop to record a program a colleague just mentioned while I'm in the office.  Home security service (e.g. home WiFi camera) enabling secure remote access from a PC or my mobile.  The list goes on...  What these services have in common is allowing me to do something new that I could not imagine doing 10 years ago and has value to me.  10 years ago I could call from home, and FMC has not changed that, only made it a little more complex and frustrating when I thought I was on the home hub, but instead was on the mobile network, so my international call cost $5 rather than 50c so I've got to waste an hour with a CSR (Customer Service Representative)...
• Recommendation for MSOs: Only use FMC for the basic services when it's completely transparent to the customer (and that includes handset range).  Focus upon new services that leverage cable's unique position in people's lives, cable = video.

A mobile broadband Tipping Point has been reached: HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) is 'good enough' for customers and prices have fallen by a factor of 16 in less than two years.  Three UK (H3G UK) now offers mobile broadband prepay, 10 GBP ($20) buys up to either 1GB or 1 month of access, and its prepay so for regular travelers are no longer subjected to the extortionate 15 GBP ($30) per night internet access charges at UK hotels.  Specifically on the 'factor of 16' data point using Three UK as an example, in '06 the price per MB was 8p/MB, it is now 0.5p/MB (contract package 15 GBP per month for 3GB).  Mobile broadband is growing faster than any previous service, including voice.  Operators are talking about annual subscriber growth rates of over 400%, in one case 100% per month!  It reminds me of the good old 'mobile-gold-rush' days in the '90s, and aren't we supposed to be in a recession?  Mobile Broadband is generally a USB HSPA modem connected to a laptop.

However, the problem is this has happened at the same time as two other trends:

• The internet has gone 'video,' so data traffic is growing exponentially on these broadband ISPs; and
• Computing has gone personal; laptop penetration in some countries is close to 40%.  As data points: the Asus Eee laptop costs between $300-$400, and there will be roughly 40 million laptops sold this year in both the US and Western Europe.

In the UK, the BBC iPlayer is causing fixed broadband ISPs (Internet Service Provider) to complain, customers are now regularly consuming multiple GB per month through their ISP, most of it watching video.  Also new internet-connected HD (High Definition) devices such as the Sony PS3 provide access to games demos and video trailers (all available for free to the customer) where one demo often requires >1GB of data.  The fixed broadband ISPs are now revisiting their network economics.  

For Mobile Operators they the advantage at the moment that customers do not yet expect 'unlimited' mobile broadband access, so the 1, 3 and 7GB limits are not yet a significant deterrent.  However, even with such limits and customers now more readily filling those limits, hence mobile operators must change their network economics from 1c per MB to 0.1 c per MB.  Note, a typical smart phone uses about only 10MB of data per month on average, so laptop access has the potential to increase usage per device by a factor of 100!   The average mobile data bit rate per subscriber was about 10 kbit/s per session, a fixed broadband ISP's average was 25 kbit/s ('07).  Fixed broadand ISPs are estimating their average rate will grow to 70 kbit/s by (2010 or 2011).  The driver as mentioned before is video consumption over HTTP, iPlayer (P2P video), P2P (Peer to Peer protocol) sharing, Sony PS3 downloads, etc.

This tipping point creates a number of opportunities.

On the services side:

• The Mobile web is not just about smart-phones; it's about mobile laptops.  The web is not just about desktop PC access, it's about mobile laptop access.  The use cases are different, hence the opportunities.
  
• With Bluetooth coming as standard in most laptops sold in Western Europe the opportunities for VoIP bypass are significant.  But it will be interesting to see what substitution really takes place.  It can not replace my mobile phone, but it could help save me a few dollars for expensive international calls when I'm settled at a coffee shop.
• Those places where people sit and wait: train stations and trains, coffee shops, airports, in the back of the car, etc. will be far more likely to have sophisticated internet devices connected.  Presenting opportunities in customer service, customer retention, marketing, ways of selling and doing business.
• For enterprises this also changes the mobile office, enabling greater transparency and security of enterprise applications.
• And as discussed at length in other articles on this weblog, provides new opportunities for the Telco API to enhance the web experience of those mobile laptops.

On the network side:

• The core network of mobile operators is going to need to flatten, and do so quite rapidly.
• The backhaul network in mobile operators is already a well covered topic, announcements between O2 and BT show the solutions being adopted.
• HSPA+ is required not for speed, but for the capacity it offers to meet demand in high traffic zones.  HSPA+ was discussed in my Mobile World Congress Summary.
  
• The usual device delays that 3G and HSPA has suffered, may not impact LTE (Long Term Evolution) as greatly as its first application may not be a smart-phone, rather a USB mobile broadband modem powered from the laptop.

I would like to thank Jeroen Visser from BT for his suggestion of this article to explain SOA, SDP and IMS; and then explain how they fit together.

Service Oriented Architecture Defined

SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) has emerged as a successful integration framework for BOSS (Business and Operational Support Systems) within operators.  We are now witnesses that success driving SOA into the services layer of operators.  But what is SOA?

SOA is just an evolution of distributed computing and modular programming.  It's an IT (Information Technology) architecture (note, it does not specify the technology for its implementation) enabling the creation and execution of business processes, packaged as services, throughout their lifecycle.  The promise of SOA is that the marginal cost of creating the nth application is near zero, as all of the software required exists to satisfy the requirements of other applications. Only orchestration is required to produce a new application.  From a telco perspective it's a flexible architecture that enables service innovation, mass customization and leverages an IT standard, avoiding yet another expensive 'telco-special.'

SOA defines the IT infrastructure to allow different applications to exchange data to form business processes, e.g. a "new employee set-up process" that could require services from multiple IT platforms, ordering of equipment (e.g. phone, mobile and PC), etc. SOA separates these functions into distinct units "services," which can be distributed over a network and can be combined and reused to create new business applications, e.g. "temporary employee set-up process." These services communicate with each other by passing data from one service to another, or by coordinating an activity between two or more services.

OASIS (the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) defines SOA as the following:
A paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains. It provides a uniform means to offer, discover, interact with and use capabilities to produce desired effects consistent with measurable preconditions and expectations.

Services are unassociated units of functionality, which have no calls to each other embedded in them.  This causes some confusion from a telco perspective as services are what customers pay for, so the term SOA services is often used to differentiate from end-customer services. SOA services typically implement functions such as filling out an online application for an account, viewing an online bank statement, or placing an online booking or airline ticket order. Instead of services embedding calls to each other in their source code, protocols are defined which describe how one or more services can talk to each other. This architecture then relies on a business process expert to link and sequence services, in a process known as orchestration, to meet a new or existing business system requirement.

