Vanillaplus April-May 2010

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TALKING HEADS Bigger flat-rate troubles just mean bigger Policy needs, says Volubill CEO

CLOUD SERVICES Is this a justified silo?

SERVICE DELIVERY CSPs need to take things personally!

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE How to find a needle in a digital haystack T-MOBILE CASE STUDY Tackling mediation troubles in 5 territories MOBILE PERFORMANCE iPad: A blessing or a curse for data service quality?

MOBILE OPERATORS’ OPPORTUNITY Hot Data with Britney! ▲

PLUS!

Rev Up for T-Mobile/Orange merger • New App boosts Facebook e-commerce Hope for CSPs in service frenzy – See our 16-page Nice Supplement Attached 11 Event Previews • The Contract Hot List • And... Network, Heal Thyself!

www.comptel.com

Take Charge of Your Services!

Policy Control & Charging

Management World Nice, France, 18-20 May, Hall 2 Booth 21

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13 EXPERT OPINION: CLOUD SERVICES

20 BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

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IN THIS ISSUE

Bigger flat-rate troubles just mean bigger Policy needs, says Volubill CEO

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SERVICE ASSURANCE

EDITOR’S COMMENT Web promises must match customer experience.

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NEWS Company, Product, Contract and People News.

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CONTRACT HOT LIST Major contracts awarded globally.

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TALKING HEADS John Aalbers, Volubill’s CEO, tells VanillaPlus why flat-rate charging is such a challenge for CSPs.

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CASE STUDY: MEDIATION T-Mobile has tackled problems with its billing mediation platform in five territories.

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EXPERT OPINION: BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE Stephan Gatien explains the role of BI in the digital economy.

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BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE CSPs are prevented from rolling out new services by the fragmented and out of date customer records they hold, says Steve Rogerson.

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EXPERT OPINION: CLOUD SERVICES Bob Machin wonders if cloud services are sufficiently different to justify being managed as a silo.

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IN ASSOCIATION WITH...

Fred Werner describes the goals of ETIS, the Global IT Association for Telecommunications.

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INTERVIEW: PERFORMANCE Is the iPad a blessing or a curse when managing mobile data service quality? We ask Steve Hateley.

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SERVICE ASSURANCE George Malim explores how MSPs are working to ensure service quality in the all-IP environment.

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EXPERT OPINION: INVENTORY MANAGEMENT Better inventory management can improve service roll-out, says Adan Pope.

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(Cover Photo: ) Volubill provides innovative ‘on the network’ charging and policy control solutions to telecom operators worldwide. The company’s solutions enable operators to manage bandwidth based on subscriber- and service-centric usage policies and quotas in order to maximise revenues and service experience, and eliminate churn.

Transcending the boundaries between the network and IT systems, Volubill provides flexibility and unlocks the potential of real-time BSS integration. Founded in 2001, Volubill is a global company with more than 75 customers worldwide. For more information go to: www.volubill.com

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LEFT FIELD OPINION Barbara Lancaster wonders if networks will ever truly be self-healing, as some claim.

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OPINION CSPs need to start taking things personally, and Pat McCarthy can tell you why.

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UPCOMING EVENTS What’s on and where to find it.

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BARCELONA: POLICY & CHARGING REPORT The impact of policy control and real-time charging on CSPs was evident in Barcelona. Jeremy Cowan reports.

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EVENT PREVIEWS Three pages packed with details of forthcoming events.

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WEBINAR REVIEW: BILLING & BI How integrated billing and business intelligence can unlock the data that operators hold.

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WEBINAR REVIEW: WEB SELF-SERVICE 45 Ian Jones shows that there are twin benefits from web self-service.

CLOCKING OFF! George Malim casts a jaundiced eye over the merger between Orange and T-Mobile in the UK.

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PLUS + MANAGEMENT WORLD SUPPLEMENT Don’t miss our 16-page CEO Guide to the TM Forum’s event in Nice – wrapped with this issue, featuring an exclusive Interview with the CTO of ConceptWave Software.

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Web promises must match customer experience The evidence of my own eyes tells me that the communications industry is showing a bit more confidence about the mediumterm future. The GSMA, organisers of Mobile World Congress Jeremy Cowan, (see report, pages 37-38) says that visitor attendance this year editor, VanillaPlus reached 49,000 (47,000 in 2009) of whom 54% were said to be C-Level execs, and there were over 1,300 companies exhibiting.

And the muted buzz within the industry is continuing as we head to Nice for the more focused but still influential Management World event organised by TM Forum (see our 16-page Preview Supplement attached to this issue). But talking to operators, integrators, system vendors, and analysts recently does give you a mixed picture of health. Vendors seem more bullish than service providers, which makes you wonder if many procurement hopes are going to be dashed or at least delayed.

I’m quite prepared to believe the forecast by Analysys Mason that says, “there will be no quick post-recession recovery for western European telecoms.” VanillaPlus is an EMEA-wide title so I don’t want to be too parochial, but the report says that end-user spend here was down by 4.4% in 2009, and will decline at a compound annual growth rate of –1.8% until 2012*. This is sobering and underlines the need to optimise service provider profit margins (see T-Mobile Case Study, pages 16-17) and the customer experience (see article pages 28-29).

EDITORIAL ADVISORS

John Aalbers, chief executive, Volubill

Dan Baker, Research Director, Technology Research Institute

Martin Creaner, president, TM Forum

Andreas Freund, VP Marketing, Orga Systems GmbH

Louis Hall, chief executive, Cerillion Technologies

Barbara Lancaster, president, LTC International

Gaby Matsliach, general manager, BSS Product Line, Comverse

Pat McCarthy, VP of Global Marketing, Service Delivery Solutions, Telcordia

Simon Muderack, COO, Tribold

Andrew Taylor, CEO, Intec

Mac Taylor, CEO, The Moriana Group

Andrew Wyatt, head of Solutions Management, Subscriber Data Management, Nokia Siemens Networks

Chris Yeadon, director of Product Marketing, LHS

Doug Zone, chief technology officer, MetraTech

Femto ‘fun and games’ Of course, I’ve tried to do my bit to bolster Vodafone UK’s AMPU, with questionable support from the Newbury-based mobile operator. Frustrated at the poor 2G signal (much less 3G) at my home office (an hour from central London) I invested £50 (€57.50) in a femtocell which Voda is unique among Britain’s carriers in offering.

Unusually for a bloke, I grant you, I followed the instructions to the letter. Nada.

Nothing. Rien.

Voda’s website assured me that my iPhone and SureSignal (their name for it, you understand – not mine) were both registered. For the next 4 days there was no joy and I got bored. Nor was I alone in struggling; online chat about the “SureSignal” showed that it was far from being plug & play, as their video clip suggested. Then, fortified by a week’s holiday, I retried the femto which now appeared not to be registered after all. With that rectified it was working in 15 minutes, once the cell had found my device. Memo to Voda: 1. Being the first is different from being the best.

2. Your web site can make promises the rest of you can’t keep. 3. I suggest that someone in marketing tries out the customer experience for themselves. * The Western European telecoms market: trends and forecasts 2009–2014, Analysys Mason

VanillaPlus is distributed free to selected named individuals in EMEA who meet the Publisher's terms of Circulation Control. If you would like to apply for a regular free copy supplied at the Publisher's discretion visit www.vanillaplus.com If you do not qualify for a free subscription, paid subscriptions can be obtained. Subscriptions for 6 issues cost £99.00 worldwide (or US$150 / EUR125) including post and packing.

VanillaPlus magazine is published 6 times per year.

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EDITOR & PUBLISHER Jeremy Cowan Tel: +44 (0) 1420 588638 editorial@vanillaplus.com DIGITAL EDITOR Nathalie Bisnar Tel: +44 (0) 1732 808690 nathalie@vanillaplus.com BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR Cherisse Draper Tel: +44 (0) 1634 243869 cherisse@vanillaplus.com DIGITAL SALES MANAGER Janna Willick janna@vanillaplus.com

© Prestige Media Ltd 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be copied, stored, published or in any way reproduced without the prior written consent of the Publisher

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EVENTS & OPERATIONS DIRECTOR Charlie Bisnar Tel: +44 (0) 1732 844017 charlie@vanillaplus.com

DESIGN Jason Appleby Ark Design Consultancy Ltd Tel: +44 (0) 1787 881623 DISTRIBUTION UK Postings Ltd Tel: +44 (0) 8456 444137 PRINTERS Printed in England The Magazine Printing Company Tel: +44 (0) 20 8805 5000 www.magprint.co.uk CIRCULATION Circdata Tel: +44 (0) 1635 869868 PUBLISHED BY Prestige Media Ltd. Suite 117 70 Churchill Square Kings Hill, West Malling Kent ME19 4YU, UK Tel: +44 (0) 1732 844017

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CA opens wallet to buy cloud computing firm 3Tera, and Nimsoft for service assurance New York-based CA, Inc. is to acquire privately-held 3Tera®, Inc., a pioneer in cloud computing for an undisclosed sum.

According to CA, 3Tera’s AppLogic® offers an innovative solution for building Chris O’Malley, cloud services and CA: New type deploying complex of IT ‘supply enterprise class chain’ applications to public and private clouds. In a separate deal, CA has also agreed to buy privately-held Nimsoft, Inc. – a provider of IT performance and availability monitoring systems for emerging enterprises and managed service providers (MSPs). This is in an all-cash sale valued at US$350 million.

The addition of 3Tera and Nimsoft to CA’s other recent acquisitions – Cassatt, NetQoS and Oblicore – are designed to help the company expand its portfolio of systems to manage cloud computing.

3Tera enables enterprises and service providers to provision, deploy and scale public and private cloud computing environments while maintaining full control, flexibility and reliability.

3Tera also makes it easier for service providers to offer application stacks on demand by adding applications to the AppLogic catalogue, where they can be deployed to a low cost, shared cloud

infrastructure. 3Tera’s customers include more than 80 enterprises and service providers globally.

“CIOs can use cloud computing to build and manage a new type of IT ‘supply chain’ across today’s virtualised internal and external technology infrastructure,” said Chris O’Malley, Executive Vice President of CA’s Cloud Products & Solutions Business Line.

Using 3Tera’s intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) and drawing from a catalogue of pre-configured virtual server and software components, AppLogic simplifies the design and deployment of composite applications as a single logical entity in the cloud. By unifying application configuration, application deployment, and a virtual server fabric – functions that are otherwise typically performed in a fragmented manner – AppLogic helps reduce costs, improve productivity and increase service quality.

The acquisition of Nimsoft will extend CA’s ability to meet the IT management needs of emerging enterprises and MSPs, both of which are playing leading roles in the growth of cloud computing.

The Nimsoft Unified Monitoring™ system is designed to allow MSPs complete visibility into the performance and availability of their customers’ business applications across both internal and external IT infrastructures.

NetCracker to represent NEC’s telecom software NEC is consolidating its Telecom Operations and Management Systems (TOMS) software and services business under its subsidiary brand NetCracker Technology. TOMS includes business and operations management systems, network management systems, service platforms, and associated applications.

These assets include: • Customer and service management: e.g. CRM and billing, on-line care/selfservice, subscriber and device management, and mediation

• Service platforms: Service delivery platform, SaaS, and applications for IM, M2M, chat, presence, push to X, video and content distribution, and security applications • Network management: Element and network management systems, network and service assurance including SQM and monitoring, as well as device and equipment control, and • Professional and managed services: NEC’s R&D, delivery, operations, support, and maintenance centres in Asia, the Americas, and Europe.

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cVidya’s CEO tells of 'biggest RM deal since Subex bought Syndesis'

Alon Aginsky, cVidya: Revenue intelligence

"We're now the largest vendor in telecoms revenue management, by revenues and customers." That's the bold claim by Alon Aginsky, President, CEO and CoFounder of cVidya Networks, speaking exclusively to VanillaPlus, three months after buying ECtel for US$21 million in cash.

In an Exclusive report in October VanillaPlus.com broke news of the planned sale of ECtel to cVidya. Aginsky says that ECtel's publicly-quoted shares were trading at "around 50 cents," while the deal was still under wraps. When news reached the market, shares in ECtel leaped to $1.26, and the loss-making revenue management vendor's market capitalisation jumped from $7 million to "around $20 million".

By January 13 Aginsky was able to confirm the deal and cVidya's team of 150 staff grew to 300, with the loss of 20 posts through cutting overlap in administration.

He says: "We're a privately-owned company (Aginsky is the largest shareholder) with annual revenues in the area of $50 million, 132 operator customers and 300 staff across 18 global offices."

ECtel was providing Integrated Revenue Management. cVidya was focused on Telecom Revenue Assurance and Dealer Management, so the synergies were obvious. "cVidya had 80% growth per annum in recent years. But to grow in future we needed scale. ECtel being another Israeli company with offices just 20 minutes from ours, it made sense. But," he adds ruefully, "it's not easy buying a public company."

"When word of the deal got out," says Aginsky, "new orders were higher than ever before. We've now changed some of the old management and are more 'startup' in style. We're finishing the first quarter today and it's been a good quarter.

We're now working with AT&T, Telefonica Group on revenue assurance and fraud, Telecom Italia, China Mobile, Rostelecom, Kyivstar and others. We've re-branded from just revenue assurance to revenue intelligence.”

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Highlights of the survey include: • 79% of those who use video rely on consumer applications such as Yahoo!, Gmail, AOL and Skype, while 21% used systems such as those offered by Cisco and Polycom.

• 61% indicated video delay and video freezing as the largest concerns in use.

• In the US, 40% of business professionals surveyed indicated that their company will be deploying a video communication system in the next 6-24 months.

Broadband Forum launches first certification programme The Broadband Forum has announced its first ever certification programme, to develop the full potential of broadband and support smooth broadband architecture convergence around the world. Through 15 years of test plan development and interoperability test events, the Forum has helped the industry establish common standards, reduce the burden of service provider testing and expedite network deployments around the world.

To advance the goal of faster and more cost-effective service rollouts, the Broadband Forum is now launching a certification programme, the Broadband Forum Certification Programme, to verify adherence to critical IP/MPLS, broadband and digital home/business specifications. These technical specifications address areas of vital importance to the networking industry.

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Accenture launches mobile money management system for high volume mobile financial services

Video conferencing use on the rise, says survey A recent survey of more than 1,200 business professionals in the United States, Japan, South Korea and China has revealed that video chat / conferencing is rapidly being adopted worldwide, for business and personal use. The survey, conducted by Research Now and sponsored by Global IP Solutions (GIPS), indicates that business professionals are adopting video to communicate and collaborate more clearly and effectively.

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Andy Zimmerman, Accenture: “If (CSPs) do not provide these services they risk ... being eliminated from the payment process.”

According to Juniper Research 150 million mobile subscribers worldwide will access banking services on their mobile device in 2011. This makes it timely that Accenture has introduced new secure, high speed, high volume mobile financial transaction software for telecoms service providers and large banks.

The mobile money management system allows firms to reach customers through existing mobile operator networks, web and internet channels and mobile devices, regardless of the device their customers prefer to use.

It also allows customers to conduct traditional banking transactions, automatically adjusts to fluctuations in network traffic, such as sudden peaks of traffic at the beginning of a business day, and can facilitate thousands of

simultaneous transactions. Since it uses “cloud-like” technology, the system can reportedly be launched quickly, economically and scales easily. Customers can be segmented by brand, product or language. The solution is now available worldwide.

“Mobile operators and banks are facing increasing pressure to provide mobile money services on mobile phones to all users,” said Andy Zimmerman, Global Managing Director of Mobility Services at Accenture. “If they do not provide these services they risk losing subscribers and being eliminated from the payment process.”

The mobile money management system enables the processing of micropayments in real time, helping companies take advantage of new business models and revenue streams, for example selling content that costs between a few cents and a few euros, such as music, pay-perplay games, newspapers, articles, reports, small computer programmes, tickets and postcards. Accenture offers the mobile money management solution as a nonbranded, ‘white label’ capability. Mobile money management is provided as a managed, pay-per-user service.

Convergys forges strategic links with Microsoft Convergys Corporation, a global provider of relationship management services, has entered into a global strategic relationship with Microsoft Corp, to deliver the ‘Convergys Smart Communications Suite powered by Microsoft’.

