It’s All About Me!

I’m really excited about contributing to my new Billing & OSS World blog. Welcome to my first post.

Now, I’ve been around the B/OSS world for nearly 15 years with stints at Sprint Canada, Solect and, for the past eight years, Amdocs. I’ve seen a lot of buzzwords and trends come and go — actually, most of them come and stick around for a long, long time before being realized (witness 3G, triple-play or convergence). So the question I always ask myself when these things come along is, how do I take practical action on this today? If I can act on something today, then it’s worth a closer look.

The emerging trend I’m most excited about right now is something I’ve dubbed the “Tera-play.” Analysts forecast that by 2015 more than 1 trillion devices will be connected to the network. Phones. Personal electronics. Refrigerators. Cars. TVs. Medical devices. Devices beyond imagination. These devices will form a highly complex, digitally-enabled, constantly-connected lifestyle. Certainly, with a trillion connections in play, this not-too-distant future holds the promise of new revenue for service providers. But only for service providers that act now, building the systems, processes and infrastructure to manage costs, monetize growth, simplify complexity and establish a central role in this Tera-play world. So I’d like to use this space to share my thoughts on the signposts that mark the road to the Tera-play and to create a dialogue so that we can learn a thing or two from each other on how to maximize this evolving opportunity.

One signpost I observed recently is the launch of personal hot spots by Clearwire, Verizon Wireless, Telefonica, Sprint and Comcast. If you think mobile broadband is all about connecting everybody to everybody and everything to everything, everywhere, think again. It’s all about connecting you to everything and connecting everything around you. This is what Verizon Wireless MyFi does.

These personal hot spots will allow you to access broadband networks, connect multiple devices and users simultaneously and maintain this level of access and connectivity everywhere you go — like driving around the country inside a personal hot spot bubble! Now you can access your media library in your car or connect your laptop to the Internet in any hotel room without paying your host for the privilege. Pretty cool stuff.

But the ground-breaking idea behind Verizon Wireless’s MyFi or Clearwire’s Clear Spot isn’t the idea of owning a personal hot spot — it’s the experience these services enable; MyFi is an immediate response to what customers are increasingly demanding — a digital lifestyle, which will eventually become a way of life for many consumers. The digital lifestyle is enabled by the interconnectivity that exists when all your devices talk to each other, so that you get the information and the services you need wherever you are and on whichever device is in front of you, and the experience is seamless and convenient.

Sounds like a Tera-play signpost and something service providers and consumers can take advantage of now. But how will service providers ensure that they are providing more than just another form of convenient access? How do personal hot spots do more than turn the iPhone into a simple toll bypass platform? Service providers need to grapple with how to be relevant, smarter pipes through personalization and adding value to the content they distribute. From here the question becomes, how do service providers fully monetize their assets? That’s an even tougher nut to crack as the Tera-play emerges.

Mike Couture is head of global marketing for Amdocs, where he leads the company’s global team of marketing professionals in the areas of market research and insight, product marketing, marketing communications, corporate marketing, regional marketing and account-based marketing.