By Manuel Vexler, IMS Forum

Recently, IMS joined a list of “misused” standards which, under the effect of market forces, changed direction by 180 degrees. These standards were originally intended for other applications, however they found their mass market appeal in other directions than the one originally intended by their creators.

IMS is not the first and for sure not the last case where standards are designed for one application, just to find that they are used for another.

As examples, let's start with the Ethernet, which at 10MB/s was running at a hard-to-imagine speed when modems were still running at a few KB/s. Of course, it was destined to be a LAN working over very short distances. Ethernet is now known as a 10/100 GB Ethernet point-to-point connection and can run thousands of miles on a fiber optic cable. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) started as a peer-to-peer (P2P) music download standard, just to morph into a signaling standard used in IMS. And finally, IMS started life as a mobile broadband standard and is now used as a replacement for ... you guessed, softswitches. Used for VoIP delivery, the softswitches are used in both fixed and mobile networks to deliver a single, narrowband service.

IMS, however, will see at least one more turn as market forces will push convergence and multimedia in telecom networks worldwide. The writing is on the wall. Many service providers and in some cases regulators, are busy combining fixed and mobile voice business units in converged organizations. That will make the introduction of IMS easier and faster as it simplifies both the business case and maximizes the OPEX savings. It also forces the regulators to reconsider basic things such as the definition of a voice call — since for now TDM calls, cellular calls and VoIP calls are regulated separately.

The change to IMS also is helped (sadly) by the economic crisis, as companies have less financial means to keep competing point solutions in operation; for example, VoIP and PSTN fixed line are being delivered on multiple non-IMS platforms. With major and mid-sized service providers entering into new markets such as video delivery and content delivery, there is still a question why the IMS business case is still made on softswitch replacement. Maybe we should wait for a couple of more years so LTE will finally provide a competitive amount of wireless bandwidth (when compared with 3G) and demand the level of quality-of-service required by new interactive media.

Also, for a final comparison, let's go back to the Ethernet model, and talk about the mutation of standards – that is when a standard jumps from one transport medium to another. After all, Ethernet is closely related to the WiFi and WiMAX architectures. So how will IMS mutate?

Manuel Vexler is chair of the technical working group in the IMS Forum. He is well known for his expertise in voice and multimedia over Internet, bringing more than 20 years of experience to roles such as the CTO of CopperCom and vice president of IMS Interoperability at the IMS Forum. He drove M&A at Cisco, and launched new technologies at CopperCom, AMD, Alcatel (Newbridge) and Nortel.

As I was hanging out recently with B/OSS editor Tim McElligott outside the Akathor Pub in the Flower District in Nice, France, it dawned on me that instead of talking about the upcoming Cannes Film Festival or the F1 race in Monaco, no, we were talking about my interest in spreading the word about the need for rational business thought in these challenging times, and the need to measurably improve back office efficiency.

Likewise, I’m sure that while all the tourists dining in Nice that evening were talking about potential celebrity sightings, all the attendees of the TM Forum’s Management World 2009 that week were outside pubs talking about how to accelerate new service introduction and operations innovations in a year when margins are under pressure.

For the far-reaching world of Billing and OSS is in fact a small community of hard working service providers, vendors, and integrators, all dedicated to making sure that those tourists up and down the Cours Saleya on their mobile devices can surf the Web for film festival schedules and tweet with their friends to find a convenient meeting place. Little do they know what it takes to bring that experience to their fingertips. Little do they know the compilation of people, processes and systems that must be orchestrated flawlessly whenever they press a Send button. They take it for granted. They take us for granted. And that’s a good thing.

That means that we are doing our jobs. Well. The BOSS community is right at home working in the back offices and in the call centers, pushing every day to improve provisioning flow-through, automate trouble resolution, and support the rollout of some new interactive customer loyalty campaign that the marketing department dreamed up the day before.