Currently under development, the system will aim to provide a comprehensive nextgeneration business support system (BSS) that dramatically improves the customer experience. By combining Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 with the modular business support system capabilities of Convergys, the solution supports a shared vision of enabling service providers to rapidly deliver a wide range of new and differentiated services.

The Convergys Smart Communications Suite is designed to be scalable and interoperable with existing systems and third party applications, as well as with

www.comptel.com

varying deployment models, and aims to be an alternative to rival billing and CRM platforms. Its open architecture aims to help companies achieve faster-time-tomarket for new services, with reduced implementation time and automated workflows for most common business processes. Additionally, the low cost licensing options and maintenance costs associated with the solution can rapidly reduce cost-to-market for new services.

The integration of the scalable Microsoft Dynamics CRM into the Convergys Smart BSS Solutions portfolio will bring wellknown customer care tools based on Microsoft Office, Outlook, and SharePoint across all customer care channels. Agents will benefit from a customer-centric, simplified user interface, to move customers quickly and intuitively between sales channels and promotions, delivering the best possible customer service and reducing call handling times.

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Subex’s new version of fraud management system aims to help operators cut TCO Subex Ltd, an India-based global provider of operations and business support systems (OSS/BSS) for communication service providers (CSPs), has launched Nikira™ v7.2, the fraud management component of its ROC (Revenue Operations Anuradha, Centre). This latest fraud Subex: CSPs management system is are grappling designed to help with costs operators reduce TCO (total cost of ownership) by reducing the hardware investments required for fraud management, as well as improving robustness and reliability of Rule Management with the introduction of the Rule Test Facility (RTF).

The system’s new version will help service providers reduce TCO by 25 - 40%, depending on the processing load of the provider, says Subex. Architectural changes in the solution eliminate the need for certain hardware

NEWS IN BRIEF

components, as well as improving its processing capability. As a result, service providers can now reduce investments in CPU, memory and storage throughput.

New Facebook payment app could turn social network into e-commerce market

With the introduction of the RTF, the system also provides a ring-fenced rule testing environment which supports extensive rule testing, segregation of duties and productivity improvements.

From now on the estimated 400 million Christian von users of the social network HammelFacebook can use a new Bonten, e-payment system called ClickandBuy: Buxter. Developed by Share real The anti-flooding capability of the RTF is ClickandBuy, it is claimed money claimed to enhance its robustness and to be the only platform reliability. Nikira v7.2 also provides within a social media enhanced customer experience with its new network handling real currencies and improved GUI interface. instead of virtual ones. Users can register and load their Buxter Anuradha, Senior Vice President – e-wallet in Euros or US dollars, with Engineering, Subex Ltd said: “With demands a limit of €50.00 for now. for NGN services increasing every day, service providers are constantly grappling Christian von Hammel-Bonten, Senior with the cost aspect of making these services VP & Head of Product Management available to subscribers. We are constantly at ClickandBuy says: "From now on, challenging ourselves to introduce newer Facebook users can not only share features ... to help our customers better their their status and pictures, they can efficiency and operations.” also share real money in a way that is fast, easy and secure."

eServGlobal and Orange prove FlexiContent in the run up to South Africa’s World Cup eServGlobal Ltd, described as a provider of smarter transaction management solutions in charging, payment, retention and network services, has successfully launched its FlexiContent service. This is a carrier-grade service that uses a rapid application development environment, allowing operators to offer new content and two-way messagebased services without any set-up costs.

Mobile network operators will be able to generate immediate new revenue from popular events such as sporting competitions. The recent African Cup of Nations Infotainment service – based on eServGlobal’s FlexiContent – gained 12 Orange affiliates within one month. Using SMS, USSD, XML triggers and web-based bearers, eServGlobal’s FlexiContent allowed Orange’s subscribers at affiliates in Africa to use premium SMS to get the all important ‘live scores’ in real time. They were also able to play games such as Instant Win, Predict & Win, and Credit Goal, where subscribers play for airtime or financial rewards.

The African Cup of Nations was seen as a rehearsal before the big event of the football

year, the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa.

The World Cup is expected to attract the attention of over 1 billion subscribers in June and July.

“We immediately knew that the Infotainment service would be highly valued by our customers when they needed real-time results or just wanted to enjoy playing for airtime during the African Cup of Nations,” said Didier Lombard, Chairman & CEO, Orange Group. “As it was a new service, we found the revenue-sharing system most appealing, allowing us to generate new revenue, without any CapEx.”

FlexiContent allowed Orange’s subscribers to get football scores in real time

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The application could prove to be equally helpful for friends and family. Facebook users are able to transfer, receive and request money from other Facebook users via Buxter, free of charge. And for a fee of 1.9% (minimum €2.00 or $3.00) they can withdraw money from their ClickandBuy account. The application will initially be available in Euros and US Dollars and can be found at http://apps.facebook.com/mybuxter At least as important though, is that this development enables Facebook's transition from a successful social network to an ecommerce marketplace that is not contained in a closed system. Buxter is designed to encourage third party developers by giving them access to the Buxter-Facebook API. This way, third party developers are able to create individual business solutions within Facebook and then receive payments through Buxter.

According to Buxter, the services that could use the e-payment facility range from movie tickets to collecting money for a birthday party to raising funds for charity.

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On the shoulders of giants...

Unleash the Vision of Single Sourcing with Dedicated eBilling Solutions

The MNC guide to telecoms single sourcing How can MNCs benefit from sourcing global telecoms from a single provider? And how can telecoms providers use this to their advantage?

Single provider status allows telecoms companies to use management systems to improve their service and maximise margins, whilst at the same time unburdening their clients of telecom management responsibility.

At the forefront of Telco eBilling & analysis solutions for over 20 years, CTI Group has a customer base that includes many of the Tier 1 & 2 service providers.

Because we work with some of the biggest players in the game, it has given us the view from the higher ground of what is demanded from MNCs in an ever shrinking world.

Because we would like to share this expertise with you, the company has produced a white paper outlining the huge benefits single sourcing has to offer both telecoms providers and their MNC customers.

For answers to the above questions and more, “The MNC Guide to Telecoms Single Sourcing” white paper is available for you, exclusively, at www.ctigroup.com.

www.ctigroup.com | +44 (0) 800 0925 835 | info@ctigroup.com

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Donate airtime for Voilà Mobile users in Haiti with MoreMagic Solutions’ etopuponline.com

Evolving achieves 7m SIM card activations through Dynamic SIM Allocation™

with a verified PayPal account or a major credit/debit card.

Donations are instantly credited to an airtime pool. Subject to certain conditions, any prepaid subscriber of Voilà can text ‘SOS’ to 321 from their own phone to receive US$1.00 of airtime credit per request, free of charge, and subject to availability of airtime in the pool.

Haitian communications provider, Comcel, offering mobile service as Voilà, and MoreMagic Solutions, the provider of www.etopuponline.com, have been organising donations of airtime for mobile phones in Haiti since the earthquake struck.

People worldwide have been able to buy airtime that is immediately available for a person in Haiti to make calls from their mobile phone.

To donate, login at www.etopuponline.com, click ‘TopUp Mobile Phone’ in the menu on the left, select the country "Haiti", the mobile operator "ComCEL (Voilà)", and enter one of these mobile numbers: 50934437802 or 50934410029, and the amount of your donation. Payment can be made online

“Within hours of the programme announcement, thousands of Voilà customers asked for airtime so they could call their relatives,” said Robin Padberg, General Manager of Comcel. “Our customers appreciate the generosity of the worldwide community, as even a small donation allows Haitians to reconnect with their families at this critical time.”

“Even as the mobile networks are restored, the Haitian people cannot afford to pay for their prepaid top-up right now, and the few who can afford it do not know where to go, because so much of Haiti’s infrastructure has been destroyed,” said Pankaj Gulati, CEO, MoreMagic Solutions. “MoreMagic Solutions is making a sincere plea to individuals to help out at etopuponline.com, where the gift has an immediate and critical impact.”

MTS expands advanced messaging services with Acision Acision has extended its relationship with MTS, the largest telecom operator in Russia, by deploying advanced messaging services including Acision Message Plus and Acision Message Store, key components of Acision’s Open Data Services Architecture. By implementing these solutions, MTS’s subscribers will have access to a range of personalised services across SMS via one messaging platform. In addition, the service creation environment of Acision’s Open Data Services Architecture enables MTS to continually co-design and deploy innovative services, aiding differentiation in a competitive market.

Mobile TeleSystems OJSC (MTS) is the largest mobile operator in Russia and the

CIS, servicing over 97 million subscribers by the end of 2009. MTS provides mobile communications in Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Armenia and Belarus.

Acision’s Open Data Services Architecture enables the operator to provide innovative services such as message auto-reply, forwarding and a web-based messaging inbox where messages can be read and archived. This allows users to control the content they receive, helping to combat SMS bullying or inappropriate messaging.

As part of its advanced messaging solution, Acision will also upgrade and extend MTS’s Acision SMSC, and Acision MMSC as well as deploy Acision Message and Data Charger across the operator’s Russian networks.

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Colorado-based Evolving Systems, Inc. reports that its pioneering Dynamic SIM Allocation™ (DSA) system has now activated more than seven million SIM cards worldwide, including four million in 2010. Three DSA customers are in live production - 3UK, MTN South Africa and Telefónica Móviles México. Two south-east Asian customers are due to implement the solution in the first half of this year, with a further African operator expected to follow later in 2010.

"The dramatic growth in the number of network platforms and new communications applications over recent years has led to a rapid increase in SIM card volumes," says Jeremy Green, Mobile Practice Leader for communications analyst, Ovum.

"We believe that Evolving Systems' approach (...) offers the possibility of streamlining what has been a complex and inefficient set of processes. The explosion of growth in emerging markets, where customers are of inherently lower monetary value, means that traditional methods of activation and provisioning are outdated. The long-expected advent of devices without user interfaces – particularly M2M industrial and consumer devices – will also require a change to provisioning models," he adds.

GCI asks Comverse to support cable users with unified billing and customer care Integrated telecoms provider GCI of Alaska has selected the Comverse Business Support System (BSS) to support its multi-channel TV services, replacing a legacy BSS. Comverse already supports billing and customer care for GCI’s internet, mobile and wireline services.

Comverse’s systems are field-proven in the cable market, supporting over 45 million subscribers through cable and multi-play service providers worldwide. Its BSS are optimised for the converging communications market, with active customer management capabilities, including customer selfservice, ordering and activation, realtime charging and payments.

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VanillaPlus builds ties with two independent research firms VanillaPlus has established new working relationships with two leading independent communications analysts, The Moriana Group in Europe and Technology Research Institute (TRI) in the USA. Research directors from both Mac Taylor, The organisations – Mac Taylor from The Moriana Group Moriana Group and Dan Baker from TRI – have agreed to join the VanillaPlus Editorial Advisory Board with immediate effect, to help guide the future direction of the magazine, website, webinars, html broadcasts, and several new services that are currently being planned.

Dan Baker, Technology Research Institute

Both of these experienced analysts will feature in some webinars in the ongoing VanillaPlus Thought Leadership series, providing independent and in-depth assessments of the market sectors involved. In addition, selected market reports, product assessments, product catalogues, and operator guides from both analyst firms will be made available through the VanillaPlus website (www.vanillaplus.com).

Mac Taylor founded The Moriana Group (www.morianagroup.com) in 2000, to provide analysis, research and consultancy services to the telecom industry, specialising in the service layer and next generation networks. He has also worked as consultant with Deutsche Bank private equity, and with Middle East investment funds in telecoms and IT. Mac holds an MA from Cambridge University in England.

Since 1994, Technology Research Institute (www.technology-research.com) has been delivering research reports and analysis for the global telecom IT industry. TRI not only produces multi-client research studies, but does custom research, writes value proposition papers, and advises clients on business strategy.

Commenting on the development, Jeremy Cowan, VanillaPlus’ Publisher & Editorial Director said: “We are delighted to be working closely with two such influential analysts as Dan Baker and Mac Taylor. Our readers and online visitors will undoubtedly benefit greatly from their telecoms expertise and in-depth research, and I am also sure that the rapidly growing worldwide reach of the VanillaPlus brand will bring their work to a new audience.”

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MACH’s new CTO to build mobile exchange systems MACH, a provider of hub-based mobile communications exchange systems, has appointed Chris Burke to the new position of Chief Technology Officer (CTO). His appointment signals the beginning of a new phase of Chris Burke, service development and provision for MACH this specialist in data and financial clearing. MACH provides a single source of multi-lateral applications to accelerate the accurate exchange of traffic, service delivery and financial settlement between communication service providers (CSPs) of every type, in any location.

Announcing the appointment, the CEO and President of MACH, Guy Dubois said: “Our mission is to bring together the growing universe of CSPs, encompassing public and private companies in the telecom, internet, cable, satellite and managed services businesses, enabling them to fulfil their mobile visions, quickly, costeffectively and to the highest standards of quality.”

Chris Burke brings international wireless and IT expertise, having held both technical and general management positions as MD EMEA for Research In Motion, CTO/CIO for Vodafone UK, CTO/CIO of fixed line service provider, Energis, and Director R&D, Bell Northern Research (formerly Nortel R&D).

Sidonis’ new VP James Fox joins from Amdocs/Cramer Sidonis, an emerging player in service assurance, has appointed James Fox as its Vice President of Technical Sales. James joins from Amdocs, where he was Director of Solution Engineering, leading technical sales James Fox, engagements at a range of major Sidonis telecom service provider accounts across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He joined Amdocs through its acquisition of Cramer Systems in 2006 where he worked for 10 years.

Formed in 2006, Sidonis helps providers of networkbased services in telecoms, utilities and the broadcast industries to assure high levels of service costeffectively. The company’s flagship product, Sidonis|StateWise, identifies the root cause and impact on services of network faults in a more flexible and lower cost way than traditional service or network management systems. The company has customers in the UK, Europe and Middle East, and partners with system integrators and solution vendors including AssureNet, Harris Stratex, SciSys and IPL.

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VanillaPlus Hot List: April/May 2010 The Hot List below shows the companies informing us of recent contract wins or product deployments.

