Avoid the Mashup Dead Zone with Integrated B/OSS

3. A service creation environment that brings together a variety of software, subsystem, network and media content vendors in a common framework will allow service providers to navigate the variety of business relationships they must initiate to create a service. Some MVNOs are examples of this not having worked well. While there are many vendors that maintain advanced integration systems that approach service creation, such as MVNEs like Telspace and Visage Mobile, the key ingredient of service provider control of the offering is missing because mobile network operators maintain closed and inflexible networks.

The open Internet offers a remarkable democratic opportunity for a successful multiservice service-creation environment. IMS has been the most recent attempt at a service-creation protocol. This idea may return, but rather than being a common protocol, there will be a company running the platform. There are a number of initiatives under way to re-invigorate the promise of IMS.

4. Finally, to overcome the limitation of different services using different protocols and sometimes different OSS and billing applications, true multiservice offerings can flourish on a network with shared Layer 2 and Layer 3 protocols, and a common device managing the full variety of sessions and policies (Layer 5). Vendors like NextPoint Networks and Airvana have tapped into the promise of fixed-mobile convergence by building access devices that seamlessly manage sessions and policies across network types. While this technology is still in the nascent stages of development, it promises to be central to integrated service delivery for multiservices offerings.

Multiservices Examples

We are on the cusp of many exciting software-based, multiservice offers. Predominantly, the services that are available today are either blends of existing applications, innovations and enhancements on mobile or MVNO services, or tie-ups between Voice 2.0 companies that are greater than the sum of the their parts.

CallTower is a hosted VoIP PBX provider that has bundled a series of service applications beginning with the hosted PBX functionality and extending into several vertical markets with specific software tools to each vertical. For instance, specific to the health care industry, they have created dial-out features for appointment scheduling and reconfirmation. For the hotel/hospitality market, they have incorporated features that allow in-room marketing and ease-of-billing and account management. These are early indicators of how the traditional PBX can extend or be shaped to different milieu. CallTower has shown strong growth attracting more than 10,000 end users to date.

Cincinnati Bell has incorporated voicemail-to-text conversion. This service add-on available to Cincinnati Bell subscribers through SpinVox allows its users to receive a transcript of each voice mail as either an SMS or an e-mail. In this age of mobile number portability, it is dangerous to lag behind these innovations, especially as they draw the appeal of a large population of mobile service end users. Both SpinVox and Simulscribe, which offers a comparable voicemail-to-text service, will work with SprintPCS in a work-around mode that requires the user to forward unanswered calls to a separate voice mail system (at a cost of 20 cents per minute). Thus, SprintPCS has imposed a restrictive and artificial barrier in addition to not providing a comparable service to its users.

One last example of multiservice application deployment is a recent strategic partnership between VoodooVox, a provider of audio advertisements into the call stream, and Talkster, a provider of international calling from mobile phones using a callback/call-through hybrid dialing system. These two companies have built specialized software-based systems that act on voice telephony calls. They believe that together, they can create an advertising-supported application for international calling that generates profit.

Strategic relationships between niche Voice 2.0 companies seem like a smart way to achieve multiservice software communications bundles.

Software-based communications applications are revolutionizing the services that service providers bring to market by allowing innovation to happen more quickly and in more meaningful ways. Integrated software mash-ups and creative add-ons will lead to higher ARPU and stickier, more customized and customizable applications catering to specific demographic sets and the granular needs of vertical markets. Even more important, software multiservices and packet-based networks scale with enormous economies of scale, making services like SpinVox, Simulscribe, Skype, etc. exceedingly inexpensive to deliver and open to many different revenue models.

The key element under way is the split between software-intensive and network-intensive services. Networks will always be expensive to build, maintain and scale incrementally, whereas software is inexpensive on all counts. In a service creation environment, it will be crucial that network operators collect their commodity toll for transmission. However, the belief that owning a network will guarantee strategic position will one day be a thing of the past.

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