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Why Should and How Can Carriers Make It Happen?
Ricci says that in the face of these highly successful over-the-top offerings, carriers need to be in the value chain, even if they’d prefer for all of the content to flow through their own app stores and walled gardens. The need to “play a role in the app space,” she says. Today, carriers aren’t doing a great job of leveraging a fundamental advantage they should have in packaging. They already provide the voice, messaging, and data services, but even those aren’t always packaged and bundled very well. When a customer buys a data plan, there’s no free content coming along with it—it’s not part of a package.
Even before we get to the technical aspects of integrated billing, carriers probably need to become more sophisticated in the way they marry infrastructure-based services with content and apps. This is a drum the BSS sector has beaten for years and yet very little has changed. Carriers’ market devices, rate plans, and coverage. That’s about it.
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FiOS, U-Verse, managed health care records, cloud and other managed services are likely to continue to grow. |
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On the technical side, Ricci suggests service providers “can make it happen by publishing and standardizing APIs” that make it much easier for app stores to integrate with them. One of Intec’s core philosophies within its product portfolio is to open up processes that allow data to be pushed into them in a secure way. She says there’s definitely a balance here between openness and security that needs to be considered, but if architected correctly, it can “all work as it should.”
There have been discussions about letting all kinds of things end up on wireless bill from vending machine purchases and gas to international money transfers. Many of them don’t make a whole lot of sense. But when it comes to apps, despite the potential contact center burden and integration complexities, it just makes sense that customers should have the option to put those charges on their wireless bills.
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