If your contract is not listed here email the details to us now marked "Hot List" <editorial@vanillaplus.com> Vendor(s) Acision Acision Alcatel-Lucent Alcatel-Lucent Amdocs Blueslice Networks Cable & Wireless Cable & Wireless Cable & Wireless Cerillion Comverse Comverse Ericsson Ericsson Gintel Gips GyPSii / Genasys Incognito Software ip.access Ixia Leostream Corp MetraTech MetraTech Microsoft Mi-Pay mobivention NetCracker Noetica Nokia Siemens Networks Nokia Siemens Networks Nokia Siemens Networks Nokia Siemens Networks Nokia Siemens Networks Nokia Siemens Networks Nokia Siemens Networks OneAccess Ontology Systems Redknee Sierra Wireless Sigma Systems Sigma Systems Synchronica Telcordia Tellabs Verimatrix Vodafone ZTE ZTE ZTE

Key:

Client, Country

Product / Service (Duration & Value)

MTS, Russia Tata Teleservices, India MTS, Russia Globenet, North / Latin America CSL, Hong Kong GO, Malta Scottish Government, UK HMV Group, UK United Utilities, UK 3 Unnamed operators, global Kyivstar, Ukraine GCI, Alaska Mobinil, Egypt China Mobile, China Telenor Denmark, Denmark Argela Technologies, Turkey Telefonica, Latin America Euskaltel, Spain Bouygues Telecom, France NTT DoCoMo, Japan Portugal Telecom, Portugal MeetingZone, US Nervogrid, Finland Qtel, Qatar ZAIN, Kenya Sunrise, Switzerland Deutsche Telekom, Germany Phoenix24-7, UK NII Holdings, Latin America

Expansion of advanced messaging service with the deployment of Message Plus Provision of advanced messaging and charging for Tata Indicom and DoCoMo brands To conduct an LTE trial, commencing second half of 2010 Completion of 20,000km submarine cable system linking the US with Latin America ChangingWorld product deployment to support the operator's new mobile internet service CSP 3000 product deployment to replace legacy Home Location Register systems 7-year, £70m (€79m) IP VPN implementation, goes live linking 801 sites for local authorities WAN to connect 600 UK retail sites and delivery of Next Gen ADSL 2+ connectivity £30m (€34m), 5-year deal to provide converged voice and data network services to 300 sites Selected by a UK, West-African and MNC operator for major CRM and billing projects Multi-channel mobile advertising platform deployment to Ukraine's largest MNO Comverse Business Support System deployment to support multi-channel TV services Charging system deployment for 24 million mobile subscribers Mobile soft-switching technology and the provision of a radio access network: $1.8bn (€1.1bn) The delivery of core technology and components for the operator's new Mobile Multiplan service Integration of GIPS VoiceEngine with TT WIRO calling service Genasys, GyPSii agree to offer location-based media product to Telefonica users Broadband Command Center product deployment to automate the provisioning of data services Provision of 2G picocells to provide extra cellular coverage for enterprise customers Wireless testing product for to validate the functionality of its pre-deployed LTE network Connection Broker to connect 5,000 end users at operator's call centres to virtual desktops MetraNet product to provide real-time billing data and useage reports MetraNet billing, settlement and customer care product deployment Strategic alliance formed to launch new value-added services over Qtel's converged network Airtime top-up service that allows people off-shore to purchase airtime for Kenyan nationals Widget app connecting to the Joylife Handy Fun portal for Nokia S60 smartphones To support DT's Next Generation Service and Systems Management transformation Synthesys software platform implemented at UK's newest answering service contact centre NSN to manage MNO's network operations across Latin America

2.2010 2.2010 2.2010 3.2010 2.2010 3.2010 2.2010 3.2010 3.2010 2.2010 2.2010 2.2010 3.2010 3.2010 2.2010 3.2010 2.2010 4.2010 2.2010 2.2010 3.2010 3.2010 3.2010 2.2010 2.1010 2.2010 3.2010 3.2010 2.2010

MobileOne (M1), Singapore

M1 makes first 100 Mbps data call on its NSN provided, LTE trial network

2.2010

Tunisiana, Tunisia

Deployment of NSN's unified charging and billing product suite

2.2010

Insight Communications, USA

Upgrade to network using NSN's optical transport and Metro Ethernet technology

2.2010

Polkomtel, Poland

3G/HSPA network expansion and modernisation to future-proof & make smartphone-friendly

3.2010

Vodacom, Tanzania

Unified charging & billing enable prepaid & postpaid customers to receive same services

2.2010

Smart Communications, Philippines GTS Novera, Czech Republic Neotel, South Africa Azure, Gabon Bouygues Telecom, France Flow, Grenada VECTRA, Poland Unnamed operator, Middle East Telenor, Norway Clearwire, Spain TelstraClear, New Zealand Deutsche Post DHL, Germany Pannon, Hungary COSMOTE, Romania Commnet Wireless, US

Deployment of unified charging and billing services to drive faster time to market for services

2.2010

Provision of CPE platform and new services targeted at local SMEs OSS/CAD implementation to unify customer, service and infrastructure data Software licence expansion of Redknee's Turnkey Converged Billing and Airtime Reseller Introduction of a new offering for wireless machine-to-machine (M2M) communication Upgrades OSS to Sigma Systems' service activation and device provisioning system OSS product selected for service fulfillment of triple-play provider's offerings 50,000 annual licences for mobile email product Mobile Gateway Next gen OSS replacing all mobile broadband infrastructure: 2G, 3G/UMTS and 4G/LTE SmartCore 9100 platform selected to underpin national 4G services deployment Video Content Authority System to deliver a range of pay-TV services 5-year deal to provide managed MPLS network in 67 countries, connecting 400 sites Selected as Pannon's LTE live network trial vendor, allowing operator to test peak rate Deployment of UTMS network for transition from GSM / UMTS to HSPA+ and LTE Network implementation enabling faster data access for remote areas of North America

3.2010 2.2010 3.2010 2.2010 2.2010 3.2010 3.2010 4.2010 3.2010 3.2010 3.2010 2.2010 2.2010 1.2010

HSPA: High Speed Packet Access MNO: Mobile Network Operator UMTS: Universal Mobile Telecommunication System

DON'T MISS THE NEXT VIDEO TALKING HEADS! Ramez Younan, CEO of Orga Systems tells VanillaPlus why convergent billing must handle far more subscribers! www.vanillaplus.com

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John Aalbers is Chief Executive Officer, Volubill.

Over a few short years John has successfully lead the transformation of Volubill into one of the leading real time Data Charging and Policy Management vendors. Volubill now boasts over 75 customers around the globe. The company is helping service providers reinvigorate their businesses with the latest technological advances to manage the revenue and cost side of the data services revolution.

Bigger flat-rate problems just mean bigger Policy needs, says Volubill CEO If flat-rate charging is dead, as many people say, why is it still so widely deployed in some markets like Western Europe and North America? VanillaPlus talked to John Aalbers, Volubill’s CEO, to learn more about why this issue is proving such a challenge for communication service providers (CSPs).

John Aalbers: There are two reasons for this.

First is the fear factor. Operators in markets that have a long history of flat-rate charging are worried that any move away from this will put them at a disadvantage to their competitors. We are showing them that if it is done properly by offering valuable and relevant packages that are tightly targeted at specific groups of users and they provide real value to these users, the reverse is actually true – it becomes a competitive advantage.

The second reason is that most operators don’t have the required systems to support more granular data charging models properly today. If you are going to launch innovative packages that are more usage-based and be able to make them stick, you need the three key functions of charging, policy management and policy enforcement working in tandem and in a real-time loop, with each feeding into the other. The complete set of infrastructure is only now starting to be deployed.

VanillaPlus: Are some operators relying entirely on PCRF systems (Policy & Charging Rules Function) as a solution?

“The PCRF

VP: In view of this capacity crunch what answers are there for operators caught between falling voice revenues and the dwindling profitability of their broadband data services?

missing a very big

standard ... might read as a network tool. Some operators are ... unfortunately opportunity.”

JA: Broadband data is clearly where the growth opportunities are going to be. In fact, I experienced a HD (high definition) voice service the other day, and it dawned on me that voice has now just become another broadband service anyway.

So, the focus needs to be on how to ensure the broadband data services are delivering profit to operators – it’s a bit sad to think that the telecommunications industry is experiencing probably the biggest growth in demand for a service out of any industry on the planet and operators are seemingly unable to turn it into a profit engine. The answer is to make the commitment to getting the business model right, and take the necessary steps to price these services in a way that is both interesting to users and profitable to service providers.

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JA: I don’t know of any operator who is only relying on PCRF. That would be a bit foolish as there are great things happening in the network to support greater volumes/speeds at lower cost. But what is clear is that growth in demand will outstrip all of these network-only advancements.

At CTIA in March, we were told that LTE will provide about a sevenfold increase, but at the same time we heard that last year the demand for bandwidth grew tenfold. This year the expectation is even higher. So PCRF, and more importantly the Charging/Policy ecosystem, is a crucial part of the solution as operators must get the revenue side of the equation right too.

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VP: We can probably all agree that basic fixed and mobile broadband service charging needs to evolve. But is better customer segmentation and personalisation the sole key to greater profitability – enabling premium charges for targeted services?

are very important. But they only partially address the cost aspect.”

JA: I wouldn’t say it’s the sole key, but it’s a tremendously powerful way to reconnect the revenue model to the cost model. At the moment the industry has capped revenues on the one hand, and out of control, insatiable growth in demand for bandwidth and hence cost on the other.

This is no way to run a business, it’s simply not sustainable. The work that’s being done to make core networks more efficient, offload through femto and WiFi, as well as techniques like content caching are very important. But they only partially address the cost aspect.

Profitability is about the relationship between revenue and cost, so it has to be addressed holistically.

VP: What is the full range of policy management challenges for CSPs that Volubill is now addressing?

JA: If you look generically at the PCRF standard, it might read as a network tool.

Some operators are doing just that and unfortunately are missing a very big opportunity.

Policy is not only a network tool, it is a business tool as well. When you start to bring subscriber data and real-time usage information to bear as an input to Policy Decision you are creating the most powerful marketing tool that the industry has seen to date.

So at Volubill we do all the basic PCRF stuff that you would expect, dynamic policies for fair usage limits, time of day limits, etc., etc., but then we go two steps beyond that and enable more sophisticated policies and rules to be configured that represent very personalised, very targeted, subscriber centric packages and segmentation that can then be offered and enforced. Beyond, that we enable users to upgrade their packages based on their real-time needs, which thus far has been missing from the market.

VP: This is becoming quite a hectic market place. What advantages can your CONTROL-IT and CHARGE-IT suites deliver?

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claiming they have a policy management solution – and that’s before breakfast. It’s mainly nonsense, of course – what’s happening is that all the vendors recognise Policy has become a ‘must have’ platform for operators and their marketing departments are telling them they must have a story to tell.

But a Policy platform takes multiple years to develop if it’s going to be carrier grade. It takes a lot more than a well-spun press release. Our advantage is that we have been at this for over two years now and have a full set of Charging, Policy Management and Policy Enforcement capabilities that work as a whole or integrated with components from other vendors. We also have the experience from our customer deployments.

However, the real advantage is our people and the knowledge we have built up about how to make these three components work in unison.

And that’s not trivial, because it requires indepth network knowledge and skills as well as OSS/BSS (operations/business support systems) and IT skills. A working solution requires a real-time, feedback loop to be created that crosses the network boundary and links in the charging elements and hence requires tight integration to work effectively.

VP: Assume that I’m a CSP needing to control network resources, services and subscriber activity, can a single product manage it all?

And what if I already have a policy enforcement tool, can I drop in your policy management alongside it?

JA: I wouldn’t go for a single product because there is diversity in the system characteristics that are required – instead I would suggest a suite of products that are proven to work together effectively. So, for us that means either all three products from Volubill, or one or two products from Volubill

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JA: Yes, indeed. It seems every morning when I wake up I read about three more companies

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and tight integration with some of the other guys. For example, we are working with Sandvine who are providing DPI (deep packet inspection) and Policy Enforcement at three joint customer sites.

VP: Where have you implemented your offering so far?

JA: We have just signed our twelfth policy customer. Implementations have been completed in Western Europe, the Middle East and Africa thus far. We have deployments ongoing in the USA, Venezuela and The Caribbean, to name a few. We are currently signing between three and five new Policy customers each quarter, and we expect this trend to continue to grow over the coming years.

VP: Do you have any metrics to demonstrate the turnaround in profitability following realtime monitoring, policy control and charging system deployments?

JA: It’s still relatively early days but the results are very encouraging. Operators who have used this model to create deeper segmentation have typically found a number of things. Firstly, at least 60% of the new market segments they create are considered popular as reflected by users’ uptake.

This is an important point as it shows that users can be tempted away from flatter rate charging models if the quid pro quo is attractive. In one case the quid pro quo was higher priority for packets relating to games usage. Gamers loved this package and were willing to sign up.

The way to measure the benefit is to look at the increase in revenue relative to the notional cost of providing the bandwidth consumed. In the cases we have experienced this has so far ranged from a 7% to a 25% increase. We believe that as more experience is gained with these models, even higher increases are going to be possible.

The second thing that operators are reporting is a general increase in overall satisfaction by users who are taking up these new packages, often linked to a better quality of experience in the services they consume.

VP: Are deployments coming first in the most competitive markets? And are Tier Ones, Twos or Threes most likely to be interested at this stage?

JA: Policy deployments are now coming thick and fast. The good news for vendors like us at Volubill is that it applies to operators of all tiers in pretty much all markets. We’ve won policy management deals as far afield as the USA, Egypt and Venezuela, with the Tier 1 market leaders and with the innovative smaller carriers who are trying to get an edge over the big guys.

One thing is clear and that is that the players in Western Europe and North America where flat-rate charging has been entrenched for a long time have the biggest problem, and the bigger they are, the bigger the problem. That’s certainly reflected in the amount of interest they are showing in Policy solutions.

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C A S E

S T U D Y :

M E D I A T I O N

Billing mediation issues faced by T-Mobile in five territories T-Mobile has been searching for a central and flexible billing mediation platform for use in five countries – Austria, Germany, the UK, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands – to improve its competitive position on the mobile operations market. Now, with help from system integrator, NEWCON it has implemented Digital Route’s Mediation Zone 5, with a target to reduce the total cost of ownership for billing mediation service by 20%.

Jan Karlsson, DigitalRoute: T-Mobile International contract is a milestone

T-Mobile, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom AG, has 150 million customers in Europe and the USA. And it was the first mobile operator in Europe to provide open internet access for its customers to view news, films, music and infotainment. But, until recently, it faced a number of problems in these European markets that were restricting its competitive position.

Improve the competitive position

Gerald Haidl, NEWCON: Strategy and implementation competence

• Improvement of time to market: faster changes to network element functionalities were demanded. New services and products should be offered more easily.

• The operator wanted a next generation international Billing Mediation Device (ngiBMD), able to process the total traffic data for voice, SMS and data generated by the network on a single system.

• The mediation (transmission of data) between the network and the processing unit should be provided centrally as a service for all five countries’ fully-owned subsidiaries.

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Future-oriented technology and implementation experience After an intensive, one-year vendor selection process NEWCON was selected for the project in April 2009, leading a syndicate of Digital Route for its MediationZone™ core technology, supported by NEWCON for system integration.

Joachim Heybrock, T-Mobile’s VP Shared IT Enablers, says: “Due to the fact that we can hardly influence the revenue side we must increasingly see to the expenditures. Because of the proven know-how which extends over several years, as well as the convincing savings potential of the Next Generation Mediation Technology, we decided to assign the syndicate of the two technology partners Digital Route and NEWCON.” Also among the main drivers for involving NEWCON were its long experience with T-Mobile Austria as service integrator, and its choice of next generation mediation technology. As T-Mobile was used to

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Out of date technologies hampered its business support systems (BSS) performance and slowed its time to market with new products. New services and products were also difficult to implement and expensive hardware was needed to mitigate increasing traffic data volumes. So, the following project requirements were set:

• Development and maintenance should be provided by a common internal unit of T- Mobile International, the Competence Centre Mediation (CCM).

• The system should be deployed in a group data centre, operated by T-Systems Enterprise Services.

time. Parallel to this the operating platform for data processing was installed in a common data centre, along with the MediationZone software at the Competence Centre Mediation in Prague, Czech Republic. Up to 12 experts from NEWCON have been working on the implementation, partly on site at the customer’s premises.

managing different suppliers, systems and responsibilities, the decision was taken to operate everything from one source: there should only be one software system, one hardware environment, one service partner and one licence for implementation of the data covering three areas; IT, network and finance/controlling.

Technologies used Digital Route, is a Swedish software company providing mediation and data integration software.

Its core technology is MediationZone™, designed to retrieve, convert and process mass data in telecoms. Every phone call, SMS or internet access of every customer on the domestic market or abroad is registered and evaluated. MediationZone™ and the relevant modules developed by NEWCON enable T-Mobile to manage the commercial and technical sector with one system.

As MediationZone™ is a completely Javabased solution it is hardware-independent. At T-Mobile two Intel-based servers configured in stretched cluster are used to guarantee system stability. As all turnover and revenue-related transactions are processed by these servers, MediationZone™ has to have the highest standards of security, system stability and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.

Being compatible with all current databases (Oracle or Open source) and operating systems, MediationZone™ does not require any third party software. Christoph Mazakarini, CTO NEWCON and project leader for T-Mobile tells VanillaPlus: “The two servers which we need for complete operation cost US$25,000 per item. This leads to a reduction in CPU costs of 50%, with remarkably better performance at the same time.”

Short project lead time The project was started in Austria last May. First of all the migration of SMS services was achieved, followed by data services. All lines of business were productive by the end of January 2010. Part of the roll-out for the next four countries is being conducted at the same

Milos Cimoradsky, Senior Head of Competence Centre Mediation in T-Mobile International reports: “Personal contact is crucial for the co-operation; it helps the experts from T-Mobile and NEWCON to solve issues more efficiently than per emails, and allows for faster implementation. NEWCON experts proved to be highly flexible and technically skilled.”

T-Mobile Austria is a fullyowned subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom AG, that generated a turnover of €1.08 billion last year with approximately 1500 employees. T-Mobile in Germany, Britain, the Czech Republic and Netherlands are also wholly-owned subsidiaries and together serving roughly 70 million mobile phone customers.

Change Requests are often implemented within 2-3 days. The know-how is transferred from NEWCON to T-Mobile in three stages: training for the correct operation of the data processing centre, developer training at Competence Centre and hands-on training by co-operating on site.

