Mobile Network Operators Face Surging Data Delivery Costs: Study
According to Juniper Research, mobile data delivery costs could go up to $370 billion by 2016—a sevenfold jump from $53 billion in 2010. The analyst firm reported that mobile network operators can reduce costs with Wi-Fi network build-out, femtocells and network sharing initiatives. Juniper also suggested that mobile network operators in developing countries transition to renewable energy for off-grid networks.
The bottom line though: data usage is outpacing operators’ revenues. This only continues to underscore the need to strike a balance between encouraging service use, controlling resources like bandwidth and ensuring maximum payback. Policy control gives operators the levers to manage mobile data delivery and monetise the services.
Alcatel-Lucent Blog…
Customer Experience Management and the Thieves of Time
Did you know that it costs about five to ten times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to retain an existing customer? As Alcatel-Lucent’s Vincent Kavanagh notes, unfortunately, “money talks”— and most companies typically end up incorrectly distributing their marketing spend. They’ve also ignored the fact that happy customers have proven to stay longer and spend more, and not made customer experience management (CEM) a priority.
Luckily, operators are paying greater attention to CEM. They are being increasingly conscious of customers’ time and interacting with them more over multiple channels including social media. One important area that they have yet to tap into though is their OSS and network data, to gain a holistic view of subscriber activity. By doing so, operators can open up a myriad of possibilities and turn them into something that can be monetised.
TYN…
Cloud Computing: Latin American Market Will Be 69% in Five Years
IDC recently conducted its Cloud Solutions Roadshow in Argentina, and after meeting with various Latin American company executives, one of the research firm’s vice presidents, Ricardo Villate, has dubbed 2011 as “the year of the cloud.”
IDC survey results have shown that 14.5 percent of Latin American companies with more than 100 employees have implemented cloud services. This is nearly three times more than in January 2010, and the market is expected to continue this steady growth pattern, reaching 69 percent in five years.
It’s exciting to see barriers to enterprise cloud adoption like security and performance management being broken down, much like Comptel demonstrated through several TM Forum Catalyst initiatives.
]]>CTO Gareth Senior and Stratecast’s Nancee Ruzicka will be presenting a TeliaSonera case study as part of TM Forum’s Enabling Service Innovation Summit on Wednesday, May 25 from 12:15 p.m. – 12:45 p.m. It’s a worthwhile presentation that will discuss the operator’s unique “you get what you pay for” approach and use of policy control, to better manage its customers’ mobile Internet usage and meet the European Union’s data roaming regulations.
As my colleague Greg Scullard mentioned, we’ll also be giving live demonstrations of the Enhanced Cloud Service Management Catalyst in Forumville. Comptel’s mediation and policy control solutions were used in the proof-of-concept, which explores how communications service providers can develop, monetise, and assure access to new revenue streams and markets with hosted unified communications and collaboration services.
Lastly, Comptelians will be manning booth #49 in the expo hall and are on hand for demos of the Comptel Dynamic OSS, covering catalog-driven service fulfillment, dynamic SIM management, mediation, charging and policy control. We’re particularly looking forward to showing how our solutions can help operators deliver a superior customer experience, from customer acquisition through to service delivery, and to customer retention.
Should you wish to share any thoughts from the event, Comptel invites you to leave a comment here. We look forward to seeing you in Dublin!
]]>I am particularly excited about the Enhanced Cloud Service Management Catalyst, as it is the first to involve Comptel’s mediation and policy control solutions. Last year, we were primarily focused on fulfillment, with being responsible for orchestrating the delivery of hosted unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) services. Now, in the second phase, we’re also taking a key role in the monetisation of these services by capturing and rating usage and performance data from the infrastructure. It’s great to have this year’s project leveraging most of our software assets, and thus completing the Comptel Dynamic OSS loop.
What’s also interesting to note about this Catalyst—the same core set of applications traditionally used to manage mobile networks is being applied to UC&C in the cloud. For instance, just like the mobile world has gone through many changes in terms of the way subscribers pay for services, customers of UC&C solutions will be looking for pricing that accurately represents their usage levels—whether its billing for video and call usage per minute or per second, blended pricing where video usage doesn’t incur charges for the audio that accompanies it or different pricing for the host and participants. To achieve this service differentiation, operators of UC&C services can exercise flexible policy control and charging capabilities.
