IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) continues to struggle in market acceptance for a variety of reasons.  Hugh Bradlow from Telstra did a good summary recently.  The SDP (Service Delivery Platform) through a lack of standardisation is becoming a vast architecture with multiple definitions.  Linking IMS and SDP would appear to be a sure-fire-way of killing any service platform business case.

In an IMS survey I did this year, two results of note are: an increase in uncertainty on whether IMS will be deployed, and deployment remains 2 years out for those planning IMS deployments.  In addition, some operators are bored and frustrated by the constant marketing on IMS and FMC (Fixed Mobile Convergence); they're not being presented with a clear roadmap, rather they're asked to 'believe.'  There's clearly a disconnect in the market.

Last year I built the IMS/NGN business case for an operator.  The NGN piece was relatively easy based upon operational savings, and accounted for the bulk of the investment.  However the service platform (IMS/SDP) business case proved difficult.  A critical gap in creating the case was the operator's lack of a strategic services roadmap (SSR).  Within the operator the plan for services to be deployed that year was clear, but there was no stated plan in developing the customers experience over the next 2-4 years. 

The SSR tends to fall into a gap between the CTO and CMO responsibilities.  The CTO focuses upon the platforms and technologies as enablers of general classes of services, while the CMO tends to focus upon operational matters to meet the current year's targets.  The SSR is critical to the CTO because it defines the requirements the platforms and technologies must support, but the SSR must be driven from the customer facing side of the business.  The easiest answer is to make the accuracy and performance of the strategic services roadmap part of the CMO's performance metrics.

But back to the IMS/NGN business case project.  In summary, we built a SSR, identifying which services the operator should brand versus what it should just enable, specific to the cultural and competitive environment of that operator.  For example, exposing their branded portal within communities (e.g. Facebook) as another route to market.  As a use case: why should people spend $1 gifting a picture onto a friend's profile for their birthday, when they could spend that $1 on a cool ring-tone for them.  Creating the SSR is tough, and it's not going to be right, but at least it's a position from which the platform business case is easier to define.  And sets a timeline and prioritization on the capabilities within the platform, hence the operator can take an incremental approach to building their service platform, rather than defining a grand architecture and becoming a 'prisoner of that architecture'.

I'll be presenting more details on this experience at the SDP Asia 2007 conference in Singapore on the 26th-29th Nov.

The term 'on-device portal' (ODP) describes 'thin client' software that provides a graphical user interface to improve the presentation of content on mobile devices,  addressing the '3 Ls:' Latency, Look-and-feel, and Lack of availability (not always connected).

The ODP market remains nascent.  However, we've seen this year some significant steps forward with the selection of a java-based ODP by a global mobile operator, and that same ODP vendor being used in the 3 X-Series devices that enable eBay, Skype, Orb, Sling Media, etc. to be used from the mobile phone.  And additional rounds of funding coming into some ODP companies such as Action Engine.

In 2004 there was successful ODP experimentation by One (Austria) and O2 (UK), both experiments demonstrated >100% increase in content sales.  However, this initial success did not kick-start the market for reasons such as handset coverage, portal integration, market confusion, lack of end-to-end solutions, and the ODP's location within the mobile phone's menu.  This left the suppliers, of which there are at least 23 (Abaxia, Action Engine, Adobe (Macromedia), Cibenix, Geniem, Handmark, Motion Bridge, Motorola (Screen 3), mPortal, MSX, Nellymoser, Nokia (Preminet), Onskreen, Opera, Openwave, Qualcomm, Refresh Mobile, Silk, Streamezzo, Surf Kitchen, V-Enable, weComm), searching for ways to 'cross the chasm.'

Over the intervening three years a number of paths have been explored:

• The ODP was extended beyond embedded content consumption, home-screen and discovery; into search, personalization, back-up, lifecycle management and advertising;
• Proprietary solutions (non-java) and handset vendor specific solutions have extended handset coverage;
• The operator has been bypassed with a direct to consumer approach; and
• Some suppliers with a portal platform (back-end) have focused upon providing content delivery as a managed service.

One of the challenges with ODP is it created a device focus, the analogy to RIA (Rich Internet Applications) is better, because the back-end is equally as important.  The term RMA (Rich Mobile Applications) may be more appropriate than ODP.  The RIA term was created by Macromedia back in '02; Google Maps is a good example.  In the longer-term it's likely the market will evolve into add-ons to a browser on the phone, e.g. AJAX-enabled browser, flash-lite, or script-based 'widget engines.'  However, start-ups such as Zenzui are attempting to go head-to-head with this model.