Underlying and enabling all of this is metadata which is sufficient to describe not only the characteristics of these services, but also the data that drives them. Generally web services are used to implement the SOA.  A web service refers to clients and servers that communicate using XML messages that follow the SOAP standard. In such systems, there is often machine-readable description of the operations offered by the service written in the Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) is used to discover those services.  In SOA's implementation XML has been used extensively to create data which is wrapped in a description container. The services themselves are typically described by WSDL, and communications protocols by SOAP, with UDDI being used to discover those services.

However, SOA is not tied to a specific technology.  It can be implemented using a wide range of technologies, including SOAP, REST, RPC, DCOM, CORBA, Web Services or WCF. The key is independent services with defined interfaces that can be called to perform their tasks in a standard way, without a service having fore-knowledge of the calling application, and without the application having or needing knowledge of how the service actually performs its tasks.  

Of course nothing stays the same.  Advanced SOA or SOA 2.0 is the "the next-generation version of SOA" combining service-oriented architecture and Event Driven Architecture (EDA).  An event is simple a change of state, e.g. new employee contract signed, which then triggers an business process.  Building applications and systems around an event-driven architecture allows these applications and systems to be constructed in a manner that facilitates responsiveness, because event-driven systems are, by design, able to cope with unpredictable and asynchronous environments.  EDA is complementary to SOA as its just adding the triggers to start processes and enable processes to adapt to changing circumstance, i.e. exist in the real world.

And finally on the practical application of these concepts, some of the issues are:

• Complexity - SOA is very flexible, perhaps too flexible, SOA service definitions do result in capabilities being misinterpreted.
• Security - security at the service level is not appropriate; it must be managed at the network level.
• Interoperability - as it's an architecture the implementation allows lots of opportunities for many incompatibilities between vendor implementations.  So when a vendor claims SOA compliance, the response is 'So what!'  SOA compliance does not guarantee interoperability of services between operators, or even interoperability between SOA-based functions within an operator.
• Processing power - its important to implement what is necessary, do not build a 'Grand Architecture,' build lean.
• Hype - the standards are still evolving, and will continue to do so.  Hence build lean as next year or within 18 months the implementation will need to evolve to remain competitive.

Service Delivery Platform Defined

What is a 'service delivery platform'?  It really depends upon with whom you are talking.  Are they a vendor trying to sell IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem); or a Java games download platform; or an operator responsible for value-added communication services, IPTV, or content service?  Each will likely give quite different answers.  Service delivery platforms have a long history; their roots can be traces to the FN (Feature Node) that emerged in the intelligent network (IN) concept defined by the ITU-T (International Telecommunications Union) back in the 1980s.  In the FN a SCE (Service Creation Environment) enabled operators to create new communication services without the need to change the software in the exchanges.

This evolved into the IN SDP (Service Delivery Platform), an architecture that enables re-use of service components, that good old chestnut of 'remove the service silos to save money.'  The benefits of taking a horizontal (layered) approach versus a vertical (stove-pipe) are: faster and cheaper time to market, and enabling service innovation independent of switch vendor.  Most operators have IN implemented in their networks, though most of the SDP implementations tend to be bundled into a specific service implementation, for example caller ring-back tone or prepay billing.  The IN SDP has not achieved the ubiquity of deployment as a re-usable layer within the telecommunication software stack; rather it is a component of a vertical application.  The barrier remains 'incrementalism', that is, it is cheaper to deploy service X as a vertical than incur the additional costs of deploying an SDP.

As networks have evolved from circuit-centric to packet-centric, the SDP has extended its reach beyond communication services, to include content services, streaming services, and even broadcast services.  So the SDP is now positioning across all services and access, an "all-encompassing service delivery architecture".  But the challenge of 'incrementalism' remains.  In addition, there is no one standards body leading the creation of reference SDP architectures or implementation norms.  Currently, we're seeing initiatives for vendor-specific frameworks, or common application-network interfaces within an operator group.

There are a number of standards bodies working in the SDP space including Parlay, Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) Service Environment (OSE) and the TMF's SDF TeleManagement Forum's (TMF) Service Delivery Framework (SDF).  There are many other service layer initiatives including Product and Service Assembly Initiative (PSA) which are not covered in this article.  OSA Parlay is part of the 3GPP IMS, and exposes enablers such as presence and call control to applications.  The OSE is as architecture that provides a common structure and rule set for specifying enablers, e.g. presence, location, etc.  The TMF SDF definition provides the terminology and concepts needed to reference the various components involved, such as applications and enablers, network and service exposure, and orchestration. The TMF uses these in the definition of the processes and entities needed for managing the SDF components.

A service delivery platform (SDP) is an IT-based environment, enabling service creation in an environment that does not rely on a specific network element enabler. This need comes from two major trends:  The need to cut costs in the service creation process, in saturated markets service providers want to differentiate through their service offerings; and the need to enable third-party companies to provision services through the service provider environment.  Typically, most SDPs include: service creation environment, service orchestration environment, service execution environment and third-party management.

I abstract this a little further and think of the SDP as having 3 main systems:

• Content Delivery Management: System that ingests, presents and delivers content to customers on their mobiles, STBs (Set Top Boxes), PCs or other devices.
• BOSS integration: Processes associated with service creation, delivery and life-cycling.
• Telco API: Exposing capabilities from the network to operator services, partner/co-branded applications and 3rd party applications.

I find the above definition helps in understanding where a supplier is coming from in their definition of and SDP.  Stepping back from the definitions and functions, as discussed in the article "An Industry At The Crossroads," the SDP will be the innovation engine in operators.  It will have multiple elements for multiple suppliers, what is critical is not the architecture (as this article shows, we have more than enough of those).  Rather we must focus on the business requirements of service innovation to drive a lean implementation that's going to evolve far faster than any previous operator platform.

IP Multimedia Subsystem Defined

I've talked about the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) in several other articles such as SofNet Day 3, The Divergence of CDMA and UMTS Operators on IMS, SCIM: Its time for operators to sort out the services layer mess, Critical Gap in IMS/SDP business cases.  Simply IMS is an architecture for delivering internet protocol (IP) multimedia sessions (e.g. voice and video) across multiple access networks.  This is done by having a horizontal control layer that isolates the access network from the service layer. Services need not have their own control functions, as the control layer is a common horizontal layer.  Hence why I focus on the IP session control capabilities within IMS and the relevance to operators such as Verizon and Sprint in supporting voice over their EVDO network.

So How Do SOA, SDP and IMS Fit Together?