The benefits The project is still in the implementation phase, however it is already clear to T-Mobile that the demands are being met and the desired benefits can be achieved. The reported benefits are: • Modifications to active business tariffs can be implemented within a few man-days. This has noticeably improved the competitive position of T-Mobile as more flexible models can be offered to the end-consumer.

• The new platform brings improved transmission time performance. Tests have shown an improvement factor of 3.5, as well as a “remarkable” decrease in CPU costs.

• The solution allows sustainable cost reductions. T-Mobile is able to save costs to compensate for decreasing ARPU (average revenue per user).

Jan Karlsson, CEO of Digital Route, is proud of his new customer: “The conclusion of the contract with T-Mobile International is a milestone. We are proud that the close partnership with NEWCON has developed successfully and are perfectly convinced that we will celebrate further mutual success in future.”

“The major lines of business (GSM, SMS and GPRS) were in production within 6 months.”

Gerald Haidl, NEWCON’s CEO, sums up: “We are a partner for T-Mobile who proves competence on two levels: strategy and implementation – that means we support our customers from management consulting to service integration. We are aware of the needs of IT, Technology, Sales and Finance. Only with this overall view are we able to meet the objectives of a major international customer such as DTAG/T-Mobile.”

www.comptel.com

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B U S I N E S S

I N T E L L I G E N C E

EXPERT OPINION:

How to find a needle in a digital haystack?

The role of business intelligence in the digital economy

The author is Stephan Gatien, Industry Solution Manager, SAP Telecoms Industry Business Unit

By the time you finish reading this article (assuming you aren’t distracted by your Blackberry or iPhone and actually finish it!) approximately 200,000 tweets will have been sent on twitter, about 15,000 applications will have been downloaded from an App store somewhere on the planet, and Google and Bing will have processed more than 100 Terabytes of data. The era of ‘Big Data’, as described by some, is in full swing and this year alone more than 1,200 exabytes (billion gigabytes) of data will be created according to IDC. And as machine-to-machine communications get set to explode, the ‘internet of things’ will increase that traffic significantly as vehicles, packages, sensors, devices, buildings, everything becomes connected.

For communications service providers (CSPs), this situation represents both a blessing and a curse. As key actors in the hyper-connected world, through their networks, CSPs may have a unique role to play in the nascent datacentered economy which will increasingly treat data as a resource.

On the other hand, as large businesses, CSPs must also be in a position to analyse and make sense of this super-abundant data, for example to make better business decisions that will impact the success of their new offers, customer retention campaigns or geographical expansion. Before we consider possible answers for CSPs, let’s first have a look at the current trends experienced by telecommunications service providers.

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• A deluge of data - The pace and volume of data accumulation will only accelerate for CSPs as digital service consumption becomes wider and broader. Attempts are already underway to capture all the data associated with individual set top boxes (such as channel surfing clicks) in the hope of monetising this granular information for advertising-based models. Such examples will add to the staggering amount of data already gathered

by CSPs to date. In addition, as more and more consumer electronics and M2M devices

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• I want it now - The digital experience has already compressed the time span of many activities in the industry. Ordering a video on demand or purchasing a mobile app takes only a few seconds. In fact, the digital experience is rapidly moving towards a selfservice, real-time one where instant access is the new form of instant gratification for a new breed of subscribers and partners. This tempo will increasingly dictate the tone of all facets of the relationship with subscribers, from instant activation and real-time diagnostic tools to detailed usage reports and analysis.

• A growing digital eco-system - To the traditional ecosystem of dealers, VARs, and installers, a number of new players such as content providers or application developers have emerged. These new actors play a unique role in the digital supply chain and will become increasingly critical to CSPs. As CSPs further invest in mobile content or IPTV, and fight back on the app platform space, they will need to learn not only how to ‘onboard’ and

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“... accelerating the evolution towards ... dynamic pricing or yield management, already successfully applied in the airline or entertainment industries.”

come to market with embedded connectivity, market success will greatly depend on finding the right business models to reach disparate demographics and population segments.

There is no doubt that business intelligence will play a critical role to enable this strategy.

manage these partners but also how to interact with them in an optimal way. Timely information sharing and self-service tools will likely be important drivers in the satisfaction of these new stakeholders.

But while these trends unfold, many CSPs are still struggling to distill actionable intelligence from the mountains of accumulated data they already have.

• Today, approximately one out of four employees in CSPs has access to BI tools and solutions. This population typically includes power users, business analysts, managers and executives. Yet, the reporting or dashboard experience of too many of these existing users is still perceived as inadequate, highly prescribed by IT designers and whose relevance or timing is only appropriate to address yesterday’s questions.

• That leaves three in four people with no access to BI tools in most organisations. Could the next innovation in handling customer complaints or improving a handset return come from such a group? Maybe from a more ‘casual BI user’ who will have been able to connect the dots and propose a better way to do business thanks to access to simpler yet relevant BI tools? Absolutely!

Both the deluge of data and the now generation trends identified earlier will only reinforce the need for a model that enables ‘the rest’ of an organisation to better contribute to the decision making process.

So, what are the possible answers and solutions for CSPs? • Consider in-memory analytics What once represented a promising technology is now a reality. With the rapid decline of memory prices, the need to store pre-calculated data (in the form of OLAP cubes or aggregated tables) is being eliminated. For CSPs, this opens the door to the possibility of browsing through very large data sets (up to billions of data records) in seconds and deliver self-service analysis capabilities to their business user community.

• Discover BI on-demand The SaaS revolution will clearly impact the

business intelligence space. IDC Research expects the SaaS BI market to grow three times faster than the overall BI and analytics market over the next five years. CSPs should explore how BI on-demand solutions may help them spread BI capabilities in their organisations in a very cost-effective way, to make BI more pervasive and enable the casual users to get access to relevant and easy-to-use tools. BI on-demand could also be an alternative deployment option targeting partners in the digital ecosystem, such as application developers for example, to provide this population with self-service data analysis capabilities on their own data.

VanillaPlus Jargon Buster BI: Business intelligence CEP: Complex Event Processing KPI: Key Performance Indicator M2M: Machine to machine OLAP: Online Analytical Processing VAR: Value-added reseller

• Think and analyse in real time As highlighted earlier, the digital economy will increasingly run in real time. The business implications are obvious for CSPs. A greater level of agility will be expected to create more differentiation from the competition. And gaining this extra edge will virtually be impossible without real-time analytics. Thanks to the advent of technologies such as Complex Event Processing (CEP), opportunities exist for CSPs to operate at real-time speed and leverage real-time insight to make new decisions or react quickly to any changes in their business. But real-time BI will also probably boost innovation in the telecom industry by accelerating the evolution towards concepts such as dynamic pricing or yield management, already successfully applied in the airline or entertainment industries.

• Do not re-invent the wheel As a new category of business analytics solutions become available, with KPIs, reports and dashboards based on pre-defined industry content, CSPs will want to leverage them to expand beyond their traditional BI user base or to deploy analytics solutions more costeffectively.

Business intelligence has a critical role to play for communications service providers in the digital hyper-connected economy. Whether it is on-premise or on-demand, in real time or not, CSPs should select a comprehensive platform provider that can support them across the different dimensions they will require to broaden the usage of BI in their organisations and enable better business decisions.

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BUSINESS

INTELLIGENCE

Data headache for service providers Communications service providers are being hampered in their attempts to roll out new services because of fragmented and out of date records of their customers. Steve Rogerson looks at how they are tackling the problem.

Many businesses are envious of communications service providers (CSPs) because of the vast amounts of data they have on their customers. This information can prove crucial for knowing the types of services and packages to offer, for retaining customers by being able to spot when they are likely to churn, and for targeting new broadband services.

John Gillespie, Netezza: Better response from targeted ads

Stephan Gatien, SAP: Up-to-date picture of what customers consume is critical

But there is a problem and that is that these data are in the most part spread across different servers, in different systems or stored in data silos. Different departments will have different pieces of the whole. Some of this information will be incomplete or in contrast to information stored in other places.

“Almost all of the service providers have focused their energies in the past 20 years on building networks and producing a bill that is correct,” said John Gillespie, Vice President for Global Telecoms at Netezza. “They have no way to look at their end business because the intelligence is limited to silos of each part of the network. There is no single place to go to understand customer behaviour to target products.”

Even when operators have live data, they usually only keep the information up front for 30 to 40 days before sending it to long-term storage. The challenge therefore is to clean the data up and bring the parts together in a way that they can be used dynamically and in real time.

“We like to have dynamic data to know what we need to know about the subscribers in real time,” said Jonathan Bell, Vice President of Product Marketing for OpenCloud. “But to do this, you need to bring your static and dynamic data together. But the data are dispersed and depleted and it is a real problem to federate the data and get access in real time.”

Jonathan Bell, OpenCloud: Bring static and dynamic data together

VANILLAPLUS APRIL/MAY 2010

Political decision Combining these data may not be just a technical issue but a political one as well. Data silos will not be connected until there is an agreed strategy of data management across departments.

Merging the data also needs to take into account differences in the records. The same name may be spelt differently in different places, or the address may be in different formats.

“They have to clean up their mess,” said Stephan Gatien, Industry Solutions Manager at SAP. “They have to realise they have a fragmented approach that has led to this lack of an overall picture of their customers.”

Software is available to help with this and this can also merge households to improve the data stored. Building up a picture of who does what in each household can prove valuable for targeting services.

Even when the data have been combined, there is the additional problem of who owns the data and who is allowed to update the information.

“On the static side, you could extract the data from all the different systems and have them in a data warehouse, all in one place,” said Bell. “But to use these data in real time they all have to be connected together and changes seen in real time.”

www.comptel.com

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Jake Frievald, Vice President of Marketing for Information Builders, added: “Once you could do all this in a static way. You could have a data warehouse and upgrade it once a day, or month or quarter. Now, it has to be real time.”

Not having these data can create difficulties even in the day-to-day operations. “If a customer calls a call centre and they don’t know about one aspect of the customer, this can cause problems,” said Pawel Lamik, a Product Manager at Comarch.

Copied data?

One answer is to have a centralised database and all the other systems use copies. But this is not going to be completely up to date and can be expensive to do. The federated approach means different servers have their own data and there are rules for combining and updating them. But, again the data are not available in real time for all applications. This can be crucial for location-based services for targeting adverts. For an advertisement to be effective it may need to be sent to a user’s mobile as they approach or enter a particular store.

“If you federate data for the business intelligence system, you can use this to deliver personal services depending on the data from the network, such as the location, or whether they are entering a store or doing something on the phone,” said Lamik.

“These data can be used be used for mobile adverts.”

The situation is becoming critical for service providers because of the number of third party vendors selling applications to consumers, while the service providers are seeing little or none of these revenues.

If they are going to compete in this market, they can use the advantage they have of the customer data if

they can manage the data in the correct way.

“They need to earn money on the content in the network,” said Lamik. “Customers are buying applications and no money is going to the operator. To solve this, they need to understand the customer data. They need to know who the customer is and their life style.”

Cable companies can have an extra benefit from combining the data they have on their television users by being able to see which customers are viewing which advertisements and watching which programmes. When added to the information they hold already, this helps to build a better picture of a customer.

“You can take the data and show them to the advertisers with a view to increasing revenue,” said Gillespie. “You also get a better response from advertisements if they are targeted to make them more relevant to customers.”

“Customers are buying applications and no money is going to the operator.”

-- Pawel Lamik, Comarch

Pawel Lamik, Comarch: CSPs need to know the customer’s life style

Mobile operators can take this further with users of mobile broadband. They have the capability to record every click by every customer to see where they are looking on the web. This can be used to target advertisements on those web pages.

Britney Spears fan “If, say, their activity shows they are a Britney Spears fan then you can send them Britney Spears content,” said Gillespie. “And again you can have exact profiles of who watches which adverts.”

The other danger of not having accurate information is that service providers can annoy their customers by sending them information in which they are not interested.

Reducing the number of irrelevant pushes to customers helps to keep them happy, and they begin to learn when they are targeted that the information is probably worth a look.

Jake Frievald, Information Builders: Target right people with right message

“You need to segment your database and target the right people with the right message,” said Frievald. “Giving customers too much information and too much choice means they will be less efficient about making those choices.”

Gatien summed up the situation by saying: “It remains the top priority for telcos pushing out new services. Being able to maintain an up-todate picture of what customers purchase and consume and their financial and service behaviour is critical.”

www.comptel.com

VANILLAPLUS APRIL/MAY 2010

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C L O U D

S E R V I C E S

EXPERT OPINION:

Cloud services – A justified silo?

For years, the telecoms industry has subscribed to the mantra of ‘convergence’. The accepted wisdom has been that service ‘silos’ are anathema, and that single, convergent platforms for all services and technologies are the only way forward. But, will this rule hold for cloud services, or are they sufficiently different to justify being addressed, supported and managed as a ‘greenfield’ business within the telco?

The author is Robert Machin, Principal Analyst, Strategic Marketing at Comptel Corporation

The Cloud - A whole new line of business Cloud services – broadly, the provision of computing on demand – have the potential to form a whole new line of business for communications service providers (CSPs) – one that will bring them significant new revenues on the back of existing network and business assets.

The market for cloud services is quickly expanding. Technology advances, particularly in virtualisation and remote access communications, are making cloud-based services ever more credible, and customers are increasingly drawn by the potential not only to save costs, but also to reduce risk and increase business flexibility. Businesses and enterprises are now looking beyond software as a service (SaaS) and evaluating the benefits of outsourcing very substantial parts of their IT environments to the cloud.

Telcos, particularly incumbent PTTs, are undoubtedly serious contenders in this new market. They are a trusted brand, already have a strong relationship with a large, addressable customer base and, vitally, command the lines of communication to customer premises, which will make the difference between guaranteed levels of service and ‘best efforts’.

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On the face of it, this would seem to be a market which it is the telcos’ to lose. However, some large carriers have already put their toes in the water with initial cloud service offerings, and the early signs are promising.

But, this cloud is not all bright new dawn and silver lining. There are serious challenges to be overcome before services can be delivered efficiently and profitably, and these are much more substantial than the efforts commonly required to introduce new services.

VANILLAPLUS APRIL/MAY 2010

Customers will view these services, and their providers, rather differently, too. While enterprises find the benefits of cloud economics highly attractive, they are also wary of losing control over IT governance. Issues, such as performance, security, cost control and regulatory compliance, will remain significant barriers to adoption for enterprise customers for some time – unless CSPs can provide demonstrable reassurance of service quality.

For nearly all customers, cost reduction is a substantial driver, so price sensitivity will be acute. This is a promising market in terms of size, but it will be competitive, and margins, even during the early adoption period, are likely to be slim.

Finally, trust, transparency and security will be critical issues, as will close adherence to agreed levels of support. Provider credibility will be vital and, as we have already seen from one or two highly publicised incidents, the consequences of any technical, security or performance failure will be highly damaging.

This is all the more reason to create separation and undivided focus within the

▲

“CSPs (must) present information on status, technical performance and account position through readilyaccessible interfaces.”

A wholly different kind of business for CSPs Moving into cloud services is not just an incremental change to the portfolio; they bring real challenges for CSPs. Fundamentally, although connections between provider and customer will be important, these are not primarily communications offerings. They have much more in common with IT services and outsourcing, the business model for which is likely to be quite different. In consumer and SME markets, for example, cloud service providers are likely to consider the average revenue per server as a more significant Key Performance Indicator (KPI) than the traditional ARPU.

telco business. Cutting an enterprise off from its systems or losing its customer data will be regarded as a far more serious matter than dropped calls or network faults.

numbers of desktops (users), time spent online and even CPU cycles. Charging is also likely to vary depending on the extent of support and other customer services.

The impact on OSS Selling cloud services will have a real impact on CSPs’ OSS and BSS. The business fundamentals of fulfilment, assurance, charging and customer management are similar, but the cloud brings specific challenges right across operational and business control.

Variants on ‘pay as you go’, combined with ‘pay as you grow’ models, are likely even in business and enterprise propositions. A major attraction of cloud services is their ability to ‘flex’ in response to changing business conditions, and flat-rate charging does not sit well with these expectations. Customers will certainly expect charges to flex at least as much, and this will demand close real-time monitoring of customer requests, thresholds and other charge-bearing events. Robust policy control will be vital to support flexible charging and transparent presentation of charges to customers.