But what about the here and now?  Some suggestions are:

• Move away from the term ODP, instead focus upon RIA/RMA, drawing analogies to Internet successes.
• Position ODP more clearly in the value chain.  An ODP by itself is as much use as a cart with no wheels.  Cibenix's positioning within the SDP Alliance is a good example of demonstrating the total solution.
• Focus on a specific application, e.g. Voice2.0/Web2.0 mobilization.  The market is highly fragmented beyond voice and messaging, there is no 'one-size-fits-all' RMA.  Some customers will want anytime-anywhere access to Facebook, some will want to play Second Life, some will want to use their office's unified comms services, and some will only want to talk.
• Target retailers / ASPs (Application Service Providers) as operators open up their networks.  This is critical because customers' content relationships already exist beyond the mobile operator.

Growth in LBS (Location Based Services) customers in North America (NA) last year ('05 to '06) was roughly 150%, from 1.5M to 3.8M customers.  In '05 NA LBS revenue was roughly $450M with Sprint accounting for 70% of that revenue.  Today Verizon and Sprint account for over 80% of operator LBS revenue in North America.  Services such as VZ Navigator (>500k regular users), VZ Chaperone, and Disney Family Locator service (30% adoption rate) may result in '06-'07 customer growth exceeding last year's figure.  Looking into the future, 2011 projections are between 33-52M LBS subscribers, a revenue opportunity (excluding enterprise) of $2 - 4B, with enterprise LBS being up to $9B.

Family Locator has proven to be one of Sprint's most profitable data applications, and has achieved a 30% adoption rate with Disney Mobile.  In an August report by Jupiter Research 42% of parents with children under the age of 13 are especially interested and willing to pay for services that allow them to track their child's location, roughly 50% of a typical operator's post-paid customer base is on a family plan.  Family Locator could generate half the consumer LBS revenue by 2011, that's $1-2B.

Experience of SK Telecom in South Korea shows low AGPS handset penetration is a critical short-coming in customer satisfaction; current penetration of AGPS handsets is about 25%.  Note SKT (CDMA operator) had AGPS mobile devices available at the same time as Sprint and VZW, however, they did not make 100% of their portfolio AGPS because there is no E911 mandate.  Hence for GSM operators here in the US high accuracy isn't coming anytime soon, modelling shows that even under the most aggressive AGPS introduction scenarios, its still 2010 before the critical 50% penetration is reached, that is a high accuracy location is most probable.  Suggestions to restrict handset choice for those families wanting to take the service ignore the basic problem of getting the children onto the same network, never mind restricting their handset choice.

European operators have struggled with Family Locator services because the accuracy is limited to CellID, which in the suburbs can result in an area of uncertainty of up to 3km in radius.  CellID is not acceptable to customers, and in the US where AGPS is used by the CDMA operators, CellID will not generate a competitive family locator product.  Will AT&T and TMO (T-Mobile) have no option but to open their E911 platform to commercial services?  Given family plans are similar across operators, hence for those customers interesting in Family Locator it will be the decision factor.  Will AT&T and TMO be willing to risk up to 10% of their revenue, that could be about $6B in 2011.

In the Jupiter research published in August, they also found 26% of cell phone owners between the ages of 18 to 24 want mobile social networking applications based on their friends' locations.  Again, Sprint and Verizon appear to have an edge because of AGPS allows a usable accuracy.

But this emerging party is definitely going to have more players than just the operators.  1 800 GOOGLE, a free directory enquires, is building market share to create a user base to attract advertisers.  In fact as EU operators have shown, with a few simple questions a customer's location can be determined to an accuracy adequate for walking directions.  So location advertising could be added without using an operator's location information.

In fact, Google's vans that are out taking pictures of all the streets, could also be logging the GPS coordinates of the operators' cell sites, so their application could use the AGPS unit on some phones with no reference to the operator, as they will have an approximate fix.  In this emerging market, the operator is going to need to move fast, else find its location information bypassed or inadequate.

At the end of last year I created a slide-pack that summarized my learning from 2006.  I was very grateful for the feedback this material generated.  So I thought I'd have a go at sharing some of my insights through a weblog, to hopefully be of use to my friends and colleagues in the telecom industry.  Please add your comments to the entries as I value your feedback, and suggest topics for future articles, thanks.