Unleashing Mobile Intelligence in the Cloud

By: Michael Crossey

The proliferation of smartphones, next-generation LTE network rollouts, and the rapidly increasing consumption of both enterprise and consumer mobile services puts the cloud squarely at the center of mobile industry innovation. Discussion about the advantages of cloud computing in general often focuses on the ability to offload functions like storage and processing to the cloud. But the intelligence of the mobile network itself also provides a significant opportunity to enhance the capabilities of cloud-based services.

For mobile service providers it is their network assets, combined with the flexibility and capability of the cloud, that can truly give shape and intelligence to cloud-based applications and allow them to enhance and differentiate a wide range of services. The power of the network is what will allow service providers to harness the power of the cloud and the apps it can enable, and thus bring about both further monetization of their network assets and further differentiation of mobile services.

The intelligence of the mobile network in particular allows service providers to draw a distinction between their cloud-based services. Valuable mobile capabilities such as user context awareness, reliable voice communications and messaging, network control, billing capabilities, customer intelligence, and global device compatibility can be used by third parties, including enterprise solution providers and application developers, to improve their customers’ experience and differentiate their service offerings.

This is accomplished by exposing the communications, commerce, context, and control qualities of a service-provider network as easy-to-implement application programming interfaces (APIs) that can be leveraged by enterprises, mobile application developers and content providers to allow for said differentiation of services. These APIs provide access to communications capabilities such as conferencing and video services; rich contextual information, including user profile, presence, location, device type, and connection type; the commerce functions of payment processing, subscriptions and refunds; and network control capabilities, e.g., requesting enhanced quality of service (QoS) for high-quality content delivery.

Along with these network-centric capabilities, mobile service providers can offer APIs for other resources, such as their own back-end IT systems or “proxied” services from external API providers. In addition, they can create API mash-ups composed of any combination of network, IT and external capabilities, giving them the ability to provide complete business-enablement solutions aligned with the needs of specific market segments.

By harnessing and providing the power of their networks via APIs, service providers can open up new channels to markets, drive new revenues and enable new market solutions that offset the decline in traditional voice and messaging ARPU, or average revenue per user. Below are some examples of how the mobile network can enhance the capability of cloud-based apps.