Pipeline Publishing, Volume 4, Issue 10

	This Month's Issue:
	Managing the Content Revolution

From Walled Garden
to Community Garden:
Collaborating in a Competitive World

By Wedge Greene and Trevor Hayes

Judging by the capabilities demonstrated at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last month, it is clear that customer demand for social networking, rich and seamless feature sets, and high quality video content services can be met by a myriad of technical solutions and service providers – and that customers are fully aware that these capabilities are largely here and now – not next decade. Those Core and Edge providers who choose to collaborate to get those services to the customers will be the big and sustainable winners; those who continue to ignore the customer demand will lose. We acknowledge that right now the economic drivers of the Edge companies and the Core companies are not the same, and can often even be at cross-purposes. Is there a way to bring these business drivers into alignment? Let’s explore how that might happen.

In previous articles we pointed out that the economic drivers of Edge service providers and those of Core service providers are not the same. The Edge (companies providing devices or over- the-top services) represents the new generation of service providers - innovative, flexible and somewhat impatient, they are accustomed to a business environment with a relatively low barrier to entry. The Core (network owners/operators) is the domain of more traditional companies, those with large investments in network infrastructure, accustomed to being able to exert a level of control over customers and partners.

This situation leads to the very real danger that both Core and Edge view each other as competitors rather than potential partners. Conference tracks feature words like “Battle” and “Tension” and “Survival.” Focusing exclusively on competition rather than on customers rarely yields a positive business outcome. We see healthy signs of the emergence of a more collaborative attitude, and this article suggests one approach to creating a framework to enable that collaboration to grow and flourish.

Introduction to Community Gardening

A community garden is a collaborative greenspace in which the participants share in both the maintenance and the rewards. In the common greenspace approach, garden members cooperate in managing one area. Often, each member is responsible for a set of tasks within the shared area. - Eva C. Worden, et al

In a community garden, as opposed to a private walled garden, no single gardener owns the land. Each gardener works the land in cooperation with others, following clear rules designed to ensure that each gardener has the right to reap the rewards of their labor. Yes, sometimes someone breaks the rules and steals tomatoes belonging to their

Is there a way to bring these business drivers into alignment? Let’s explore how that might happen.

next door neighbor, but overall the system works because everyone can see the direct relationship between their work effort and their reward.

In setting up each community garden club, the participants addressed specific questions:

Is there sufficient interest in those who will actually use it?
What are the group's purposes and goals?
How will the property be planted and maintained?
What tasks need to be done? Who will do them?
How will the garden be operated?
How will the produce be distributed?
What are the financial needs? How will funds be raised?
What are the legal issues?
How will members communicate with each other?

What if Edge service providers and Core service providers got together to form a type of Community Garden Club™? This is a middle-ground strategy between a wild west Over The Top services world and the existing “walled garden” approaches of most network operators. To accomplish this, we must ask and answer the telecom market analogs to the above questions. Further, we must also understand what business drivers and actions will lead to this type of stable collaboration. What exactly is to be shared? What new technologies and processes need to be developed? How can we create markets that will ensure the fair distribution of net benefits?

David Milham of Milham Consulting, a TMF Fellow, expresses clearly the requirements of the new ecosystem.

“Revenue creation is based on introducing innovative and compelling services – applications and content – to targeted and shifting markets. This leads to three requirements:

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