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Unleashing the Creativity of the Developer Community
By Jeffrey Sklaver, Senior Vice President, TeleStrategies
The term “over the top” has always had a positive connotation, implying that
whatever it was describing was incredible or beyond the norm. For communications
service providers today though, “over the top” has a negative connotation. It
now describes applications that utilize service providers' networks end-to-end,
but where the carriers are merely access providers. These services are being
delivered “over the top,” as today’s Web 2.0 service creation framework can duplicate
many of the same functions and capabilities of the network faster, cheaper and
easier. If service providers are going to weather the challenge that Web 2.0
poses, they will need to become part of the solution, moving applications from “over
the top” to “across the middle” by opening their networks to third party developers
and allowing for creative service “mashups” that leverage telcos inherent advantages.
As all services morph into IP multimedia, communications service providers’ biggest
fear is being relegated to bit-pipes, with applications resident on the network
edge or customer premise. This is the threat of the Web 2.0 phenomenon- with
its plethora of innovative new applications utilizing the Web as a platform.
Web 2.0 is a viral technology built on personalization (social networks), collaboration
(wikis) and participation (blogs). To grow applications, many Web 2.0 companies
are allowing end users and third-party developers to combine (or mashup) functionality
or content from one or more sources, via an API, to create new value-added blended
applications. This can all be done in minutes or days, rather than the 12 to18
months that is typical in the telco space, using easy, open standards such as
AJAX, without requiring the user to understand the underlying network. For example,
Facebook, which is in stiff competition with MySpace in the social networking
area, recently launched a new platform to allow third party developers to build
on-line services that can operate on its site. As a result of its effort, according
to the Wall Street Journal, it now offers more than 800 new services, up from
100 when it first opened its platform the previous month.
Such viral networks make the telcos’ walled garden or portal strategies untenable and the promise of IMS seems too distant. Rather than competing against Web 2.0 companies, the telcos need to embrace their models, allowing outside developers to easily and rapidly integrate their content with telco enablers that are most effectively provided as core network capabilities and in which the telcos have a competitive advantage. These include functionalities such as location, presence, bandwidth policy, identity/authentication, QoS, billing (micro and other), messaging, profiling and more.
Today, European carriers, which face the fiercest competition, are taking the lead in allowing third party application developers to build powerful mashups using their infrastructure. BT for example now offers developers what it calls its Web21C Software Development Kit (www.sdk.bt.com), where they can create mashups using such network services as Messaging, Voice, Location, Authentication, Conference Call, Profile or Contacts. Since first offering a beta version of its product last year, more than 2,500 developers have signed up to use it, demonstrating the demand for such offerings. Telecom Italia and TeliaSonera are looking to follow suit.
A recently concluded mashup competition sponsored by BT, Microsoft and TopCoder shows the viability of such a capability. The winning application was a service designed in two days by Deepak Sharma of Tata Consulting Services that combined Microsoft’s MapPoint Web Service along with five services from BT, including Location, SMS, Messaging, Authentication and Presence. The resulting mashup gives small and medium businesses the ability to lower their shipping costs by allowing them to identify and share space on trucks going to the same location.
Looking at it from the third party developers’ perspective, the capabilities that the service providers can provide are invaluable and cannot be duplicated easily. For example, location combined with profile information would has the potential to enrich most every mobile application.
The bottom line is that like it or not, “over the top” application delivery is going to grow without any incentives in place to work with the telcos. Opening up their networks to third party developers creates that incentive, moving the applications from “over the top” to “across the middle” and making the telcos an integral, valuable part in the delivery of Web 2.0 applications and services. Nurturing such an ecosystem will allow service providers to develop and test new servicesand determine their profitability much faster and cheaper than they could ever do on their own. New revenue will also be realized through fees paid by third-party providers for network functionality access, billing and more.
To learn more about this dynamic area, what it means for the communications service provider community and how they can participate in it, be sure to attend TeleStrategies’ upcoming Telco-Web 2.0 Service Creation conference, September 19-20 in Atlanta, GA. For more information, go to
http://www.telestrategies.com/Telco2/
Comments and feedback welcome, please email Jill Morgan at jmorgan@billingworld.com.
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