Here we are at the intersection of Web 2.0 and traditional carrier services, and many operators are standing on the corner wondering how to capitalize on the resulting thirst for innovation in the marketplace. One thing’s for certain: You can’t do it with in-house processes. And that could be a problem for traditional providers whose business practices lean in a more proprietary direction — unless they embrace open innovation ecosystems.
“Firms that rise to the challenge will thrive; those that ignore it, or fail to grasp its implications, risk marginalization and eventual extinction,” writes Matt Bross, group CTO at British Telecom plc, in a recent column. He added, ominously: “Of the companies included in the Fortune 100 when it was first published in 1917, only 18 still appear and 61 have simply ceased to exist. A business' success, indeed its very survival, is dependent on being willing to take risks on innovation.”
Network operators have long relied on traditional — and slow — internal R&D and service launch cycles to launch carrier-exclusive, network-dependent services. But now that businesses have access to greater-than-ever amounts of bandwidth, increasingly recognize the value of IP, and want to consume more and more converged video, voice and data out of the cloud — regardless of what access network is used to get there — carriers face a challenge of coming up with new services with wide appeal, quickly.
“But innovation is not an end in itself – you need to deliver the innovations your customers want, when and where they want them to innovate at the speed of their lives and not at the speed of technology,” Bross continued.
To that end, BT is embracing open, Internet-enabled innovation ecosystems to tap into the power of third-party development, partnerships and cloud strategies Witness its Ribbit acquisition, which cost it $105 million over the summer. In November, the two officially came out of a beta phase with a plan to allow carriers and service providers around the world tap Ribbit’s softswitch platform, which has been opened to thousands of developers to create voice-enabled Web applications using standard APIs. In other words, Ribbit’s providing an open way for pretty much anyone to add voice to other applications, and for any service provider to access them for use within their own portfolios.
The telco also hosts BT Tradespace, which offers BT capabilities for small and medium-sized businesses and allows mash ups with third party Web 2.0 applications.
In another example, BT has a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Infosys to put in place a framework under which the companies will integrate Infosys's GRADIENT data virtualization platform with BT's Real Time Business Intelligence, so customers of the latter can click-to-build their own business intelligence dashboards that bring together information from any number of distributed data sources.
Such are the fruits of an open innovation strategy that can be extended to include R&D teams from other companies, academics (BT now has collaborations with more than 30 universities), customers, developer and random people that are interested in solving service challenges; everyone can exchange their ideas globally via the power of the Internet.
Bross does caution that while necessary, embracing Internet-enabled open innovation “requires business managers who can transcend the constraints and culture of their own organizations and harness contributions from people across a broad spectrum of disparate backgrounds.”