Management World 2011 attendees, if you’d like to demo the project, email [email protected] or visit the Enhanced Cloud Service Management Catalyst booth in Forumville.
For those unable to make it to Dublin, a whitepaper with more information on “The Criticality of Effective Service Management in Monetising Cloud-Based Collaboration Services,” is available for download.
]]>As for Management World Americas, this year’s theme is “Beating the Revenue Crunch: Smart Pipes, Smart Services, Smart Business”. And, TM Forum has put together an impressive keynote program that will debate the business and technology decisions communication service providers (CSPs) have to make in today’s world, where traditional voice and messaging services are declining and the explosion of data offerings is failing to deliver matching revenue growth.
Some of the questions that will be tackled by highlighted speakers including our partners IBM and Alcatel-Lucent—where, how and when should our industry reposition itself, and to what? Is the future one where today’s CSPs become service-enabling ’smart pipes’ and deliver an array of new retail brands, or is there still a strong role for telcos as retailers? What would that change entail?
Supporting this theme will be four summits, 80 sessions and more than 100 presenters from CSPs and vendor companies worldwide. The Cloud Summit, New Services and Business Models Summit, Operational Excellence Summit, and Customer Experience Summit will explore the current telco industry challenges and opportunities through case studies, panel discussions and executive roundtables. Comptel and Mexican CSP Axtel will be presenting at the Operational Excellence Summit tomorrow, 9 November at 3:00 p.m. on the operator’s multi-phase OSS consolidation project, to roll out WiMAX and other next-generation network technologies and introduce new services to its customers.
Also on tap for Management World Americas, like in years past, are Forumville and Catalyst demonstrations. Forumville will feature five themed zones showcasing nine live proof-of-concept, collaborative projects, including the Cloud Service Broker Catalyst.
For those going to Orlando, we hope you’ll swing by booth #28 and say hello.
]]>After four successful iterations of the Service Model Catalyst, we are happy to share that we’ve achieved all of the results we’ve set out to accomplish. As for the other two Catalysts, we will continue to explore these further over the next few months—we’re really seeing the Cloud Service Broker Catalyst working as a potential business model for CSPs.
Podcast Options:
Play streaming audio: v2 Microsperience- Greg Scullard- July 2010.mp3
Follow the conversation via Twitter: @TeresaCottam, @Telesperience, @ComptelCorp or #BSSOSS.
]]>As briefly mentioned in Olivier Suard’s Wednesday post, the latter initiative, championed by BT, aimed to demonstrate a unified service delivery framework for managing distributed inter-cloud services (specifically unified communications voice). Comptel contributed service fulfillment solutions and a customer order portal to the project.
To give credit where credit’s due, Qwest acted as the cloud service broker exposing the product and service catalog into the cloud, while Cisco Systems brought the domain managers for infrastructure and voice applications as well as a service management portal. Progress Software was responsible for the data interoperability with standardization and mapping, and managed services provider T-Systems integrated the customer self-care portal.
Management World 2010 attendees, if you had time to walk through Forumville, what did you think of the Inter-Cloud Service Management Catalyst and the others on display? How might you like to see this particular initiative evolve (e.g. the addition of service assurance or billing components)? Or, what other types of Catalysts should be considered for Management World Americas in Orlando in November?
]]>Some of the key OSS points made: it’s critical to have a full-service suite that offers a high degree of functionality out of the box. The solutions should encompass not only the traditional elements, such as activation, order management, provisioning and inventory management, but also newer components like catalog that are important for next-generation business models, for example, Telco 2.0.
Wrapping up, Gareth and Ralf gave the Inter-Cloud Service Management Catalyst as an example of traditional OSS (service fulfillment) being applied to a brand new space. The initiative involves the ability to run services between multiple clouds, partition networks into slices and provide end-customers with the tools they need to manage their use of on-demand cloud services. But, more on the Inter-Cloud Service Management Catalyst coming up!