After that lengthy definition section, summing up how these acronyms fit together:  

• IMS is service control for IP multimedia sessions; it sits between the network (transport) and the SDP, think of it being within the control layer of the network.  An operator does not require IMS, but they need IP session control whether it be SIP/soft-switch based or IMS based.  
• SDP is service management across content-based and session-based services; think of it as the services layer of the network.  Most operators have SDP components in their network already, they're just not integrated into a coherent services layer.  
• SOA is an architecture the SDP can be based upon that leverages IT volumes.  But as discussed in the definition of SOA, being 'SOA compliant' is a bit like saying 'based on modular software programming techniques.'
  

The title is a bit of an oxymoron, how can a 'start-up' also be the largest inter-operator mobile community in the World?  I'm being a little loose in the definition of 'start-up' as airG is really a profitable, established business.  However, they still have the entrepreneurial zeal of a fresh-face start-up, and being secreted in Vancouver has enabled them to achieve something quite remarkable with little fanfare.  

While Bay Area mobile community start-ups struggle with triple digit churn, struggle to break passed the 1M customer mark, and raise tens of millions in VC cash due to the perceived value of the passing 'eyeballs'.  airG's mobile community has more than 20 million unique users worldwide and is interconnected to more than 100 mobile operators and media companies globally including Sprint Nextel, AT&T, Rogers, TELUS, Virgin Mobile, Orange, Boost Mobile, Vodafone and MTV Asia.  And most importantly is making a profit.  Yes! a Mobile 2.0 community that's making a profit rather than burning investor cash in the hope that advertisers do not wake up to the fact that they're being used by the rest of the value chain, i.e. some social networks are seeing click-through rates of 2-4 per 10,000 impressions; that's not an advertising campaign, that's an accident!
 
airG was founded in 2000 by Frederick Ghahramani, Vincent Yen and Bryce Pasechnik, originally called AirGames, they focused upon WAP games.  They quickly discovered that game-play on WAP isn't much fun.  However, they had a lobby and chat function, then soon discovered that people didn't logon to AirGames to play WAP games, rather to chat.  Hence the name change and focus on community services.

airG highlights an important point that I touched upon when I reviewed Miniweb, just as Miniweb is not putting the web on a TV, its creating interactive TV.  airG is not putting a web-based community on the phone, its enabling a mobile community.  The user experience is different.  In North America and Western Europe, broadband internet access has a high penetration, most people access their web services (e.g. communities) through a PC, and some treat the mobile as an 'always-on' connection to their communities when they're not in front on the PC.  This clouds the perception of most in the industry as the vast majority of people in the world do not access the internet through a PC, they access it through a mobile phone.  For example, there is over 20 times the number of mobile customers to broadband customers in India, here community is accessed through the mobile.  airG has demonstrated the use case is significantly different, even in countries with high broadband internet penetration.

A critical issue with mobile communities is interoperability across network 'islands'.  We'll be discussing in the panel session "Telco 2.0 and Web 2.0: Making Money Together?" at the The Voice Peering Forum (June 23-24th, San Francisco).  airG has shown the power of enabling inter-operator mobile communities, and built a profitable business.  Its good to see a Mobile 2.0 business being built on sound commercial principles, rather than the usual Bay Area process of "burn the VC cash giving stuff away for free to get as many eye-balls to your site/application as possible, create a monetization story, find a buyer, and exit on an inflated multiple before the business model needs to be really proven out."

As requested by reader feedback, I'm providing some foresight on up-coming conferences I'm attending, rather than just reviewing conferences I've attended.  For June I'll be running panel sessions at Sigma Systems's first user conference and at the Voice Peering Forum.

Sigma Systems's first user conference (June 4th-6th, Barton Creek Resort, registration is free), will explore the next generation of consumer and business oriented services, including insight and discussion around emerging trends and technology developments in the following areas:  targeted advertising, evolution of commercial VoIP & data services, global deployments in mobile broadband services, evolution to on-demand services, converged applications over video networks, data and multimedia services and IT back-office transformation.  In the OSS Consolidation article article I included Sigma Systems in the Service Fulfillment Landscape.

At the user conference I'm running the panel session "Where's the Mobile Industry Going?" with John Namovic, Managing Partner at Deloitte; and Wedge Greene, Industry Guru.  The session's objective is to help the audience understand how mobile is going broadband from those working on the 'bleeding edge' of the mobile industry. Providing a comprehensive global overview of the mobile operator's evolution to broadband; including network evolution, new services and applications, emerging business models (MNO vs. MVNO), and review of important lessons learned.  In particular we'll be reviewing mobile broadband services, evolution to LTE (Long Term Evolution), xVNO economics (Virtual Network Operator (where x = mobile, fixed, converged and possibly even cable)), and FMC (Fixed Mobile Convergence) successes and failures.

The Voice Peering Forum (June 23-24th, San Francisco), a biannual conference, brings together over one hundred unique organizations from all segments of the information technology and telecommunications industry to network and discuss the latest in peering, routing and interconnection of networks and the applications they support.  A good overview of the event is provided in this video.  I'm running a panel session on the first day entitled, "Telco 2.0 and Web 2.0: Making Money Together?"  This session will examine how the Web 2.0 paradigm is impacting telcos and how they are adapting to co-opt this paradigm to maintain service relevance in the IP-centric world.

Some of the questions we'll be discussing in the panel are:  What is meant by Telco / Web 2.0?  What is the state of current service provider Telco 2.0 / Web 2.0 activities?  What capabilities can telcos expose that Web 2.0 companies need?  What are Web 2.0 companies doing today to bypass the telcos for various service enablers?  Where is the money to be made by the telcos and saved by the third party entities?  How are operator's going to make these capabilities inter-operable across their network 'islands?'  Peering 2.0!

On the panel are Mike Lee, CSO Rogers; Francesco Fraccalvieri, Head of Innovation Telecom Italia; Stefan Kuentz, Swisscom; Asha Vellaikal, Orange; and T. Ty Wang, Senior Director, Oracle.  The objective in bringing together such a senior and diverse range of panel members is to generate a diversity of insights from people at the bleeding edge of service innovation, but link it back to the brutal simplicity that for such innovation to be successful it's got to work between operators.

I hope both panel sessions will provide some unique insights and through bringing together such senior practitioners in the industry provide an opportunity to share best practices.

Just summarizing my panel session speech on day 3 of SofNet, "A Pragmatic Approach to Developing IMS-Services."  I addressed two questions I'm often asked.

