|
|
article
page | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
But this success story, complete with an NGOSS-like architecture for the support systems, may be coming too late and at too great a cost. Telus has spent over $400 million just on transforming the revenue systems, with the assurance systems still to be addressed.
Too late and too expensive was a topic taken up by many hall conversations, which quickly became the real conference, displacing the foreground panels and presentations.
A Wake-up Call
Martin Creaner, now President of the TM Forum, was the first keynote speaker to mention “Over-the-Top Services” (spoken in caps). OTT services is the buzz-expression for services carried over the networks, delivering value to customers, but without any carrier service provider being involved in planning, selling, provisioning, or servicing them – and of course without any traditional telco booking revenue directly from them.
Martin illustrated the challenge by reference to Google’s recent announcement of an open source mobile operating system, Androidphone. This is a real issue that even the WSJ understands: “Google is trying to loosen the grip wireless carriers have over the software and services consumers can access on cellphones.” WSJ 10/30/07].
Martin laid these issues directly before the conference participants in his opening remarks:
- Potential “Collapse of the central premise of the [Telecom] Industry – billing for communications services.”
- “Increasingly possible to completely sideline the traditional service provider.”
- “Apple dictating what service can be delivered to the iPhone.” Terms: everything goes thru Apple. General evolution from “Billing-central to Advertising-central revenue models.”
- And again the fact that, “Google purchased 15% of all servers sold anywhere in the world last year.”
Martin assured us that the TMF is on top of all this. Martin: “SDP is the international, multi-organizational response” that allows SP to build new applications that “give great value and a reasonable price.” “TMF are the architects of the SDP.”
However, we have to report that there was a degree of skepticism about this among the delegates in the halls. And in the rest of the conference, we seldom heard of the SDP program that was the talk of last year. Instead, we heard Amdocs, the Platinum sponsor, stating that all of the tools already exist to build new services, and that there is
|
|
OTT services is the buzz-expression for services carried over the networks, delivering value to customers, but without any carrier service provider being involved in planning, selling, provisioning, or servicing them. |
|
no need to wait for an SDP. Indeed, new software tools allow over-the-top companies to build services with no need for, or desire for, IMS either.
Martin did a fine job in raising, in his relaxed, professional way, some real issues facing telecom carriers. However, the rest of the conference sessions were flabby in comparison, more or less ignoring the looming need to find some way of working with OTT service providers to make some money together.
New TMF Program - Device Management
This year the TMF is launching a new program aimed at managing end-user devices: specifically, the ones sold by telcos and cable companies, such as mobile handsets, set-top boxes, and home gateways. The conference track devoted to device management was an indication that there is a lot of work ahead if any coherent story is to emerge. The industry is awash with specifications, many that clash, and the business model for interaction with devices is not set. Indeed we heard stories ranging from very tight management of desktop boxes with signaled QoS, to advertisement-supported mobile handset calls, and to vendors (Apple) capturing the complete management of the consumer device (iPhone.)
The TMF is targeting a universal approach for managing not just the expected 1 trillion future end-user devices but “any content on any network on any device” in a converged telco/cableco/media world with “a lightweight, simple approach to managing all devices as quickly as possible.” We would add that these trillion devices include home management and non-end-user devices such as sensors and other edge devices of “pervasive computing.” And in adding content management, some argue that mining customer habits for business intelligence needs to be part of the story: it apparently works for Nextel. And then Identity Management and DRM have been placed in this program too. With Chris Ballard, the TMF has chosen a more than competent lead for the Device Management track, but at this point this initiative may be an exercise in herding cats.
|
|
article
page | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |
|
|
|
