Editor's Letter: The Demand for Real-Time, On-Demand Apps

It is easy to blame technology, as we often do, for the mind-blowing pace of the lives we lead. We are good at laying blame. We’ve blamed everything from Rock ’n Roll and rap lyrics to movies and video games for the creatures we’ve become. We’ve blamed hurricanes and other natural phenomenon on our own behavior. How silly is that? And we have blamed the information age with making our heads spin with the instantaneous news of crisis from around the world.

But advances in communications technology are not to blame. Sure, it has shrunk our world and caused us to feel every maddening injustice across the globe and through its wireless reach has left us nowhere to hide. But it is only because we have not yet learned to bend this technology to our will. In its newness we have embraced 21^st century communication technology and taken what it has given us. Today, that relationship is beginning to change. Technology is responding to the demands of the people rather than leading them down a primrose path. And the people are demanding real-time, on-demand applications.

Real time changes everything. Suddenly, technologists are playing catch up to market demands. Nowhere is that more evident than in the back office. A second golden age of communications suddenly is upon us and telecom companies and their vendors must face and answer the challenge of ensuring this new age is meant for them. They must figure out how to deliver services and applications on demand, rate, charge, compensate third parties and ensure service quality as a service is being requested and delivered.

Our cover story features two men from Verizon Business trying to meet this challenge. David Landry, executive director of sales support and billing systems, and Alan Mott, director of systems planning and architecture, spoke with Contributing Editor Susana Schwartz about their efforts to turn their network into a real-time delivery system through — among other initiatives — billing transformation and a single-stack approach to product catalogs. More importantly, they are doing so across Verizon’s different lines of business — an approach affectionately known as convergence.

Companies such as Orange (in the U.K.) and Telkomsel (in Indonesia) have worked toward converging their individual prepaid and postpaid billing systems to realize the benefits of delivering on-demand, real-time services to both sets of customers. (See "Switching to Offense with Convergent, Real-Time Services")

Answering the challenge of real time requires that service providers know a great deal more about their customers, including where they are at any given time, what communications mode they are in and what their preferences are. We look at Nokia Siemens’ acquisition of Apertio to see how the company is advancing its subscriber management portfolio to address this, and we look at a billing concept that refuses to die: usage-based billing. Given the way consumers of network services — and thus bandwidth — are finding ways to eliminate what once was considered a bandwidth glut, perhaps there is life in this idea yet.

And given the way people have seized the initiative in their struggle to bend technology to their will, telecom service providers only would have themselves to blame if they miss the opportunity to reign in this new golden age.

Sincerely,

Tim McElligott
Editor in Chief