Assets and resources needed to provide cloud services are oriented around IT platforms, not networks. Physical servers and capabilities, including capacity, performance, location and access bandwidth, will need to be closely managed. Third-party resources are also likely to play a significant part in many CSPs’ business models – from the simple resale of applications to potentially outsourcing the whole business to a partner organisation. But, responsibility will remain with the CSP, so close governance of any partners will be vital.

Cloud product concepts are also likely to be quite different from the existing telecoms portfolio. Bundled offerings will predominate but with multiple options and variables, and the contribution of third parties is likely to be even more important than in the existing communications portfolio. The businesscritical nature of the services means that Quality of Service (QoS) commitments will be a vital part of the offerings. Resource priority, resilience, support and recovery guarantees will need to be clearly defined and visible.

Just as in a traditional IT environment, and to a much greater degree than would apply to a communications service, customers will be concerned with performance, security and access to critical business data. It will become the CSPs’ responsibility to provide this assurance in as close to real time as possible; they will need to present information on status, technical performance and account position through readily-accessible interfaces.

Charging models will require a similar degree of flexibility to that demanded by communications, but applied to very different service attributes. We will see licence charges applied to packages, features and add-on applications. But a large part of many charging models will be linked to a variety of usage metrics, including allocated storage,

VanillaPlus Jargon Buster ARPU: Average Revenue Per User B/OSS: Business / Operations Support Systems PTT: Post, Telephone and Telegraph (service providers)

Catching the cloud Comptel argues that cloud service providers require a comprehensive ‘concept-to-cash’ platform dedicated to a very different kind of business. That platform should allow CSPs to: • handle the resources and assets needed to provide and run a commercially viable cloud services operation (very different from their communications network assets); • get to market fast with clearly defined and easily managed products; • rapidly and consistently create customer environments with minimal intervention; • offer transparent charging and settlement to customers and partners; • monitor and intervene in real time for complete control of the cloud services business; and • provide real-time access for customers to their own virtual service environment.

A justified silo?

For communications services, and services closely tied to the provision of communications, siloed systems clearly make no sense. Cloud services are an IT business; however, with a different set of buyers and users, they can operate from quite a different set of business and technical principles.

Running an OSS platform, which is focused on cloud services and optimised to provide maximum automation of cloud service management functions, will be vital to keep volumes high and margins viable. For many CSPs, it may well make a lot of sense to have a separate organisation and platform in order to nurture and sustain a new kind of business.

VANILLAPLUS APRIL/MAY 2010

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No other publication works harder or travels further!

In a year of global financial meltdown, company failures, re-structures and negative economic growth it seemed like everyone in publishing was battening down the hatches and sitting tight. Everyone that is apart from VanillaPlus magazine.

2009 saw substantial growth and investment in VanillaPlus. We enhanced our existing products, broadened our portfolio and invested in our circulation. Whilst other magazines were falling by the wayside, look what VanillaPlus did for you: BOOSTED In 2009, VanillaPlus increased its presence at key events and attended 47 events in 14 different countries across Europe, Middle East, Africa and the USA – ensuring the furthest possible reach for its advertisers and gaining more key readers around the globe.

INVESTED In 2009 VanillaPlus continued to invest in circulation, adding top level new names across Europe, Middle East and Africa. At the same time we cleaned and refined our data and got to know our readers even better. See our 2010 Media Pack for the latest details.

LAUNCHED In 2009 VanillaPlus launched a new monthly series of Live Thought Leadership Webinars – globally accessible events offering up to the minute interactive debate with top level speakers and analysts.

INCREASED In 2009 VanillaPlus increased the frequency of its e-newsletter, VanillaPlus Bites to monthly and enlarged its circulation to over 14,000 key readers every issue.

IMPROVED In 2010 VanillaPlus revamped and expanded its website, www.vanillaplus.com – Launching a new Digital Edition of the magazine!

We firmly believe no other IT & Comms magazine works harder, travels further or invests more to offer the best possible value and quality to its advertisers and the best possible reader experience.

Make 2010 the year you join VanillaPlus!

www.vanillaplus.com

IN

A S S O C I AT I O N

WITH…

The Global IT Association for Telecommunications Continuing VanillaPlus’ series of articles examining the aims and achievements of associations in the comms industry, Fred Werner, its Business Development Manager describes ETIS, the Global IT Association for Telecommunications.

ETIS is a membership-based organisation that brings together the major telecommunications providers in Europe on key information and communication technology issues. A non-profit organisation, ETIS was created by Europe’s incumbent telecom operators in 1991 and has a central office in Brussels.

It currently has 26 members from companies such as BT, Deutsche Telekom, TeliaSonera, Telenor, KPN, TDC, Belgacom and Telecom Italia.

ETIS also has Associate members from the leading IT suppliers such as HP, IBM, CA and Oracle as well as partnerships with other nonprofit international organisations.

ETIS’ mission is to “enable its members to improve their business performance by the personal exchange of information on using ICT effectively”. ETIS achieves this by engaging its members in various working groups, task forces, sharing best practices, conducting benchmarking studies, web-based information services, workshops and conferences.

Working groups The ETIS Working Groups are a set of facilitated networks that are made up of experts from the member companies, organised around the following topics: Enterprise Architecture, Information Security, Procurement & Vendor Management, Business Intelligence & Data Warehouse, Customer Self-Service, Billing, AntiSPAM Co-operation group, TeBIT Benchmarking study and the CIO Executive Forum.

The association also regularly organises workshops on key topics of IT practice in telcos and invites acknowledged experts and managers from the industry to present their views. We aim to cover all of the critical issues facing CIOs in the telecom industry. Participation in these activities not only improves your efficiency but

also translates into better products and services that result in customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Security benchmarks ETIS has a lot of new activities planned for 2010.

The ETIS Information Security Working Group is launching a Security benchmarking study which is the only telco-specific security benchmark.

This covers telco-specific security areas like next generation network security.

We have also produced an Anti-Spam best practice document which has helped our members to significantly reduce the spam levels on their networks. And our Customer SelfService working group performs a quarterly benchmarking exercise to measure success with their online sales channels. Our CIOs will also be meeting in Rome to discuss NGN roll-out strategies.

The author is Fred Werner, Business Development Manager, ETIS. fw@etis.org

Aside from our regular working group meetings all around Europe our members will be gathering in Stockholm on 14-15 October to discuss the future of telecommunications services. This is our largest event of the year as it gathers all members, associates, partners and our working group participants to share knowledge on the latest ICT opportunities and challenges that they are facing in their companies.

The best way to join the ETIS Community and benefit from our working groups, professional network, events and deliverables is to become an ETIS Member. Participation in ETIS activities provides your CIO and his team with the knowledge and professional network that can be used to increase ICT and business performance in your company. We believe that Sharing Knowledge is our Strength!

For more information on the association visit: www.etis.org

www.comptel.com

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P E R F O R M A N C E

M A N A G E M E N T

INTERVIEW:

Is the iPad a blessing or a curse when managing mobile data service quality?

With an explosion in data traffic and rising subscriber expectations, mobile service providers (MSPs) have to ensure consistent performance for a growing array of mobile services. All-IP mobile networks mean that existing OAM techniques and instrumentation can now be leveraged to assess data quality – but it needs to be seen holistically across all the domains and equipments that the service can transition.

VanillaPlus talks to Steve Hateley about the challenge.

VanillaPlus: What is the biggest challenge now facing mobile service providers (MSPs) in delivering consistent and reliable data services?

Steve Hateley, is Director of Product Marketing at InfoVista.

Steve Hateley: Service providers, in the UK in particular like O2, who took on the iPhone were very forward thinking because of its massive uptake, but what they hadn’t anticipated was the massive amount of capacity it was going to require from their network. I recently spoke with a network engineer from Vodafone UK who mentioned that since taking the iPhone onto their network the additional capacity and re-engineering necessary had been tremendous – in order to cope with the influx of new application-based traffic.

Moving on from that is the question of the iPad. Will it be a blessing or a curse to these operators? If the Apple "tablet" takes off with the popularity of the iPhone – and users aren't tempted to just buy the product for it's WiFi access – what additional load is going to be put on the network and its resources? The iPhone offers some great applications that will no doubt be available to the iPad but the new device is especially suited to multimedia and an increase in streaming services.

This increase could either bring 3G networks to a point of saturation, or at the very least help to justify accelerated deployment of LTE and 4G services.

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VANILLAPLUS APRIL/MAY 2010

VP: I was talking to someone who is involved in network caching, and he’d been told by an Australian operator that their network nearly crashed when Michael Jackson died.

SH: Yes, this is it. But we were not expecting this massive increase of data on networks five years ago, and service providers weren’t ready for it. Capacity or bandwidth is rapidly becoming both an expectation and a commodity so providers need to be innovative in the way they now start bundling services. I mean I get 1,200 voice minutes a month in my package, and I think I use about 50 of them.

Are users really bothered if they get 1,000 or 2,000 SMSs? What they’re really interested in is “Can I get unlimited browsing, unlimited data?” and – for business customers – “What package can I get if I’m travelling internationally with work?”

Also, service providers no longer face the choice of, “Do I or don’t I evolve my network to a next generation environment?” If they want to move forward and compete in the mobile data services space, they’ve got to go to 3G+, and plan for 4G/LTE. A key consideration is handling the traffic increase in the backhaul where it's widely acknowledged that it’s going to be totally unviable to buy E1s and E3s to backhaul their traffic. Reports from Infonetics say that most service providers have short term plans to move towards an Ethernet-based backhaul environment.

▲

So will operators be hesitant in taking on the

iPad or welcome it as a real opportunity to grow?

VP: Are there common failings in the responses by MSPs to rapidly rising data traffic and customer expectations?

SH: What most MSPs should do is look at the way they operationally handle these data services. If they are moving to an end-to-end mobile data environment underpinned by IP MPLS technology they need to be looking at the silo-focused manner in which they have built their operations teams. At the moment there tends to be a team that looks after mobile data and they’re purely responsible for the Mobile Packet Core domain of GGSN and SGSN devices. They’ll also have a team that looks after their IP MPLS transport network and a team focused on the Radio Access Network – but never the twain shall meet.

The forecasted growth in service management for mobile, supports the idea that maintaining quality in application delivery is becoming more and more critical.

Application quality is dependant upon performance across the multiple domains that a service will cross, hence providers should be employing a more holistic approach in operational environments.

Taking this holistic approach to mobile data quality or service performance assurance will allow for collective use of infrastructure performance monitoring, existing IP OAM instrumentation and DPI – and that's where we come in.

VP: So, how should MSPs achieve this holistic view?

SH: InfoVista began by selling performance management solutions to mobile operators to monitor their IP transport networks. We found that in most cases these operators would have vendor-specific solutions to monitor the mobile data environment plus alternative OSS tools for monitoring the radio access – RNC, BTS, etc.

To achieve the holistic view, the choice would be to conduct a large scale integration project leveraging the recommended frameworks of the TMF or to organically grow single-silo solutions into other domains with patchworkstyle extensions.

The alternative is to centralise specific key performance indicators from the end-to-end IP mobile service infrastructure, the radio access network, backhaul and mobile data core on a single platform.

Couple this with DPI level subscriber service information and user flexibility to extend visibility into key voice domain resources, and you would not only create a holistic multidomain view but significantly improve the efficiency of operations and engineering teams who would be synchronised around a common view of customer mobile data service performance.

Essentially it's an approach that enhances the speed and efficiency of troubleshooting mobile service performance between the domains and layers of the network – improving the ability to keep customer service satisfaction high.

VP: What differentiates InfoVista’s response to this problem?

VanillaPlus Jargon Buster DPI: Deep Packet Inspection GGSN: Gateway GPRS Service Node GPRS: General Packet Radio Service OAM: Operations, Administration & Maintenance NOC/SOC: Network/Service Operations Centre RAN: Radio Access Network SGSN: Serving GPRS Support Node TMF: TeleManagement Forum

SH: Essentially it's our ability to pull together the multiple domains of the mobile data service under a single platform, tied together with application perspectives and voice core equipment extensions, where we feel other solutions on the market focus on either a probe or domain specific viewpoint.

Either of these approaches will involve a dual investment in solutions and an expensive integration project to achieve the holistic view needed to support true end to end performance assurance.

What impact will the iPad have on networks?

We’ve not only combined the application, service and network performance management into this single platform. We have also created a new dashboard called Vista360 for operations teams. Service assurance is important but up to now fault management has taken the lead in the service assurance space. We’ve built a performance-centric service operations centre dashboard to troubleshoot and drill down into the quality of the mobile data service, as opposed to just responding to failures in domains or root cause.

VANILLAPLUS APRIL/MAY 2010

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SERVICE

ASSURANCE

Every byte tells a story The rise of smartphones has brought massive growth in mobile data traffic as users engage with applications, content and new forms of data communications on the move.

That has placed pressure on network capacity, but the issue carriers face goes far deeper than that. George Malim explores how mobile service providers are working to ensure service quality in the all-IP environment and the advantages and challenges that environment brings.

The author, George Malim, is a freelance telecoms writer

The concept of an all-IP mobile network is currently an unrealistic ideal if looked at from a perspective of that being a 100% IP network.

However, if all-IP is taken to mean mostly-IP, those networks are here and in operation now.

From a mobile service quality point of view, that throws up several challenges and advantages for operators to get to grips with.

Critical apps According to Ericsson, more than 50% of mobile traffic is composed of data and, in many mature markets that figure now exceeds 70%. It is putting a massive strain on capacity but also on service assurance as users turn to services that are complex to support, such as video, or expect to be able to run critical corporate applications. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The biggest issue is this 'worlds colliding' aspect of service providers used to corporate customers with very different requirements, and mobile operators used to private, responsive, visible networks,â&#x20AC;? says Richard

IP service quality issue is compounded by the inherent nature of IP - Santeri Jussila, Nokia Siemens Networks

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VANILLAPLUS APRIL/MAY 2010

www.comptel.com

â&#x2013;˛

Ultimately, the all-IP environment is easier to manage service quality over and offers the opportunity for increased automation.

But, in the meantime, multiple network environments are in use and services and

applications have to be delivered effectively across that patchwork of network technologies. In addition, pure IP is a new environment for many carriers and they need time to build up their IP management skills in order to maximise the benefits of the all-IP environment.

Thomas, Chief Executive of NetEvidence.

“Most are not set up to provide this level of visibility to their customers and I don't think mobile operators can manage the whole system as one any more. They have to be aware of, and manage, their own domain and the service provider’s domain, be aware of faults in each, and be able to track and progress faults separately.”

Hard to deal with That goal is easily stated but difficult to address from the carrier perspective. “We’ve come across service providers that are still very much in the mindset of monitoring mobile services,” says Steve Hateley, Director of Product Marketing at InfoVista. “Monitoring the data centre, monitoring the mobile packet core, the IP-MPLS backbone, the radio access network have all been done separately; but now as we move to 3G, 3G+ and 4G LTE, the focus is going to be on application delivery.”

And that’s a new area for carriers. They understand radio issues, for example, but the effects of new applications on IP infrastructure are less well known.

“Typically, the effects have been related to performance impacts which are transient problems that are difficult to identify and resolve,” says Matt Herdlein, Executive Director of Service Assurance, Telcordia.

“AT&T is a good example of a provider that has performance problems satisfying the bandwidth requests of the smartphone community. These problems can occur in the radio portion of the network – which tends to be well understood as it is not 4G yet – but, more importantly, in the backhaul and core portions of the network which are now IPbased where the affects of data requests are not as well known,” he adds.

Santeri Jussila, Product Manager, Business Solutions at Nokia Siemens Networks, thinks the IP service quality issue is compounded by the inherent nature of IP, which doesn’t readily allow resources to be reserved for specific services. “In a traditional TDM-based world one had dedicated resources reserved for calls, which is what secured its quality,” she explains. “In an IP world on the other hand, all services and calls are made using shared IP backbone resources. In peak hours these shared resources might get overloaded if not dimensioned properly. This can cause issues with the speech quality.”

Holistic view The traditional, stove-piped approach to service delivery also can’t be replicated in this new services and network environment. “A lot of silos are doing their piece but unless you have a holistic view, you can’t be sure of the level of service delivered,” says David Chambers, Solutions Marketing Manager, Amdocs. “What’s required is an OSS that is capable of modelling the resources at a network level and at the same time service modelling that relates to the network. The critical thing is to move away from the silo approach.”