We love working in the shadows, which is why the idea of blogging on B/OSS is so appealing. It gives our little community – the one that stands up a trillion dollar industry – the chance to at least put a spotlight on the benchmarks and bellwethers from which we can measure our success. It may not be starlets walking the beach for a hoard of paparazzi, but that’s OK. Even if I were in the movie making business, I’m sure I’d still be talking about idea-to-implementation, new business models, and key performance indicators. Wouldn’t you?

Adan Pope is the chief strategy officer for Telcordia, a global leader in the development of fixed, mobile and broadband communications software and services. He also serves as CTO for their OSS and Service Delivery businesses. Adan brings more than twenty years of experience in driving technical strategy and working at the forefront of industry innovation, beginning with AT&T Bell Labs in the 1980s. Prior to joining Telcordia, Adan was CTO (Americas) and vice president at Cramer; CTO and VP Engineering at Clear Communications; and led strategic EMS development programs at Tellabs.

By HP’s Nigel Upton

You're sitting on a gold mine. In fact, with the recent wild fluctuations in commodity prices, the information you've got tucked away in your customer data might be even better. Companies in communications and media, more than those in virtually any other industry, already possess a vast array of consumer data. In capturing customer transactions – from patterns of service usage to billing choices to the services chosen – your customer data paints a detailed portrait of both individual consumers and of your customer base as a whole.

The trick is turning that information into actionable insight. In today's turbulent economy and competitive marketplace, if you're not fully leveraging this vital store of information, you're leaving money on the table. New competitors are entering the playing field, powered by innovative technologies that have enabled them to immediately compete with established players. Unfortunately, too many communications and media companies still rely on yesterday's network controls and business models. Many are aware that revenue is going begging, but are constrained by their legacy infrastructure and disparate processes and unable to capture it. That has to change.

Here are five ways that more effectively leveraging customer data can help you to grow your business:

1. Monetize customer transactions. Analysis of customer data in real-time, perhaps through real-time charging solutions, can provide valuable insight into consumer behavior by "showing" what customers are doing while they're doing it. That enables the delivery of targeted marketing to the right customer at the right time. Plus, you can use compiled customer data to more accurately predict, track and analyze the outcomes of marketing spending.
2. Capture more revenue from service usage. Today, every operational process and capital investment is being scrutinized for ROI. Customer interactions are dissected to see where and how the experience can be improved to increase cross-sell and up-sell, as well as reduce churn. Analysis of customer activity can highlight which services are, or should, produce results and which should be scrapped. As competition intensifies and data and service volumes continue to grow, you must understand what your customer data is telling you.
3. Understand the entire customer lifecycle. Lifestyle service offerings rule today’s consumer-driven markets. Effectively leveraging customer data enables you to improve the velocity and accuracy of your decision making at all customer touch points. You'll not only gain speed, but when you act, you're far more likely to act correctly, even in the rapidly evolving marketplace.
4. Protect and grow revenue through monitoring and analytics. Understanding what the data is telling you enables you to quickly weigh customer credit risks, improve fraud detection and plug leakage. Real-time data analysis gives you the ability to stop revenue loss as early as the point of sale and all the way through your revenue chain.
5. Secure data efficiently for retention and compliance. You can't achieve compliance if you're not sure where critical data resides. Proper customer data management enables you to achieve compliance with data retention and protection requirements, and supports both common fixed and mobile communications data collection, as well as data collection from Internet, email, SMS/MMS, GPRS, and 3G.

Put systems in place to harness the insight provided by your customer data, and you'll be well-positioned to make smarter decisions about everything from service introduction and retirement to targeted marketing to fraud control. The answers for many of today's most important challenges are already there, just waiting to be unearthed and understood.

Nigel Upton is responsible for the Customer Intelligence and Billing portfolio within the HP Communications & Media Solutions (CMS) business. Nigel brings more than 20 years experience with HP in Europe and the United States, managing various Enterprise and Telecom software businesses within HP, as well as managed Global Alliances. Nigel represents HP on the Board of Directors of the IMS Forum. He is a frequent industry speaker on BSS topics.