"Is IMS dead?"  Both Sprint and Verizon are deploying their flavors of IMS for the simple reason they decided voice over EVDO (the CDMA version of 3G) will be supported by VoIP, so they needed a standard IP session control layer, to which IMS provides a solution.  I discussed this previously in the "The Divergence of CDMA and UMTS Operators on IMS" weblog entry.  By 'flavor,' I mean they are using some of the specifications within IMS as a guide, its not a 'soup-to-nuts' implementation of the current IMS specifications.  Now NTT and SKT have taken an aggressive approach to deploying IMS, with a number of services including PTT (Push To Talk) and virtual PBX, but they traditionally adopt technologies early to give their national suppliers an international competitive edge with early reference customers and accelerating their national suppliers' position on the learning-curve.

For UMTS operators voice is supported as a circuit over the RAN (Radio Access Network), so there is no need for an IP session control layer, yet.  Hence most UMTS operators have not deployed IMS.  On the fixed side, most operators have implemented softswitch solutions, and in some cases there are scalability issues, there they are evaluating whether IMS provides a more scalable solution, but the key word is evaluating.  So IMS has not failed, rather its core capability of IP session control is seeing pragmatic deployment, where it makes business sense.  Now, standards bodies as always tend to go beyond their initial scope, so the standards engineers can maintain the frequent flyer status, and IMS has moved into service management aspects.

This leads to the second question I'm often asked, "Are IMS and SDP in competition?"  Immediately we have the problem of definition, what is an SDP?  Paraphrasing what Humpty Dumpty said to Alice, "It means whatever I chose it to mean."  In practice there are three main elements, BOSS (Business and Operational Support Systems), Content Delivery and the Telco API (checkout this entry for more info "The Telco API: Potential to raise ARPU by up to 36%").  Here we have lots of deployment examples such as Sprint's business mobility framework, AT&T's U-Verse, Airtel's managed SDP, Vodafone Live! etc.  So the SDP is happening, and is more successful than IMS.  Its focus is service management, not IP session control.  So at present they are not competing, and if the focus of IMS remains IP session control then they will not compete.

But back to the topic of the panel, IMS-Services.  If someone starts talking about IMS or SDP-Services, they have an agenda, they're trying to sell or promote a network technology, and making a fundamental error in looking at the problem from the wrong-end.  Services are supported by capabilities, and those capabilities are implemented with network technologies.  Services come become technology, as technology enables implementation.  Of course user experience comes first, and then services fulfill the experience, but that's covered in the "A Critical Gap that Means most Service Platform (IMS/SDP) Business Cases Keep Failing" entry.

Overall the conference was worth attending, though there was a significant gap around specific enabled services.  To claim the conference is focused on Software and Networks will require much greater participation from the other members of the value chain, including media, web 2.0 companies, and internet application developers.

Summarizing day two of SofNet.

Panel session, "How Can 21CN Help Make Customers Successful?"  was a who's who on UK telecom executives with John Cunliffe, Ericsson; John Frieslaar, Huawei; Geoff Hall, Nortel; John-Paul Hemingway, Ciena; Phil Dance, BT; David Soldani, NSN; Andy Stevenson, Fujitsu; and Phil Tilley, ALU.  With so many suppliers in such a public forum, we were not going to hear anything interesting.  A good question was "What are the top 3 enterprise services enabled by 21CN."  The answer was a general description of network IT Services and cloud-computing; which are available without 21CN.  This unfortunately became a theme for day 2 of the event, lots of discussions on architectures, potentials and capabilities, but a dearth of discussion on what the innovators (web2.0 companies) want and what are the specific services.

KeyNotes

• Helmut Leopold, Telekom Austria, discussed their SDP experiences. Good review on the challenges facing a small operator, especially on processes which are "90% of the headache" in any network transformation or new service launch.  As discussed in yesterday's weblog entry operational efficiency is the best understood part of the SDP business case: Helmut mentioned new product launch effort reduction of 70%, and TTL (Time To Launch) reduced from 9 to 5 months. An important point he raised was the SDP enabled greater transparency to understanding profit management, however, a critical issue is the BOSS (Business and Operational Support Systems) organization tends to mask such data to maintain control, hence he recommended the need for "aggressive centralization."
• Sally David, BT.  Discussed next generation wholesale business models.  Covered a number of examples of wholesale business models such as outsourcing voice (to Virgin media), managed access (mobile backhaul), QoS (Quality of Service), and security.  Good focus on the capabilities operators can offer to corporate customers and service providers.  

Panel Session: Leveraging SOA to Achieve Flowthrough for IP-Services

• Brian Buggy, Amdocs.  SOA is just a tool, need to define the model that needs to be common across all services whether mobile, cable, broadband or internet.  Upon receipt of an order it's then decomposed, designed, implemented and tested.  Critical step in the decomposition process is the mapping of customer facing services to resource facing services.  Highlighted the gap that exists in the TMF SID (Tele Management Forum Shared Information/Data) on the level of decomposition to enable re-use of resource components across services, else operators end up rebuilding silos within a SOA framework.
• Francesco Caruso, Telcordia.  Described how the core capabilities of SOA: semantic (common language), transport (common orchestration) and legacy wrapper can be applied across the product lifecycle (CRM, order management, charging/billing, provisioning/activation and service assurance).  This reminded me of the the approach taken by AT&T U-verse, which is a great case study on using SOA within a mixed (NG and legacy) environment.
• Biru Chattopadhayay, Tech Mahindra.  SOA is a little like SDP in definition, it depends upon the user.  Challenge that there is no agreement on what comprises an SOA-compliant implementation, so SOA is not generating harmonization given the variety of implementations, platforms claim SOA compliance, when in practice significant integration is still required.  SOA is not a magic bullet, still requires good design and central management.
  
• Bob Titus, Netcracker.  Today results of SOA implementations on cost saving, flexibility, improved TTL have not met those seen in other industries.  Bob highlighted the model-driven architecture gap, as per Brian Buggy's presentation.
• My take-away:  What should by now be common system across most operators remain bespoke.  I'd argue the problem is not technology, as businesses in other industries have achieved significant commonality in their systems thanks to SOA.  Rather the operator's BOSS organization guarding silos of information to maintain their organization.