Richard Stone, Compuware: Problems don’t just suddenly happen

Vince Lesch, Chief Technology Officer of Tekelec, agrees; “Some carriers are still in transition with silos still in existence,” he says. “Those will probably move to a single structure and, as you go to IP, some of the [silo] distinctions go away anyway.”

So what can carriers do to get an effective view of the service quality delivered across all-IP networks?

“Measure the only thing that really matters – the subscriber’s experience of data services,” says Richard Stone, Telecoms Solutions Manager at Compuware. “Problems don’t just suddenly happen – they are almost always preceded by a gradual deterioration of the service, which the user notices long before an operator’s traditional monitoring tools are able to.”

Hateley also advocates a service-oriented approach: “Gradually, service providers have started to set up service delivery centres,” he says. “Historically, the approach has been NOC-based but now, instead of using a big fault management dashboard, they’ll be using IP and ethernet instrumentation to get a holistic view and enable operators to be more proactive. It’s about pinpointing where the degradation is occurring and having the ability to jump between individual silo toolsets.”

Focus on the customer experience is the key and IP importantly provides far more useful performance data than traditional networks.

“Operators must align their entire operational model to the customer experience,” adds Stone. “Every byte tells a story. The great thing about IP-based data is that it contains a huge amount of information about the device, the connection, the destination, and also about any errors encountered.”

www.comptel.com

Richard Thomas, NetEvidence: Mobile operators can't manage the whole system any more

David Chambers, Amdocs: OSS must be capable of modelling resources at network level

VanillaPlus Jargon Buster NOC: Network Operations Centre

VANILLAPLUS APRIL/MAY 2010

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I N V E N T O R Y

M A N A G E M E N T

EXPERT OPINION:

How better inventory management can improve service roll-out The pressure is on every communication service provider to reduce service introduction times and costs. But if you're already struggling to define your customer services and associated elements (IP addresses and phone numbers), as well as physical resources like switches and routers, what chance do you have of improving service roll-out efficiency? How should you manage in-house and third party inventory systems? And how can you automate service fulfilment in an era of complex IP services?

The new IP service factory Inventory management can make or break the business of a communications service provider (CSP), and complex IP services are focusing the spotlight. The core problem today is not necessarily the IP network; it is the fact that the IP network is promoting competition and the fragmentation in the industry. The spotlight now is on the need to rapidly innovate.

The author is Adan Pope, Chief Strategy Officer, Telcordia

CSPs have worked hard to ensure closer, more flexible linkages between inventory management processes from planning through to delivery of the service and subsequent troubleshooting and resolution. But they need to think about the consistency of the processes and pre-enabling change, rather than just the changeable nature of their offers or the underlying technologies.

The reality is: these efforts have just not gone far enough. To realise their full potential, CSPs must transform these business processes to support a more effective, flexible, service platform. For that, they need an IP-enabled production line capable of supporting the changing nature of offers and technology, and essentially serve as a new IP ‘service factory’.

So, where did CSPs hit a speed bump on the road to mastering inventory management? The problem is that inventory is often viewed as an application. In reality, it can be a 10-year project that never finishes, because CSPs have sought to engineer processes from the network upwards to fit ever-changing technology demands.

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VANILLAPLUS APRIL/MAY 2010

Unstoppable force meets an immoveable object Traditionally, IP has been seen and managed as an abstract layer on top of the physical network layer with only a partial view as to how to dynamically allocate the resources required to run the IP services.

Yet, there are a number of processes along the way that are more likely to go wrong as IP services disrupt the environment and make it more complex to manage. Add to this the pressure for CSPs to shorten the entire lifecycle and keep vast numbers of customers satisfied – while trying to streamline the underlying processes and reduce OpEx – and you’ve got an ‘unstoppable force meeting an immoveable object’ scenario, especially when inventory management is the key component to improve business processes and ensure that the network able to deliver against a hard SLA. Logically, there needs to be more focus on inventory as a process enabler that brings together all layers of the network. Inventory is a great mechanism for tying them all together – e.g. the fibre, the network route, the bandwidth parameters, the IP address and the customer order. It’s now possible to understand the relationships between these layers and provide a view of referential data without needing to actually tie it all together in the network. This is good news for CSPs rethinking over-scoped or failed transformation programmes.

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With IP, there’s a compressed timescale for service deployment due to fierce competition and the sheer number of new services. In the voice world, a new service was often just a new

feature set of an existing service – such as call waiting. But adding support for a new IP-based service is no longer a trivial matter – it can require a complete re-engineering of the network; clearly that’s a risk that CSPs cannot take.

Faults on the line So where’s it all going wrong? CSPs must understand what they have in the network, the additional capacity requirements and the inevitable errors from manual processes to ensure that the initial planning-to-provisioning stage is successful.

The next step, order-to-cash, involves relatively slow, high-touch manual order processing that is error-prone and time- and resource-consuming as details can become fragmented and inconsistent. This can lead to inefficient truck rolls, and a high number of orders to re-work.

During order verification, low customer satisfaction rates can result from mismanaged order dispatch processes and result in delays to service delivery or entirely cancelled orders. In the worst cases, there can also be poor communication to the customer about the order status, resulting in churn.

During the trouble-to-resolution process, operations staff can be looking at the logical network and only see the logical connectivity between routers. They can’t always see the common point on the physical layer that may be causing the problem, or understand the implications of a failure in an adjacent layer, because they often lack a federated network view. This is vital if CSPs are going to expose their network to third parties. There may also be multiple CSPs involved in delivering the end-toend service, dramatically increasing the pressure to reduce the service lifecycle. So what’s the answer?

Gaining visibility Inventory management in support of the IP Service Factory doesn’t necessarily touch the customer, but enterprise business processes do so every day and they are best enabled by a strong foundation of end-to-end inventory management. The CSPs must design and trafficengineer a new IP service factory that’s serviceready. CSPs ideally need a service platform, pre-constructed, pre-configured and ready for IP, to enable the IP production line’s mechanisation.

The key to improving the speed and effective flow through rate of the entire lifecycle is data integrity and minimising errors. Speed, great customer service, and process efficiency are linked and inter-dependent upon data integrity and quality. To run an effective IP service factory, focus should be applied to gaining a holistic view over the entire production line, rather than just the discrete processes.

The required solution must simplify complexity and allow CSPs to focus on areas in their inventory management enabled business processes where the largest end-to-end lifecycle improvements can be made, while respecting the value of existing investments. Two primary factors deliver the best results; consolidating back office processes around a common and standardised enterprise process model, and introducing greater flexibility into the systems estate as a hedge against changing future requirements. Transformation must begin from the bottom up.

Scrutinise the underlying processes, not the network, and develop a meaningful set of KPIs that provide benchmarks directly related to endto-end process excellence. This approach allows the CSP to understand where to focus resources.

It also promotes the gradual allocation of project costs based on measured improvements, and the approach achieves successes that can be spread into other processes. These KPIs typically consist of cost and time to process orders, the proportion of orders delivered correctly the first time, the time to service provisioning, and the cost of corrections or time between order and collection. Addressing these KPIs one at a time, or in corresponding groups, helps measure progress and ensure RoI while still affording the freedom to constantly monitor and improve business performance.

VanillaPlus Jargon Buster IP: Internet Protocol KPI: Key Performance Indicator OpEx: Operational Expenditure RoI: Return on Investment SLA: Service Level Agreement

The introduction of a future-proof systems estate based on an enterprise business process model is critical for greater flexibility in the order-tocash, plan-to-provision, and trouble-to-resolution processes. For example, knowing where a network element is located, coupled with the available bandwidth, can streamline troubleshooting and issue resolution that could otherwise result in an expensive days-long outage.

A privileged view Customer experience is the key parameter in defining CSPs’ success. They can deliver on that even more efficiently once they have a privileged view across their entire inventory including the enterprise business processes. That will result in CSPs once again commandiong their relationship with the customer, being more attuned to their needs and better able to roll out new services – all with an eye on business efficiency and cost containment. They are also better positioned to understand the relationships between, and to consolidate, discrete processes. Then the spotlight can be fixed on realising the potential to rapidly innovate.

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LEFT

FIELD

OPINION

Network – Heal Thyself (because I have no idea of what is connected to what…)

The massive proliferation of network elements cannot possibly be designed, managed and controlled with our current tools and processes. Fighting words? Perhaps. Let’s step back in time, says Barbara Lancaster, and consider how pervasive the telephone network might have become if every call continued to be connected by a human operator.

Predator-prey, producerconsumer ecosystems are … patterns (that) can be applied to network and service designs.”

- Barbara Lancaster, LTC International

Shall we agree that there are not enough smart, single women (mandatory attributes for this job, way back when) in the world to connect today’s call volumes?

Similarly, when networks were a few hundred switches owned and operated by a handful of carriers, attached to a few million end devices, it was reasonable to think that these networks could be carefully hand-crafted, monitored and managed. Just as we could not have today’s massive global connectivity without the invention of automated call connection; we cannot hope to stay in control of millions and millions of network elements, owned by thousands of service providers and an even higher number of customers using our old fashioned tools and ideas.

Enter the world of Autonomic Networks (AN), where the network devices can communicate amongst themselves with sufficient intelligence to notify one another of performance problems, take themselves off line and send a request for help – all the while keeping traffic flowing seamlessly via other member elements of the network. Selfhealing networks are both essential and rather frightening. How might this be made commercially available in the not-too-distant future?

The author, Barbara Lancaster, is president of consultants LTC International

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Three models from nature are competing to be tomorrow’s network design patterns.

(1) Most often cited as the source archetype is the autonomic nervous system of the higher mammals – hence the name – autonomic networks. This model assumes a distributed hierarchal control system of sensors and patterned responses. It is the most comfortable pattern that we derive from nature because it is already familiar. Most networks today are hierarchical in their organisation and their management. The notion of sensor/responder is parallel to our existing network management pattern of agent/manager.

(2) Social insects also provide a pattern. Swarms and colonies of often related individuals produce quite complex and seemingly intelligent decisions, based on the interaction of simpler behaviours. This pattern is used by humans seeking to build policy-controlled systems comprised of mostly homogeneous elements.

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(3) Predator-prey, producer-consumer ecosystems are another biological example from which patterns can be applied to network and service designs. The give and take, up and down flows of these systems are well matched to peer-to-peer systems; and many people think they can provide insight into the governing mechanisms for P2P – allowing the rules of engagement in the environment to provide indirect controls for the autonomous rules of interacting agents.

This relates to today’s economic systems and may model the interaction of commercial networks. It is the most complex pattern and relies heavily upon the identification and reinforcement of often unexpected emergent behaviours. The herding behaviour of cows and sheep, or schooling of fish are examples.

Natural systems reach stability via the interaction of evolutionary principles over a long time.

Despite our overloading of the meaning of ‘evolution’, there is no actual Evolution going on in networks and devices. Still, with eyes wide open and thinking caps firmly on, consider that: (1) The autonomic nervous system is a good pattern for active management and control systems.

(2) The ‘social’ insects are a good pattern for designing stable, well mannered, homogeneous networks of similar devices (e.g. optical or routed IP networks).

(3) Producer-consumer ecosystems can give us insights into how the larger, heterogeneous commercial network environments behave.

Many companies accept that the economics of self-configuration, self-management, and so on will lead to significantly cheaper networks. This has become a reason for closed door, gradual research on AN. I maintain that the principle driver behind selfhealing networks is not simply a marginal economic incentive. Services are getting more feature-rich, pervasive, and detached from the network technology on which they are delivered.

Any service, any network, any where, instantly is the mantra of the consumer. Receiving alarms, making a decision and taking action simply will not cut it.

www.comptel.com

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OPINION

Why CSPs need to start taking things personally Here's a story about personalised service delivery. You've probably heard it before, says Pat McCarthy.

A young man leaves the office and walks towards his nearest Tube station. As he does, his mobile provider recognises his location and sends him a quick text message. "Half price drinks at Murphy's Pub until 9pm - turn next right" it says. He sees the message and drops in for a couple of cheeky ones.

Everybody is happy. The young man gets his beer on the cheap. Murphy's gains a new customer. And the mobile provider earns extra revenue through serving this ad and thousands like it.

It's a story that's appeared (in one variation or another) in dozens of "mobile world of the future" articles over the years. The trouble is – it’s not happening.

“Personalised bandwidth management gives a CSP some control over its network.”

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So, does this mean that there's no profit in personalised service delivery?

Not at all; what it does mean is that advertisers need to take a more strategic and

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Pat McCarthy is Vice President for Service Delivery Solutions at Telcordia Technologies, Inc. and a member of VanillaPlus’ Editorial Advisory Board.

Is that a personalised service or just spam?

For every mobile customer interested in twofor-one pints there are hundreds more who will cancel their service to avoid SMS spam.

And, for these reasons and more, there's nothing in it for the mobile provider. For advertising-based business models to succeed, they need to be opt-in, personalised and be part of a broader set of service offers to ensure that subscribers’ acceptance and loyalty grow to the service.

sophisticated approach to partnering with communications service providers (CSPs) for service delivery.

The key for CSPs as they look to introduce the two-sided business model based with advertising, is to broaden its view on who their customers are. They need to move away from being mere suppliers of voice and data and move towards creating and developing an interactive relationship with their subscribers and advertisers.

To use the internet as a model, the provision of broadband is a commodity and is entirely price-driven. Subscribers will switch between CSPs to save money unless there is some lock-in to a device, a contract or a personalised service which they value.

On the other hand, interactive online services such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter are leading the way. They learn more and more about their users every day and, as such, are well placed to exploit and monetise these relationships.

Telcos must think like social networks To be successful, CSPs need to start thinking less like a telecom network and more like a social network. They really have no choice.

With network demand growing five times as fast as revenue, and with customers accustomed to cheap, unlimited access as a matter of course, there's little or no opportunity to grow revenue through increasing access charges.

Personalised bandwidth management is a solution that gives a CSP some control over its network. With bandwidth management, a CSP has the ability to agree new levels of service with content providers and command some share of revenue to deliver a tiered service to its subscribers.

Revenue from access may not be enough; so it needs to come from somewhere else, such as advertising. The networked world has seen its share of failed start-ups who thought that generating loads of traffic by tossing up a bunch of ads was a viable business model. If the internet experience has taught us anything, it's that advertising needs to be more personal and more relevant than ever before.

And by personalisation and relevance, I mean much more than just slapping on "Dear Bob Jones" and sending it to everybody in a given postal code. I mean sending a customised message, to a given person, at a particular location, at a precise time, for a specific reason based on the personalisation option that the customer has selected. Not only is this necessary to make sure the messaging is heard and acted upon, but anti-spam regulations make it necessary in order to make sure people opt-in.

“The internet has taught us that advertising needs to be more personal and relevant than ever before.”

Mobile service providers won’t bear all delivery costs A second clear source of revenue is the content and online service providers themselves. In my view, content, internet and social networks need to adopt a revenue sharing model for interactive services. It is simply not sustainable for, say, a TV catch-up service or an IPTV website to sit free on the internet and expect mobile providers to bear the entire cost of delivering the service to the end user.

The success of the mobile phone was built on revenue-sharing partnerships and created a global market. To make the new interactive world a success, revenue sharing needs to become part of the reality in the new twosided business model.

Access charges alone will not cover the costs.

With mobile marketing and advertising, CSPs can subsidise content to make it more accessible to their subscribers – creating a win-win business model for all.

The exact pricing model remains to be developed, but I can see a world in which web-based businesses will share some revenues with CSPs in order to receive quicker or easier access, or to leverage the CSPs’ charging models, or to take advantage of its distribution networks. This may sound like a radical approach, but in my view it is little different from a supermarket or department store charging suppliers for marketing more premium shelf space.

Getting from where we are now to where we need to be will be difficult. There is, fortunately, technology available to make it a little easier. But technology alone can not do the job. A complete shift in mindset is needed if the telecoms industry is to realise its potential in the decades to come.

