Mapping the future of Web 2.0 and defining the role service providers will play in it, requires intimate knowledge about the one thing that all parties would agree drives the market: adoption.
From this, advertisers can determine their consumer strategies, enterprises their revenue strategies, and other vertical markets their investment priorities. And service providers can learn how to respond.
The search for these drivers drove two enterprising employees of Alcatel-Lucent to write a book on the subject. “The Shift: The Evolving Market, Players and Business Models in a 2.0 World,” was written by Allison Cerra, vice president of marketing, communications and public affairs, and Christina James, director of solutions marketing. It addresses the emerging ecosystem of service providers, developers, advertisers, consumers and how they stand to benefit when smarter networks are used as development platforms. That’s right, development platforms.
There was a time when the idea of using networks in this way would be dismissed out of hand. However, it is through the untapped value in their networks, which they must share with developers, that service providers will play a vital role in the new business model known as Web 2.0. And given the consumer and enterprise demands, it is not an offer service providers can refuse.
The book includes a year’s worth of primary research and is anchored by analysis of the rapid pace of consumer technology adoption, how that impacts service providers, enterprises, application developers, content providers and other ecosystem players and how they are responding to what the research shows will be a $100 billion opportunity in the U.S. market.
“This represents a new opportunity not only for service providers but all the stake holders in the mix,” Cerra said. ‘By creating more powerful end-user experiences that people are willing to pay for and by defragmenting a complicated market that advertisers are willing to pay for, you create incremental value that doesn’t exist in the ecosystem today by exposing these capabilities that largely remain behind the walled gardens of the serviuce provider,’ Cerra said.
Much of that incremental value comes from service providers exposing the elements in their networks to developers. Cerra said the transition from Web 1.0 business models to Web 2.0 that are necessary for the customer control and new capabilities would be a winner for all parties to the ecosystem. End users get to control their experience, developers have more tools to work with to create applications and service providers monetize their investments.
“This value can start to fund the future wave of innovation we could all benefit from,” Cerra said.
The authors found that most users are willing to pay for applications that leverage network-based features such as location, presence, profiles, security and quality-of-service.
In fact, they will pay 25 percent to 35 percent more for a service that includes three network-based capabilities versus just one. Another element critical to building such services is giving developers access to customer profile and usage information. And, luckily, 50 percent of consumers are comfortable sharing sensitive profile information such as location, presence and other online behavior with their mobile provider.