Panel Session: The Reality of Convergence: Operator Experiences

• Thibaut Roussel, Orange.  Summarized Orange NeXT (New Experience of Telecom) strategy and localization issues across its OpCos (Operating Companies).  Unik (Orange's FMC service, c.f. BT Fusion): 500k customers in Feb '08, 25% of customers use at home and in the office (SME is a target segment), main selling point for customers is unlimited calling  that has resulted in an additional 67 call minutes per month.  Business Everywhere (remote intranet access): 910k users (600k in France) as of Feb '08, 24% annual growth, targeting MNC and plans to expand to SMB and SoHo segments.  
• Paulo Tavazzani, Fastweb is an all-IP triple-play network based in Italy.  Deployed an integrated CPE (Customer Premise Equipment) for converged voice, video, and data for all devices, including mobile, in the home.  No plans for IMS, soft-switch is good enough, will only implement IMS when business case justifies.  Fastweb are the only convergent MVNO in Italy, hence focus on converged services to differentiate from other MVNOs and try to keep calls on their network as much as possible to manage costs.
• Take-away: Good examples of service innovation that focuses upon the importance of providing significant customer value to stimulate adoption, even though the technologies are far from mature.

Overall Summary  

• The telecom industry is unfortunately still too 'fat and happy.'  For example Verizon announced first quarter results yesterday where net income rose 10% to $1.64 billion from $1.5 billion, and sales rose 5.5 percent to $23.8 billion.  Isn't the US in a recession?
  
• Most of the discussion at the conference is on capabilities and potentials; hence the SofNet ideals remain trapped between the CTO (who sees the strategic threat) and the CMO (who says, "Show me the money!").
• Recommend each operator identify for their specific situation 5 or 6 services they can easily enable and just do it to work through organizational issues in opening the network, because its still another 2 or 3 years before they'll have openness cracked and the strategic threat will have materialized into their financial results by then.
  

SofNet brings together three of the main drivers in the telcom industry, NGN (Next Generation Network), Web 2.0 and the telecom service layer (also known as the SDP, Service Delivery Platform).  Now when it comes to the definition of SDP, I'm usually reminded of this quote from "Through the Looking Glass:"
`I don't know what you mean by "glory",' Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. `Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'
`But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.
`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

So let's see what we learnt on the definition of SDP on Day One.

The morning session I attended was entitled "Industrial Revolution 2.0: Are Service Delivery Platforms the New Production Line?"  Summarizing the presentations and discussion:

• Angelo Morelli, Accenture.  Highlighted the importance in how services are created as Web2.0 principles of lightweight programming models, mash-ups and continuous beta gain main-stream adoption.  Positioned SDP as managing the complexity of aggregating the business models between network operators, service providers, VAS (Value Added Service) aggregators and Web 2.0 companies.  Also positioned the unified user control panel (an element of the SDP) to manage the complexity of transferring content and services between devices.  The unified control panel is one of those technically feasible capabilities, but it's practicality dubious, e.g. iTunes goes onto the iPod easily thanks to Apple, for those geeks that also want to have their MP3s on their Sony PS3 there's a number of free ways from using a USB to setting up a media server on the PC.  Here the SDP is defined as providing business and content adaptation between players in the value chain.
• Giorgio Ramengi, H3G Italia.  H3G Italia has 8M customers, 39% UMTS market share in Italy, and 800k (10% penetration) Mobile TV customers.  H3G has used an SDP over several years for its m-sites that enable 3rd party services on their portal.  They used the SDP for the launch of the MobileTV, which took only 6 months from license grant to launch.  Using an SDP enables trial within 2 months, free-to-air launch in 3 months, and full PayTV launch in 5-6 months.  They currently achieve 10% of mobile TV revenue from advertising.  H3G provides a realistic and focused SDP application note.
  
• Jonas Wilhelmson, Ericsson (Drutt), explained the emerging Multimedia Marketplace composed of the following actors: Media, Customers, GAMeY (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, eBay and Yahoo!), Internet Services, Advertisers and Operators.  The role of SDP is to hide complexity in this marketplace, speed time to market, and lower costs.  Quoted data from H3G Scandinavia that 70% of customers access the operator's portal and 15% ARPU comes from VAS.
• James Steadman, Oracle:  Gave the Oracle pitch on the SDP being composed of OMA OSE, J2EE application server, and SOA for integration.  Gave an insight into the CXDN (Communication Experience Design Notation) they've developed with BT, and will open source later this year.  CXDN re-uses SOA tools from the enterprise, to make it easy to create applications agnostic to network and easily integrated into an enterprise's business processes.  The CXDN has significant potential for the industry, and the addressable market is where telco's can provide significant immediate value through the Telco API.
• Richard Mishra, Amdocs.  Highlighted the important of SDP's (Service Management Layer) awareness of the resource layer (network capabilities, e.g. QoS over a RAN or DSL link).
  
• I asked a question, "If the SDP saves money and enables new services, what are the figures?"  Broad consensus on opex savings of around 50%, which is in line mt projects, perhaps even on the conservative side.  No commitment to ARPU uplift potential, on that I have a weblog entry The Telco API: Potential to raise ARPU by up to 36%
  

Afternoon Key Note

• Matt Bross, BT.  Gave the usual world-class inspirational pitch.  Highlighting the shift in power to the user, increase in complexity and importance of green issues.  Gave a great example on the success of BT TradeSpaces in dramatically improving BT's relevance to the SMB (Small Medium Business) segment.  I often use TradeSpaces as a case study on how operators have a role in communities beyond simply enabling access to Facebook.
• Bhaskar Gorti, Oracle, provided some much needed figures on the reality of an operator's business.  Quoting observed SDP savings of: development cost and time reduced by 50%, reduced IT support cost of 30%, RFT (Right First Time) improvement of 30%, TTL (Time To Launch) improvement from 30 days to 1 day, and lowered provisioning costs by 30%.  He made and clearest statement of the show, that the SDP is about improved productivity (operational performance).

Overall, I still feel like the "Through the Looking Glass" quote is relevant in the definition of the SDP.  However, there is broad consensus and specific numbers on the process improvements provided by the SDP, what is lacking is the same specificity on the services.

"But shouldn't our suppliers be building the developer programs?" I hear some operators asking. However, infrastructure suppliers make money by selling boxes, software licenses, maintenance and support; those suppliers do not understand the end customers as well as the operator. If they do, then the operator will likely not be independent for long. There is a new category of 'Application Aggregators' that bring a menu of applications, e.g. uLocate and Useful Networks aggregate location based applications; and are dependent upon mutual service success with the operator, not selling boxes or software licenses. The bottom-line is all operators will need to combine the application eco-systems of infrastructure and handset suppliers, application aggregators and their developer communities. Only those operators in a monopoly or have resigned themselves to be a utility bit-pipe provider need not worry about such issues.

In researching application developer communities across a number of industries, reviewing with the creators and community members the successes and failures, here are some topics to consider if an operator decides to build a developer community:
 
Audience:

• Know your geeks (application developers). For many operators there are local SIs (System Integrator) and VARs (Value Add Reseller) already solving the customers' problems, this is a critical group to bring on board. This generally addresses the SMB (Small Medium Business) segment, but there are also local developers applicable to other customer segments, they're not all based in Silicon Valley or LA. And localization will become critical for an operator's long-term success against GMAY (Google, Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo!).
  