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Upcoming Events IMS 2.0 World Forum 2010 27 – 29 April, 2010 Hotel Pullman Barcelona Skipper, Barcelona, Spain http://worldforum.imsvision.com/ Prepaid Expo Europe 10 – 12 May, 2010 Conrad Brussels, Brussels, Belgium www.prepaidexpoeurope.com

Saudi Com 24 – 25 May, 2010 Ritz Carlton Hotel Bahrain www.comworldseries.com/saudi Regulatory Cost Modelling & Accounting 2010 25 – 28 May, 2010 NH Danube City, Vienna, Austria www.iir-telecoms.com/I2AZ3VP

LTE World Summit 18 – 19 May, 2010 Okura Hotel, Amsterdam, Netherlands http://ws.lteconference.com

NGMN Industry Conference & Exhibition 2010 2 – 4 June, 2010 Shanghai, China www.ngmn-ic2010.com

Revenue Management & Profitability Summit 18 – 20 May, 2010 Nice, France www.tmforum.org/mw2010

In-Building Summit 7 – 10 June, 2010 Le Meridien Piccadilly, London, UK www.iir-telecoms.com/IBSVaPlus

Management World 2010 18 – 20 May, 2010 Acropolis Convention Centre, Nice, France www.tmforum.org/vanillaplus

West & Central Africa Com 16 – 17 June, 2010 Le Meridien Dakar, Senegal http://wcafrica.comworldseries.com

Americas Com Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 30 June – 1 July 2010 http://americas.comworldseries.com

WiMax Forum Global Congress 2010 16 – 17 June, 2010 Amsterdam, Netherlands www.wimaxforumglobalevents.com/global

Freddy Maldonado, CEO, NUEVATEL PCS BOLIVIA Dirk Currie, CEO, TELESUR SURINAME Divino Sebastião, CEO, CTBC TELECOM BRASIL Marcelo Abreu, Chief Deployment Officer, ANTEL URUGUAY Armand Toonen, CMO, Vice-President Marketing & Business Development, ORANGE DOMINICANA Gustavo Reyes, Vice-President for IT, TELEFONICA MOVILES VENEZUELA Eduardo Durán, Head of Technological Evolution, ENTEL S.A. CHILE Roger Solé, Director Marketing Consumer, TIM BRASIL Rogelio Ancira, IT Director, ALESTRA MEXICO Flavia Bittencourt, Marketing Director, OI BRASIL Sergio Maurenzi, Operations & New Technology Manager, TELECOM PERSONAL (ARGENTINA & PARAGUAY)

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MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS: POLICY & CHARGING

Plugging a widening revenue gap Every Congress has one or two topics that crop up throughout the event. Regular readers of VanillaPlus will not be surprised that this year’s joint winner – unscientifically awarded by Editor, Jeremy Cowan – was the impact of Policy Control and Real-Time Charging on the widening gap between slow growing data revenues and booming traffic expansion.

Everywhere you turned people were talking about rising data volumes and their impact, but this is so critical to communication service providers (CSPs) it’s not going to get dull.

Although some operators now gloss over their initial response, the threat to the bottom line was so serious that a few acted aggressively to begin with, throttling the network access given to ‘excessive’ data users.

A more constructive attitude was taken by others whose approach to policy control was designed to drive usage at times of day chosen by the subscriber, and to usage levels that they selected. This has been largely successful in cross- or up-selling users to more suitable tariff plans, and in so doing has benefited AMPUs (average margins per user).

So, what support systems and services are telcos now being offered? And what happens next? VanillaPlus talked to a number of experts in Barcelona to find out.

The scale of the problem for operators can be seen in research published earlier this year by Bridgewater Systems following independent research by Chetan Sharma Consulting.

In it, the firm’s President, Chetan Sharma said, "The popularity of smartphones, mobile laptop dongles and flat-rate data plans has brought explosive growth in mobile data traffic. A holistic approach to managing this traffic including policy control, mobile data offload, and evolution to 3.5G and 4G is critical or costs could exceed revenues and become unsustainable by 2012 or sooner."

Mobily, a GSM and HSPA+ network operator in Saudi Arabia (above), has contracted with Bridgewater to support 18m subscribers.

Bridgewater recently won a contract from Mobily, a GSM and HSPA+ network operator in Saudi Arabia serving 18 million subscribers.

The contract includes the provision of a service controller – for authentication, authorisation and accounting (AAA) of new orders – policy control, and subscriber data management (SDM).

David Sharpley, Senior Vice President, of Ontario, Canada-based Bridgewater Systems commented to VanillaPlus that most of their competitors don’t have AAA or SDM capabilities. “You need to see the dynamic state of subscribers,” he added.

His own company’s recently announced results speak for themselves. In 2009 its revenues rose from $44.2 million to $66.7 million (€49 million), an increase of 51%. Net earnings (profits) rose from $2.8m in 2008 to $11.2 million (€8.3 million), and the vendor is forecasting significant further growth in 2010.

Clearly, there is strong operator demand here, and it’s no surprise to find so many active players in the market.

Vendor-neutral Two independent software vendors have come together here to strengthen their offering.

Montreal’s Blueslice Networks is allying its evolved Subscriber Data Management functionality with Massachusett’s Camiant, Inc.

www.comptel.com

Jeremy Cowan, the author, is the Editor of VanillaPlus

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Huge policy savings The report went on to say that policy control could contribute substantial annual cost savings

of over 10%, equating to more than US$15 billion (€11 billion) in annual cost reduction by 2013 in the US market alone. It also noted that operators deploying a data traffic offload strategy to Wi-Fi, femtocells or 4G could expect savings of 20-25% a year by 2013, representing $30 - $40 billion (€22-29 billion) in the US market.

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MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS: POLICY & CHARGING

“Differentiated and real-time usage charging will allow TTSL to reach new customers in smaller parts of its market.”

and its PCRF (policy and charging rules function).

The companies believe that the “subscriber and resource control intelligence layer”, as they term it, should be centralised to avoid creating silos in the network, and must be vendor-neutral so that operators can have an independent mechanism to control network growth.

In their strategic partnership, the pair will integrate and test Camiant’s PCRF with Blueslice’s Subscription Profile Repository and Home Subscriber Server (HSS). They are bringing to market an LTE-ready PCRF + HSS system to give operators a quick and smooth introduction to evolved packet core systems.

In the longer term Camiant and Blueslice will jointly contribute to the next generation Subscription Profile Repository standards, and work with service providers to create a customised solution.

As we reported online in late March (www.vanillaplus.com) Volubill has signed four new PCRF deals in six weeks, confirming that communications service providers (CSPs) are recognising the importance of effective policy management solutions to re-invent tariff plans and better manage network usage. The new deals are in the USA, Caribbean, and Northern Africa.

For an insight into Volubill’s latest thinking, turn to pages 13-15 to see our interview with CEO, John Aalbers. His company has been developing an enviable position in this market over the last couple of years, and clearly this is no flash in the pan as the vendor also recently signed a contract with Tata Teleservices Ltd (TTSL) to reduce its revenue leakage and support more granular data charging models.

Further reading: The Moriana Group recently released an Operator Guide covering Volubill’s offering: www.morianagroup.com Moriana will publish updates to the Policy Operator Guide throughout 2010 covering a number of different vendors' systems.

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TTSL was the first CDMA mobile service provider in India and currently has 36 million subscribers, of whom 35 million are in the wireless sector. Differentiated and real-time usage charging will allow TTSL to reach new customers in smaller parts of its market. And increased profit margins are possible by eliminating slow charging and by customising mobile internet services. Volubill’s CHARGE-ITTM not only enables real-time management but also subscriber usage analaysis for IP-based services. It gives capabilities for deep packet inspection, service delivery, traffic shaping and user experience management.

Another company working in this space that has grown significantly is Openet. In February it completed a $10.5 million (€7.2 million) funding round to enable sales and marketing expansion, growth in regional markets and new strategic investments. This brings total investment in Openet to over $60 million (€44 million).

Privately-owned, the company will only say of its results that it saw 50% year-on-year revenue growth in 2009.

Canada’s largest wireless network operator, Bell

VANILLAPLUS APRIL/MAY 2010

Mobility deployed Openet’s 3GPP-compliant FusionWorksTM Online Charging System (OCS) as part of its HSPA network upgrade. The system went live in December 2009, offering mobile data speeds of up to 21 Mbps.

FusionWorks OCS consists of convergent charging, network edge rating, and balance manager products. Bell reportedly chose Openet to enable new personalised services, for pre- and postpaid data charging, rating and subscription control.

More recently, Meteor Mobile, Ireland’s third largest wireless operator, has contracted to receive convergent charging and network edge rating systems as part of a network upgrade, which will also help it to meet EU roaming regulations.

At the start of the year, Finland’s Comptel Corporation launched Comptel Control and ChargeTM, which they promoted heavily at Mobile World Congress. It is an integrated, modular system bringing together the company’s existing solutions for policy control (including bandwidth management and roaming cost control), charging and mediation.

This provides CSPs with combined policy control, charging, rating, balance management and mediation on a single, scalable platform. It can be deployed incrementally, and to fit into existing environments, and because there are no overlapping functions or duplicate data storage the cost of introducing new services or policies is kept low.

The system is already in deployment at an unnamed North African operator of fixed and mobile services, where a customer can take a weekly or monthly renewable data subscription that includes combined traffic volume limits for fixed and mobile. It is handled on a combined pre- and postpay basis so that when a subscribed package runs out (or when roaming) a pay-as-you-go model comes into effect. Data packages are automatically renewed at the end of each billing period unless the customer instructs otherwise.

"Separate policy control and charging functions slow down CSP innovation," said Simo Sääskilahti, SVP, Products and Solutions, and Deputy CEO, Comptel. "Comptel Control and Charge enables operators to more quickly and easily introduce new, convergent services. At the same time, our solution allows them to increase revenue and cost savings, as there are fewer systems to be managed, and the number of touch points is reduced."

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the systems offered to CSPs in search of real-time charging and policy control, but finding so many vendors vying for attention at Mobile World Congress says a lot about the continued demands for such solutions from operators, and the pressure to develop competitive products.

www.comptel.com

EVENT

PREVIEWS

IMS 2.0 World Forum 2010 27 - 29 April, 2010 Hotel Pullman Barcelona Skipper, Barcelona, Spain http://worldforum.imsvision.com Building on the success of the IMS World Series, IMS 2.0 World Forum, now in its 7th year, is an event for mobile, fixed, cable and hybrid operators, internet providers, application developers, IT/software players, network equipment and handset vendors from across the globe.

Demonstrating the need to focus on real-life deployments,

the objectives and challenges, and the winning solutions, discover at IMS 2.0 World Forum, what is really happening today. No one IMS service will change the game, but IMS will create a whole eco-system providing a control for the telco and defining IMS as the key enabler for business transformation.

Prepaid Expo Europe 10 - 12 May, 2010 Conrad Brussels, Brussels, Belgium http://www.prepaidexpoeurope.com GET CONNECTED - Grow your business community through personal connections enabled by face-to-face meetings, networking lunches and social gatherings.

BE ENLIGHTENED - Exchange ideas and best practices in an informal setting by signing up for “test drive a consultant” and “lunch with a speaker”, and by attending the Diamond Cocktail Reception.

BE INSPIRED - Transform your prepaid schemes with novel ideas on business models, management strategies and relationship building.

GET INVOLVED - Designed to foster real discussion and interaction among all Expo participants, the interactive experience creates exchange and flow of ideas and produces a high level of energy throughout the event.

OBTAIN VALUE - Prepaid Expo Europe brings you keynote speakers delivering out-of-the-box perspectives and motivational ideas.

OPTIMISE ROI - Prepaid Expo Europe brings together interactive and focused conference content, large blocks of time allotted to business research, meetings and other networking opportunities.

LTE World Summit 18 – 19 May, 2010 / Okura Hotel, Amsterdam, The Netherlands http://ws.lteconference.com LTE World Summit 2010 looks set to build upon 2009's successful event which attracted top operators from across the World. The major LTE players will be in attendance, including operators, vendors, industry associations,

industry press, bloggers and more. With more than 80 stands and a comprehensive six track programme, plus two co-located conferences, you can expect an interesting turnout in Amsterdam in May.

Revenue Management & Profitability Summit 18 – 20 May, 2010 / Nice, France www.tmforum.org/mw2010 Don’t miss three days of insights from leading organisations and experts from across the communications, finance and media industries. The summit will share proven strategies and ideas for optimising your entire BSS infrastructure. Key speakers include:

• • •

Dave Birch, Director, Consult Hyperion Eric Duprat, GM Mobile Payments, PayPal Deniz Guven, Channel Management, Garanti Bank

You will also benefit from access to five other summits, as well as the opportunity to attend the Management World keynote plenary session.

www.comptel.com

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• Sian Williams, VP Fraud & Revenue Assurance, Orange - FT Group • Rob Weintraub, CIO, Etisalat Nigeria • Ian Beckett, CIO, Trilogy International

Plus up-to-the minute insights from the world of finance, including payments industry specialists:

VANILLAPLUS APRIL/MAY 2010

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EVENT

PREVIEWS

Management World 2010 18 – 20 May, 2010 Acropolis Convention Centre, Nice, France www.tmforum.org/vanillaplus Management World 2010, now in its 11th year is the leading global management conference for the information, communications, media and entertainment industries. It brings together industry experts from the mobile, fixed line, cable, defence, internet, advertising, information and entertainment industries.

countries, and 275 speakers including representatives from the world’s leading service providers.

PLUS – don’t miss the TM Forum Executive Programme, a prestigious, invitation-only programme for C-Level executives that includes executive roundtables and an executive reception.

Meet with more than 3,000 attendees from over 80

Saudi Com 24 – 25 May, 2010 Ritz Carlton Hotel, Bahrain www.comworldseries.com/saudi The Saudi Arabian telecoms market is one of the most interesting in the Middle East. Increasingly competitive and involving the key regional operators, this is a dynamic market. Saudi Arabia has attractive demographics, with two-thirds of the population under 30. The high proportion of technology literate users, combined with a wealthy subscriber base, make this a market with high growth potential.

Saudi Com will gather more than 200 regional operators and vendors from across the Saudi Arabian telecoms market – with operators present such as STC, Mobily, Zain, Bravo PTC, Go Telecom and many more.

The event comprises a two-day conference discussing the key topics for the region – and, with 15 operator speakers already confirmed, attending should be a good investment of your time. Alongside the conference will be a 20-stand exhibition showcasing some of the latest technologies and products from the telecoms world.

Regulatory Cost Modelling & Accounting 2010 25 – 28 May, 2010 NH Danube City, Vienna, Austria www.iir-telecoms.com/I2AZ3VP IIR's annual Regulatory Cost Modelling & Accounting conference will provide a dynamic networking and information-sharing business environment, bringing together key stakeholders to examine the latest developments and best practice in regulatory cost modelling and accounting. Key issues to be addressed include:

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VANILLAPLUS APRIL/MAY 2010

www.comptel.com

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• Developing accurate cost models and regulatory accounts that optimise operator objectives while meeting regulatory requirements • Establishing how to use cost modelling to detect areas for cost improvement • Determining how operators can effectively provide the level of detail required by the regulators

• Effectively assessing and reporting the profitability of new products and services • Reviewing key regulatory cost modelling and accounting developments for mobile operators • Scrutinising accounting separation and costing for fixed and mobile operators • Overcoming the cost modelling challenges of implementing the EC recommendation on Mobile Termination Rates • Examining the cost modelling challenges when moving from traditional PSTN to IP-based networks • Analysing the effectiveness of different Next Generation Network cost modelling approaches • Exploring the mechanics of LRIC and its suitability in Next Generation Network cost modelling

Returning to Senegal by popular demand De retour au Sénégal par demande générale

E rs E rato T urs FRope UI rate T é r fo RA op G les ur po

7th Annual – 7e Annuel The ONLY communications event gathering 25+ Operator CEO speakers from across the region.