Leveraging OSS for managed services—and providing end-customers with the ability to make changes as they like—can certainly give service providers an edge (including time- and cost-savings as a result of automation and integration) over those that don’t know how to do it.
]]>Gary Bruce, Catalyst lead and project champion at BT Innovate & Design, answers a couple of questions about the Cloud Service Broker Catalyst (CSB), which will demonstrate a trusted, governed cloud management platform, to simplify the delivery of complex, cloud services to enterprise customers.
Q: How is the CSB Catalyst addressing the barriers to cloud adoption for enterprise customers?
A: Although cloud services offer many attractive benefits, enterprises are naturally concerned about losing control over IT governance. Issues, such as maintaining application performance, delivering adequate security, preventing runaway costs and complying with regional or sector regulations, create significant barriers for cloud adoption.
The CSB Catalyst project starts to address these issues by developing a trusted interface between the enterprise and cloud service environments. This facilitates a secure, highly performing cloud-based environment for enterprise activity that operates in accordance with each organization’s own governance rules.
Using the CSB Catalyst, enterprises can benefit from cloud models, like pay-as-you-go, ‘OPEX not CAPEX’, and automatic scaling on demand, while retaining control and avoiding lock-in with any single underlying cloud platform. The CSB also benefits cloud service providers by enabling them to offer services with transparent governance, and providing levels of control and assurance which would otherwise be difficult and costly to achieve.
Q: What will the demonstration scenario on display in Forumville entail?
A: The CSB Catalyst is acting on some of the primary requirements from TM Forum’s Enterprise Cloud Buyers Council, and explores the use of TM Forum standards to facilitate the cloud service broker function. In particular, the CSB Catalyst employs the Product and Service Assembly (PSA) standard to facilitate automated interworking between each of the catalyst’s collaborators with respect to cloud service assembly and deployment.
The CSB Catalyst demonstration in Forumville will highlight:
Q: How will the project takeaways help BT in the real world as a buyer and seller of complex cloud services?
A: Through the CSB Catalyst, BT hopes to make the provisioning of cloud services more easily accessible and viable for enterprises, and enable buyers to capitalize on the benefits of complex cloud services, while having the control they need over IT governance.
The initiative can also help cloud service brokers improve their customers’ experiences, by providing the best available resources at any given time, reducing service delivery bottlenecks and minimizing the effects of resource contention.
We hope that the Catalyst will encourage the adoption of cloud services, and open up new revenue opportunities for operators and cloud service providers.
To learn more about the CSB Catalyst, which also involves Comptel, Infonova, OpenNMS Group and Square Hoop, head over to Level 3 in the Agora 3 Mezzanine during the following hours:
Tuesday, May 18 from 12:30 – 19:00
Wednesday, May 19 from 10:00 – 19:00
Thursday, May 20 from 10:00 – 14:30
]]>CTO Gareth Senior and Ralf Jaeger from partner Cisco Systems’ Worldwide Managed Services Team will be teaming up for a presentation as part of TM Forum’s Successful Business Transformation Summit. On Tuesday, May 18 at 5 p.m., head over to the session, to hear about and discuss managed services’ vital role in enhancing the overall customer experience, maintaining competitive advantage and modernizing communications service providers’ (CSPs) systems to handle the ever-changing telecom environment.
Customer Telecom Personal Argentina will also be speaking at the show. Kick off the Revenue Management & Profitability Summit with Leticia San Juan on Wednesday, May 19 at 10 a.m. She’ll explain how the CSP was able to meet business goals, such as reducing the duration of the activation process duration, with an integrated self-service solution.
Don’t forget about the Catalyst stands in Forumville! Comptel is participating in three of these collaborative initiatives at Management World 2010. We’ll be on hand with our fellow participants to discuss the Inter-Cloud Service Management (from a service fulfillment perspective), Cloud Service Broker (from a service-layer active catalog and design studio perspective) and Service Model (from a federated product and service catalog perspective) Catalysts.
For those going to Nice, we hope you’ll swing by booth #21 and say hello.
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