• Know your early adopters. These are generally high spending customers that will trade some of their time for exclusive access to the latest applications and have their opinions matter.  This is of great value to geeks as they lack customer access that operators can provide.

Tools and Education

• The program needs to use the latest protocols, environments and community tools. Check out Saleforce.com's Appexchange; and Orange's Widget, picture sharing and OpenID APIs. To win, an operator must educate (marketing); to educate an operator must speak (blog); to speak an operator must do/show (code examples and success case studies). The more code examples the greater the addressable pool of geeks, because less able but perhaps more innovative geeks can then "cut and paste" capabilities together.
• Do not require registration or login to educate, only have registration if the geek wants to make money. Beta programs (without a clear path to cash), NDAs and legal documents will kill any community no matter how large the operator.

Communications and Marketing

• Community communication by the operator needs to be made by Geeks, e.g. bloggers, writers; IRC (Internet Relay Chat) / wiki / forum addicts; regular conference presenters that draw a crowd; and have a track-record in writing code samples and helping others geeks.
  
• Have a "Geek Advisory Board" with expertise in the platforms, customer verticals and known to the geek community.
  
• Sell your best geeks, others will follow. Communicate success stories from the community's launch. Contextual application search to help customers find preferred/certified applications that are relevant to a customer's particular circumstance is vital.

Metrics

• Program must be aligned with the operator's overall business goals. Metrics include things such as number of new geeks, number of downloads, number of active developers, number of transactions, revenue generated from APIs.

Biz Model

• The business model must be baked into the API. Ultimately, the Telco API is just a big business development deal. If the Telco API helps geeks make money, then so does the operator.

Integration

• The application developer community should not be owned by the CTO. After building the brand and the network, the application developer community is the next most important leg of an operator's business. It must be owned by the CEO, and integrated into Marketing's processes, so the innovations get out to the customer and are effectively monetized by the operator.

The above topics may appear obvious in building an application developer community, but the challenge is getting them simultaneously implemented.  Have a look at the many developer communities being launched against these 6 topics. An operator's application developer community is not a lab's project, nor something that can be released as a Beta; it's a core business assets, on a par with brand and the network, and must be led from the top.

HomeCamera enables people to securely see what's going on at home without being an expert in geeky stuff like DDNS (Dynamic Domain Name System), NAT (Network Address Translation) and port forwarding, which are generally required for the home surveillance solutions on the market today.  HomeCamera aims to be an easy-to-use home surveillance system, with any webcam, any PC, and any Internet connection; targeting the average PC user.  The service is live and currently free because its in beta.  Once launched it will remain free with ad-support, there will also be subscription models that add capabilities and remove the advertising.  When I talk to operators about this simple proposition the common refrain is, "We thought about doing just that, we just never had the time."  HomeCamera is a spin-out from M1 (Singaporean mobile operator).

Google averages between 100k-200k relevant search terms per week on home security and monitoring, so there's definite customer demand.  The estimated number of global broadband homes with webcams in '06 was 60m according to Logitech.  IDC estimates 21m webcams will be sold in 2008 alone; average annual worldwide growth rate of 9%.  More importantly to the HomeCamera proposition there were roughly 600k network cameras sold to homes in 2006.  A network camera is a standalone unit that is used for surveillance not web chat.  For example, D-Link has added HomeCamera support into its 2120 WiFi network camera.

The use cases include monitoring one's home, kids, the elderly, pets, and domestic help.  I also think HomeCamera provides a great example of how third party applications can use the Telco API.  Take this use case as a simple example: Jim recently hired a nanny to look after his two young sons.  When he's on the road he can check-in from his mobile phone, just to make sure everything is OK.  He also shares access with his parents so they can check in from their TV.  The operator could expose capabilities such as Single Sign On (from Jim's mobile phone or his parent's STB (Set Top Box) they can access the camera directly without the hassle of entering usernames and passwords), service provisioning (Jim can set up the service for his parents, all they need to do it press the widget button on their remote), IPTV and mobile video streaming capabilities (to ensure quality delivery of video to both his mobile and parent's TV without HomeCamera dealing with the hassle of video clients and QoS (Quality of Service)).

As discussed in the article on the Telco API, the operator could use this service either own-branded, co-branded or as a third party application.  You could imagine a scenario where it's an option on the operator's Family Plan.  The more challenging part is the business model, but as discussed in the Telco API article there are a number of options which generally will be dependent upon the customer and how the operator chooses to charge for use of its network capabilities.  My recommendation is the model must be simple, common across many applications, and at this point in the commercialization of the Telco API its more important to get out there and experiment commercially (continuous beta) rather than spend time crafting complex models and agreements.

What is a 'service delivery architecture'?  It really depends upon with whom you are talking.  Are they are a vendor trying to sell IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), or a Java games download platform; or are they an operator responsible for value-added communication services, IPTV, or content services.  Each will likely give quite different answers.  Service delivery architectures have a long history; their roots can be traces to the FN (Feature Node) that emerged in the intelligent network (IN) concept defined by the ITU-T back in the 1980s.  In the FN a SCE (Service Creation Environment) enabled operators to create new communication services without the need to change the software in the exchanges.

This evolved into the IN SDP (Service Delivery Platform), an architecture that enables re-use of service components.  Most operators today have IN implemented in their networks, though most of the SDP implementations tend to be bundled into a specific service implementation, for example caller ring back tone.  The IN SDP has not achieved the ubiquity of deployment as a horizontal layer within the telecommunication software stack, rather a component of a vertical application.  The move from vertical (stove-pipe) to horizontal: faster and cheaper time to market for new services and enabling service innovation independent of switch vendor did not significantly happen.

As networks have evolved from circuit-centric to packet-centric, the SDP has started to extended its reach beyond communication services, to include content services, streaming services, and even broadcast services.  With this move the use of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) as an integration framework has emerged, given the successful implementations of SOA for BOSS (Business and Operational Support Systems) systems.

So we arrive at today, where the SDP is has come full circle and is positioned again as a platform for the creation of new communication services, but this time in the IP domain encompassing IMS.  Since 1999 IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) has been standardized by 3GPP, it enables service control for IP based multimedia communications, across any IP based access.  So the SDP is now positioning across all services and all access, an all-encompassing service delivery architecture, with a total market size of roughly $2B in 2007, source OSS Observer.

