Taking a Lifestyle Approach to Connected Services
This is where operators can integrate and open up BSS/OSS, subscriber data management (SDM), policy control, and service-delivery platforms, all built around a growing foundation of standards-based network-control elements and interfaces. It’s the “sweet spot” from which CSPs can actually enable and enrich digital services, bringing to different stakeholders the awareness that’s needed in record to customers, applications, usage, preferences, and locations.
A complete service and control solution
The convergence of IT and networks is building momentum as CSPs move toward virtualized, software-defined networks, which are characterized by more programability than traditional networks.
Four phases of building cross-channel digital lifestyle services
Mobile operators are riding out the last of the three major revenue waves of voice service, peer-to-peer short message service (SMS) and data-driven access demand. As with most technology-driven markets, once market penetration is achieved, alternatives emerge and revenues begin to drop, with a number of factors, including market dynamics, regional characteristics and usage models, determining how rapid the drop will be. Consider, for example, messaging services: what used to be a robust source of revenue for CSPs is now being supplanted by free or low-cost applications from competitors such as WhatsApp and WeChat.
In mature markets operators are well aware of impending revenue drops and are aggressively rolling out LTE networks that will make the most of burgeoning mobile-social ecosystems.
As they deploy LTE, a true end-to-end, cross-channel customer experience will depend on rapid offer and service design and order delivery, and will demand a comprehensive approach when it comes to processes implemented and supported across many different applications. It will also require that CSPs’ roadmaps span all applications.
Oracle believes there will be a four-phase evolution in what will ultimately be the emergence of thinking networks: highly developed, software-defined networks that self-organize, self-optimize and self-determine responses according to subscribers’ ever-changing behaviors, preferences, circumstances, and usage habits.
The first phase will be the creation of the New Diameter Network (NDN), in which Diameter both generates revenue for 3G and LTE services and manages explosions of data and signaling on CSP networks. NDN establishes a scalable foundation through a Diameter control layer built to enable intelligent controls and seamless network evolution.