A commonly used service delivery platform definition is an IT-based environment, enabling service creation in an environment that does not rely on a specific network element enabler. This comes from the need to cut costs in the service creation process; in saturated markets service providers want to differentiate through their service offerings.  And the need to enable third-party companies to provision services through the service provider environment.  Typically, most SDPs include a service creation environment, a service orchestration environment, a service execution environment and third-party management.

Another way to look at the SDP is to relate it to boxes/functions we already see in an operators network:

• Content Delivery Platform, e.g. a platform that enables content such as ring-tones or movies to be successfully presented and delivered to customers.
• Communications Gateway, e.g. a Parlay server that exposes call control capabilities.
• Telco API, e.g. The exposure of network capabilities across communications and content to third parties.
• BOSS, e.g. a service creation process aligning to 'Common Capabilities.'  A Common Capability is used by many different services e.g. IVR; an 'authentication' common capability that bundles the capabilities of an AAA server with some of the features of an ID management system; and accounting functions, e.g. an internal directory server.

Taking this view it becomes a little clearer why there are just so many suppliers that fall under the SDP label, a subset is listed here: Accenture, Acision, Alcatel-Lucent, AePONA/Appium, Airwide, Amdocs/Qpass, BEA/oracle, Broadsoft, CoreMedia, Comverse, Convergin, End2End/Mach, Ericsson/Drutt, Genband, HP, IBM, IMImobile, jNETx, Metaswitch, Microsoft, Motorola/Leapstone, Motricity, mPortal, NSN, NEC, NetCentrex, Nortel, OpenCloud, OpenWave, Oracle/BEA, Pactolous, Personeta, Qualcomm/Elata, Red Hat/Mobicents, Redknee, Telcordia, Telenity, Sun, Sybase/Mobile365, Ubiquity/Avaya, Verisign/mQube, Volantis.  The SDP Landscape is definitely complex, confusing and consolidating as I write.

But coming back to why an operator should consider a SDP.  The drivers for the SDP are clear: to extend the life of traditional services; lower costs associated with the development and introduction of new services; extend services across networks and devices; provide an operating environment and development tools for third-party software developers; and improve the profitability of niche services.  However, the challenges to implementation are equally as clear: managing end-to-end application performance; modular, standards-based service delivery platforms are still relatively immature; integration; service provider organizational challenges; lack of a compelling business case; lack of standards creates confusion and trepidation; and marketing challenges.

As part of the SDP (Service Delivery Platform) workshop a run I go into depth on this topic and review a number of case studies.  In general my recommendations for operators are:

• The part of SDP that deals with operations (BOSS) has a clear business case and operators are adopting the same tools as enterprises based on SOA;
• The part of the SDP focused on content services is maturing and becoming a managed service;
• The part of SDP focused upon communication services is still in an experimental stage, with some initial success focused upon enterprise services;
• The part of the SDP focused upon third parties, the Telco API is a current hot topic within the industry with a few examples of initial success such as Sprint's Business Mobility Framework.

How the parts get integrated into an all-encompassing SDP is a question I'll leave for another weblog entry.

We've all experienced it: you're on a call, not moving around, just talking and the call drops, you check the signal level on the phone and it's gone only to return to near full strength as you check.  Does the operator even know what's just happened?  And then when you're on the move, for example on the Gatwick Express (between London Gatwick Airport and Victoria Station), there are several points on the train ride where you see most people who are on the phone either start shouting at it or removing it from their ear to look at what's going on.  The phone is an invaluable source of information on the status of the operator's network, yet it remains an under-utilized asset in the fight to improve service levels on the most basic service.

This is the problem Wadaro addresses, monitoring network and service performance from the phone.  It's embedded software on the phone, from a simple SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) application to a sophisticated OS (Operating System) application.  At the lowest end it just monitors the phone state when a call terminates, so its impact on the phone is not perceptible to the user, and it enables an operator to make its existing phone portfolio become part of the network, service and usage monitoring.  Network quality is important to customers, after price is the next decision criteria. 

Operators in the US focus upon network quality as their core differentiation where they spend billions of dollars in building the brand and embedded their bylines in the public's subconscious, e.g. for Verizon their byline is "the nation's most reliable wireless network," whilst AT&T's is "the network with the fewest dropped calls."  We're also seeing operators such as O2 allow their business customers to see the status of their network, with services such as Network Manager GSM and Network Manager GPRS.  Extending that to the status and usage of the services their employees are receiving on their phones provides that last step which moves a 'nice to have' into a 'must have' differentiator.

Their application can also improve customer service.  For example, most customers have no idea what model their phone is. So when they call customer support, the first few minutes are a frustrating dialog of finding out who the customer is and what equipment they have. With Wadaro when the customer calls the support team, the CSR (Customer Service Representative) can know the phone model without asking the customer. Even if the customer has purchased their own unlocked phone elsewhere, the operator can still know the make, model and its performance history.  Next, the operator can proactively identify and remedy errors. If the Wadaro app is showing that the customer can't connect to her email server or collect her MMS, the operator can stimulate device management to correctly configure her device.

The main challenge is getting the Wadaro application onto devices.  For new devices the software can be bundled on the SIM and/or phone.  For existing devices it's a little more complex and will be dependent upon the operator's OTA (Over The Air) capabilities and how aggressively the operator promotes the application and its benefits to customers.  Its one of those areas, where you'd think operators would already be using the phones on their network to let me know how things are working from a customer's perspective.

With the launch of services such as FiOS from Verizon and U-Verse from AT&T, TV services in the US are finally entering the 21st Century, where widgets are now available on the TV such as local weather and traffic; it's slowly becoming interactive.  As anyone from the UK will attest Sky, a satellite TV service provider, has been offering interactive programming since 2001 with the launch of the "Red Button."  That is a simple red button on the TV remote that launches a mico-browser on the STB, which communicates over the dial-up telephone line for voting and getting more information on a topic (e.g. Sky News).  This concept was then extended to the Sky Key, a short-code that advertisers could use so people could go directly to the advertiser's site.  Over dial-up, in my experience, anything more that voting was not an ideal user experience.  But with STBs (Set Top Box) finally going broadband, things have got interesting, and Miniweb is ideally positioned to create a new category in interactive TV.

Miniweb is a spin-out from Sky, they created the microbrowser and the TV Key platforms, and have now created a broadband interactive TV platform and standard based (WTVML) browser that can run on most set-top boxes.  This potentially makes the viewing experience of 382 million TV households worldwide, as rich as the internet, but with the ease of use of the TV.  Miniweb's proposition is to create a new digital entertainment experience through the TV by enabling an Interactive TV experience that combines TV viewing, on-line services and interactive advertising. This generates revenue by connecting TV eyeballs through their products, relevant advertising, contextual links to content and broadcaster driven enhanced TV.  It's a business model analogous to that of Google. What Google does for Internet advertisers, Miniweb wants to do on the TV.

The immediate question that comes to mind is to point out that the Wii and PS3 both include web browsers, so why won't customers just use the existing web browsers on their TVs, especially given the growth of HDTV.  Here is where it's important to examine the user experience.  When someone is watching TV it's an engaging experience.  As an analogy, when I'm watching TV and the phone rings it's an inconvenience, whilst when I'm at my PC surfing the web I do not think twice about checking CID (Caller ID) and answering.  This is a critical point, TV viewing is engaging, so a context-switch is a significant disruption to the user experience; hence why Miniweb subtly overlays their browser and integrates it with the TV channel and its content.

I've accessed the web using both the Wii and PS3 browsers, and though it's nice to see on a HDTV, the PC it still a much easier user experience.  I've experienced the Miniweb platform and it's not the web, its interactive TV, it's a different and new experience that enables me to find out what song is being played on the program I'm watching, find-out the actors name while watching the show, see local traffic reports, find out more about the current news report, book a test-drive from the advert I've just seen, rate programs and share new discoveries with friends, and yes even order a pizza with the press of a couple of buttons on the remote.  It's really just making an appropriate experience to the TV and the context in which people watch TV, rather than force-fitting the internet model.  Regardless of its commercial success Miniweb is an important experiment for the industry in creating new and innovative interactive experiences to understand how the TV/web experience is going to evolve.

Starting with a few definitions:

• Service Fulfillment systems support processes that ensure service providers give requested services to customers in a timely and correct manner, so called Order-to-Cash cycle.
• Service Assurance solutions monitor service performance based on the customer's view, not the network manager's view, based on defined key performance indicators (KPIs), key quality indicators (KQIs) and service-level agreements (SLAs).  These solutions help service providers connect network, service performance with the end-user experience, so called Customer-Assurance cycle.

Although Service Fulfillment and Service Assurance play complementary roles, there is a disconnect between these two functions in service providers' infrastructure. This hinders the service provider's ability to improve the customer experience, reduce support costs, accelerate time-to-market of services and assure smooth introduction of launched services from day one. Hence the focus upon the integration of Service Assurance and Service Fulfillment solutions, sometimes termed Service Management, which enable service providers to have an end-to-end view of services data, without the need for replication of data across fulfillment and assurance systems.

The goal of the service provider is to provide any service on any network to any device. There are also many more services, with service bundles being frequently modified, sometimes in real time. It is therefore no longer enough to manage the customer, the network or the resource. It is now important to manage the service as an entity in its own right. In addition, service data is usually held in several systems in a service provider's environment such as a legacy fulfillment or assurance system, and the many subscriber management system silos. By linking service fulfillment and assurance, service providers have a single view of services data.

So Service Management appears to be growing out of the consolidation of these functions, more general industry consolidation, and the trend to delivering a broader integrated BOSS (Business and Operational Support System) solution.  An example of this consolidation is Subex that acquired Syndesis last year.  Syndesis is a service fulfillment platform for Triple Play services.  After the acquisition Subex created a service fulfillment and assurance division focused upon 'service agility' (the ability to provide better services and multiple services) for what Subex terms "operational dexterity" which falls into this category of Service Management.

Just to make things a little more complex, within Service Assurance is a function called Service Management (though I more frequently see it being called Service Monitoring these days) as the software systems that measure and monitor services including the overall quality of each service and its business impact on a particular set of customers. Service management systems enable CSPs (Communication Service Providers) to generate granular reporting capability by each customer and service to validate service level commitments. Key quality indicators are measured in each specific network domain to alert CSPs of degraded network performance leading to unsatisfactory customer experience.  The main vendors are HP, IBM (Vallent), Telcordia, Agilent, Ericsson and Nokia accounting for about 60% of the market.

But moving back to the broader definition of Service Management, competition in this space comes from providers focused on Service Fulfillment, Service Assurance and Service Deliver Platform providers.  It's a complex competitive landscape.  Just focusing upon Fulfillment as an example, some of the big players are, Amdocs (Cramer), Ericsson, HP, IBM (Vallent, Micromuse), Oracle (BEA, Metasolv, Portal), Sybex (Syndesis), Telcordia and Wipro.  In the small and medium sized company landscape are about 20 suppliers in this segment, shown in the attached table, let me know if there are any mistakes.  This table analyses each from their technology focus (VoIP, IMS, Triple Play / IPTV, DSL / HSD, and IP VPN / Ethernet), customer focus (ISP / xVNO, Broadband, Mobile and Cable), region focus (EMEA, LATAM, APAC and NAR), and functional focus within Service Fulfillment (Inventory, Mediation, Order Management, Work-Flow / Provisioning, Activation, Catalog, Self-Serv, and Service Tools).

Now in addition to the Fulfillment landscape there is an equally complex Assurance landscape and an even more complex Service Delivery landscape, which I'll not tackle here.  Rather to wrap up this article I thought I'd finish on the few trends I see emerging:

• Consolidation of functionality.  Just like enterprise IT, as mature functions are subsumed.  For example, once upon a time a service provider would buy a VoIP fulfillment platform, now multi-service fulfillment is the norm.
• Emergence of managed solutions.  This is coming more from the Service Delivery side of the competitive landscape.  Rather than buy a license and pay an SI, we're starting to see solutions (particularly in self-service) being managed by the technology provider on behalf of the service provider; which saves costs for the operator and the technology supplier, especially for those with scale.
• Consolidation of companies.  The big guys like Oracle and IBM have recently bought some of the medium-sized suppliers; but we're also seeing consolidation amongst the medium sized suppliers, e.g. Sigma Systems buying C-Cor, and Subex buying Syndesis, as they race to achieve scale.
• Best of Breed components do not generate a Best of Breed system.  Tier 2/3 markets have generally focused upon all-in-one solutions because of limited scale and cash.  Tier 1 operators have generally implemented a 'best of breed' component approach.  However, as we've seen in several cases, which I'll not name here, having a kitchen full of Michelin chefs does not necessarily result in a meal worthy of a Michelin star.
• Strong push with most operators to control their escalating BOSS spend on both legacy and new services.

This sets up an interesting phase in OSS consolidation, where we have three major functional segments of the BOSS industry starting to merge, a strong push to control BOSS costs from operators, emergence of business models (managed services) which require scale, and a push-back on the rational for best of breed components.  By the end of this year, I think I'll need to be updating the small-medium fulfillment landscape again.