Confirmed speakers include: Les intervenants confirmés incluent: Abdourahim Agne, Minister of Telecommunications, ICT, and Transports, Government of Senegal

Christian de Faria, Vice President – West & Central Africa, MTN Group

Network with operators from ALL countries in West & Central Africa:

Tiemoko Coulibaly, Vice President Western Africa, Zain Group

Rencontrez des opérateurs de TOUS les pays d’Afrique de l’Ouest et Centrale:

Delivering Innovative Services and Managing Efficient Operations for Optimum Profitability Offrir des Services Innovants et Gérer des Opérations Efficaces pour une Rentabilité Optimale

Tushar Maheshwari, Commercial Director, Starcomms, Nigeria

Louis Lubala, CEO, Zain Niger Wim Vanhelleputte, CEO, MTN Cote d’Iviore

PART OF THE

François Nze, Director General, Comium Ivory Coast

16-17 June / Juin 2010 Le Méridien Président, Dakar, Sénégal

Clovis Yameogo, Marketing & Commercial Director, Intercel Guinea

Steven Evans, CEO, Etisalat Nigeria

PRODUCED BY:

Ken Aigbinode, CEO, Zoom Mobile, Nigeria

Robert Aouad, CEO, Isocel Telecom, Benin

Lionel Ekabouma, Chief Commercial Officer, Azur Gabon

SPONSORS Headline Sponsor

Ismail Olubiyi, CEO, GeoidTel Nigeria

Register quoting WCA10AVP: www.comworldseries.com/wcafrica

rs to ra CC pe G ll o he ra t fo rom f

EE FR

BRAND NEW launch event in the

Targeting the rich potential of the Saudi Market

Find the solutions to the challenges facing your business:

24-25 May, 2010

15+ Fixed, Mobile and

The Ritz-Carlton Manama, Bahrain

ISP operator speakers confirmed

Learn from the Who's Who of Saudi Arabian Telecoms Dr Ahmed Sindi, CEO, Atheeb (GO)

Ali Amer, Senior Expert Consultant, STC

Homoud Al-Kussayer, VP Regulatory Affairs, STC

Ahmad Al Yamani, CTO, SAGIA (Saudi Arabia General Investment Authority)

Gert Reider, Chief Executive Bahrain, Batelco Andrew Hanna, Senior Advisor, Market Development, TRA Bahrain

Nawaf Al Shammari, Head of Service DevelopmentMobile, Enterprise Unit, STC Jameel Al Molhem, VP Personal Services, STC

Robert Lee, CCO, Zain KSA Abdulrahman Obaied, Marketing Director, Alwalnet Ahmad Abu Zannad, Head of Consumer Segments, Zain KSA Rasheed Shaksheer, Director Key Projects, Mobily Alaa Malki, Director - Mobile Radio Network Planning and Design, Mobily

Who you will meet

Learn from the experiences of visionary speakers including operators

1 25+ 15 2 3 4

Address untapped demand and Increase penetration in Saudi Arabia

5

Maximise the opportunities for the ICT Industry in Saudi's Economic Cities

6

Adopt costumer experience management as a key differentiator and a major customer retention tool

7

Develop the Tools and Solutions you need for the Lucrative Enterprise Market

Develop new revenue streams with Value Added Services Make the next step after 3G analyse and compare WiMAX, LTE and 4G

Network with 200+ senior decision-makers from the region’s mobile & fixed operators and ISPs all in one place: I Saudi Telecom I Mobily Company

I Zain KSA

I PTC (Bravo) I Atheeb Telecom/Go

I ITC

I Verizon Business

I PCCW

I Cyberia

I Zajil

Sponsor:

Produced By: Part of the:

Register online www.comworldseries.com/saudi quoting “VPSA10”

EVENT

PREVIEWS

NGMN Industry Conference & Exhibition 2010 2 – 4 June, 2010 Shanghai, China www.ngmn-ic2010.com The NGMN Industry Conference & Exhibition is an important platform for the entire mobile eco-system to network, gain an outlook on upcoming technology and service innovations, and to progress critical industry challenges ahead.

Beyond the conference programme and the exhibition, participants will benefit from a valuable networking platform with evening events, networking breaks and the opportunity for a visit to the Shanghai World Expo.

WiMax Forum Global Congress 2010 16 – 17 June, 2010 Amsterdam, The Netherlands http://www.wimaxforumglobalevents.com/global Bring together 4,000+ attendees from 125 countries.

Meet 1,300+ operator representatives at the world's first truly global, operator-led WiMAX show.

The event offers 100+ speakers, including 43 operators across two days as well as 80 exhibitors.

West & Central Africa Com 16 – 17 June, 2010 Le Meridien Dakar, Senegal http://wcafrica.comworldseries.com Following two years in Nigeria, West & Central Africa's only dedicated communications event returns to Senegal. Join more than 700 decision makers and a panel of over 50 speakers, including 25 CEO-level operators, for a two-day

strategic conference and 50-stand exhibition. Gain all the contacts, insights and ideas you need for your operations in the region.

Americas Com Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 30 June – 1 July, 2010 http://americas.comworldseries.com Now in its 14th year, Americas Com is the longestestablished annual meeting place for telecom network operators and supporting companies operating in Latin

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America. This year the organisers have announced a ‘re-juvenated’ format and a newly-expanded exhibition as it co-locates with IP&TV Forum Americas.

LHS

WEBINAR

REVIEW

Using existing customer information to increase operator revenues Mobile operators can reduce churn and increase the effectiveness of mobile advertising by intelligent use of the data they own on their subscribers. A recent VanillaPlus webinar, supported by LHS, explained how integrated billing and business intelligence can unlock the information that operators already possess. Steve Rogerson reports. needs to be accessed, something that once could only be done by database experts. But business intelligence systems can make this available in a usable format through dashboard style interfaces.

Applications are now available that can use this information to predict the probability of a customer churning and when, and the type of rewards or offers such customers are likely to respond to that would keep them with the provider.

Many industries are envious of the amount of information communications service providers (CSPs) have about their customers, yet the communications industry is bad at exploiting that data. Chris Yeadon, Director of Product Marketing at LHS, described this data as the “crown jewels of customer information”.

Operators know which services customers use and, just as importantly, which they don’t use.

They have information about call behaviour – when they make their calls, who they are calling, even the service providers of the people they call. They know how they pay their bills, whether they are prompt players or whether they are late payers. They know where they live and even when and where they go on holiday.

Huge strategic asset “This type of information forms a huge potential strategic asset,” said Yeadon, “which any other industry would love to get hold of.”

CSPs are uniquely positioned to leverage this data. They have easier access to it and they have ready-made channels to the customer through the bill, the ability to SMS, the fault line and so on. But the industry seems to be playing catchup when it comes to exploiting this data compared with, say, the retail industry that has become experienced in using rewards and offers to hold onto customers.

To use this information to reduce churn, the data

Get value from the data The main point is not to get as much data as possible but to get value out of the data, explained Veronika Olsson, LHS’s Director of Strategic Marketing and Research. This can be done using analytics software that is built into most new OSS and BSS products.

“A subscriber that reduces the amount of calls they normally make maybe a sign they are about to churn or it can be seen as an opportunity to offer them a new call package,” she said. “The operator can increase the value of this customer by recognising the threat and reacting on it in time.”

Using these systems can also help target mobile advertisements and can even change a customer’s reaction to such advertisements from sceptical to positive. Some customers are happy to receive advertisements on their mobile phones, some find them an irritation and others become so frustrated they generate a negative impression to all mobile advertisements and may even churn as a result.

Veronika Olsson, Director Strategic Marketing and Research, LHS

“When advertising falls within the consumer’s interest area, it is often perceived as information instead of advertising.” – Veronika Olsson, LHS

But by using the information they have on the customer, such as the services they use and the mobile web sites they visit, the promoters can make the advertisements relevant to the customers.

“Targeting is crucial for success,” said Olsson.

“When advertising falls within the consumer’s interest area, it is often perceived as information instead of advertising.”

The conclusion is clear. The information operators have on their customers is like gold dust, but it only has real value if it is presented in an accessible format and is used to the full.

Chris Yeadon, Director Product Marketing, LHS

VANILLAPLUS APRIL/MAY 2010

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WEB

SELF-SERVICE

WEBINAR

Twin benefits from web self-service Telecoms operators face an increasing challenge supporting customers using ever more complex applications. A recent VanillaPlus webinar, supported by eGain, explained how web self-service can save them money and improve the experience for their customers. Steve Rogerson reports.

The world has changed for telecoms operators.

Once they sold just the basics but now they are expected to provide applications and services to a customer base that is becoming increasingly demanding. On top of that, there is more competition putting pressure on prices.

“The profit margin is constantly being eroded by increasing customer choice and competition,” said telecoms consultant Alun Lewis. He compared the situation to that of a village shop – selling the basics of tea, sugar and flour equating to voice, mobility and data – to a department store where the basics were still in the basement but the real value was upstairs where premium prices could be obtained for quality applications and services.

The difficulty though is that as the products and applications become more complex so the need for customer support grows. For example, Lewis said that a technical support call for a basic mobile phone used to last an average of 10 minutes, but now for mobile broadband phones that had grown to nearly half an hour. Providing bad service is also not an option with the growth of social networking sites that mean a company’s brand can be ruined quickly as word spreads across the internet.

Ian Jones, Head of global strategic solutions for eGain Communications, believes the answer is to rely more on web self-service, where customers can go to a web site and find the answers they want without having to make a call. But to do that the web site has to be made more accessible.

‘Web first’ strategy “You need to encourage them as far as possible to go to the web first,” he said. “And there is a great groundswell of people who are more than ready to go to the web first.”

He said the key to designing the web site was to understand the type of queries a customer wanted. These can be broken down into three types: tell me something; do something for me; and fix something, either a device or a bill.

“Once you have mapped out the types of enquiries you are getting, you can map out the types of tools you need to respond to them,” he said.

These can be a combination of FAQs, search and browsing. FAQs (frequently asked questions) work well for occasional visitors who do not know too much about the operation, and can be

better when they are presented in context.

Search facilities are handy both for those who know exactly what they want or are not sure what is available. The key here is to have flexibility in how the results are presented.

Browsing facilities suit customers who know roughly what they want but not exactly, and the facility should be there for them to browse by different criteria, such as by brand or price. Tick boxes can be handy to build up search queries.

More complex sites can have features such as chatbots.

The value of forums Forums allow people to talk to other customers and experts directly. And using social networking facilities such as Facebook can be convenient to keep in contact with customers and have a finger on the pulse of what they are saying and feeling about the company.

Ian Jones, eGain Communications: Customers can go to a web site and find the answers they want

“Those who do well in web selfWhat is useful though is to separate the access route from the content. Poorly designed sites can service win twice; mean that customers who choose one access they give a good route can only get to part of the content, whereas the content should be available to all – no matter customer how they choose to get to it. experience and they do it Setting up such a site can done in a relatively short time, “within a couple of weeks,” said cheaper.”

Jones, if you already have the content.

– Ian Jones, “Those who do well in web self-service win eGain twice,” he said. “They give a good customer Communications experience and they do it cheaper.”

VANILLAPLUS APRIL/MAY 2010

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Former Virgin chief revs up for T-Mobile / Orange crush Now that the European Commission has approved the merger of Orange and T-Mobile in the UK, a new super-operator can emerge; one with 30 million customers and £7.6 billion (€8.3 billion) in revenues. That comes much to the chagrin of former market leaders by size, O2 and Vodafone, who become numbers two and three in their home market. Now the real work begins at the operator that, for the time-being, I have dubbed Orange-T. There’s a mass of work to do integrating the networks, systems, cultures and workforces of the two businesses. However, in some regards the operators have lived a parallel existence over the last decade although they have pursued vastly different approaches and fulfilled opposing roles in their owners’ portfolios.

The author is freelance writer, George Malim.

“(Alexander) swanned off to the south of France to spend more time with his sportscars and motorbikes.”

Tom Alexander, Head of merging UK operations of Orange and T-Mobile

T-Mobile UK was acquired by Deutsche Telekom in late 1999 for £8.4bn and became the German telecoms powerhouse’s UK operation during the peak of the carrier’s expansion phase.

Immediately rebranded to reflect DT’s ‘T-’ brand, the strategy was to maximise revenues from the UK mobile sector and form a key part of DT’s pan-European and global structure.

In contrast, Orange, acquired by France Telecom at the height of the dot.com boom for £25bn in mid-2000, became a branding, identity and business model that France Telecom can in some aspects be seen to have reversed into. The Orange identity is one that has served FT well, and a challenge for the merged entity will be to see how the Teutonic blends with the Gallic.

The hot seat is glowing Orange The man in the hot seat is Tom Alexander, the former chief of Virgin Mobile, who – following that operation’s successful flotation in 2004 – swanned off to the south of France to spend more time with his massive collection of sportscars and motorbikes. That’s a career path I wholeheartedly approve of and I’m a little surprised to see him back in the industry.

Perhaps the European GT racing in an Aston Martin and the full time mechanic he employs to keep his vehicles in tip-top condition have become less of a challenge and he now wants to do something really difficult. If that’s the case, he’s certainly got a task on his hands now.

However, he seems relaxed about what needs to be done. The combined workforce of Orange-T

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is 19,000 which is 50% larger than nearest rival O2’s. Nevertheless, he doesn’t see swingeing redundancies being necessary. “There are some duplications of back office functions, but for the time being we are supporting two brands, two lots of call centres and shops so there are not going to be big redundancies,” he told The Sunday Times. “We will just lose some management layers and back office.”

Expect the back office to grow regardless As an avid watcher of the OSS industry over the last decade, that statement sets my alarm bells ringing. Those back office duplications will need to run for some years, in my view, as the two businesses attempt to integrate and centralise systems. As for losing management layers and back office, a more likely expectation would be to gain management layers and increase the usage of interim or overlay back-office systems – especially when you take into account that both carriers have network sharing agreements in place with other carriers that will have to administered, reported on and accounted for accurately.

Alexander faces a massive task, but it’s clearly one he relishes and is especially equipped to complete. He’s dealt extensively with DT, which supplies Virgin Mobile’s network, and he’s lived in France for five years. He could be the ideal bridge between Orange-T’s owners. In the meantime, I have a proposal to make his job easier: If he doesn’t like my Orange-T suggestion, the One2One brand – T-Mobile UK’s forerunner – upon which tens of millions of pounds were lavished is still highly recognisable in the UK and its rights are probably somewhere in a file in one of the combined company’s many mansions.

18-20 May 2010. Nice, France

Clouds on the Horizon?

NEW GAME. NEW PLAYERS. NEW RULES. The game is changing for the communications industry. Increasing competition from traditional and new players is driving the need for change harder than ever before.

Success in todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s market means following new rules: continually reducing costs; reducing customer churn by improving experience; and delivering innovative, profitable new services.

TM Forum Management World 2010, now in its 11th year is the leading global communications management conference for the information, communications and entertainment industries. Each year it continues to attract 3,000+ attendees from 80 countries of which over 50% are senior executives.

6 Conference Summits, 275+ Speakers: Growth through New Content & Innovative Services Summit

Successful Business Transformation Summit

Driving Technology & Operational Excellence Summit

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CEO GUIDE SUPPLEMENT 2 0 1 0 DRIVING

PROFITS

FOR

EMEA'S

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C O M M U N I C AT I O N

SERVICE

PROVIDERS

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C-LEVEL VIEW: Consolidated view gives hope for CSPs caught in service frenzy, says ConceptWave’s CTO

SPECIAL SUPPLEMENT PREVIEW FOR NICE 2010 MANAGEMENT WORLD - Conference Preview - A-Z of Exhibitors - Expo Floorplan PROFITABILITY GAP Do we need to re-invent real-time charging for a tidal wave of data traffic?

MACHINE TO MACHINE New BSS & OSS platform introduced for M2M services

VIDEO TALKING HEADS PREVIEW Convergent billing must handle far more subscribers, says Orga Systems’ new CEO

PLUS!

BPM comes to GoogleApps marketplace • IPv6 migration for carriers & ISPs LTE networks system links data across silos • IRIS® looks hard at bottom line Carrier class VoIP for next-gen operators • Optimising global satellite services

www.comptel.com

Head in the clouds?

OSS for Cloud

Management World Nice, France, 18-20 May, Hall 2 Booth: 21

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COMMUNICATIONS BRIEFING

Welcome to Nice This time 12 months ago we were reeling from the shock of bank failures and stock market collapses, while trying to decipher what impact these would have on the communications sector. And the answer is: Not as much as many of us feared. Many telecom network operators are once again reporting growth in earnings, rising dividends, and less share price volatility. Many equipment and system vendors – although wary of saying so openly – are bullish about their prospects in 2010/2011.

German giant calls for NGN help

So this month the industry’s network, service and operations technologists gather once again for their annual forum at Management World in Nice. Instead of peering nervously at their Blackberrys every 5 minutes for the latest dire news, this year the operations and business support systems (OSS & BSS) executives can press on with urgently needed discussions on: cloud service management; revenue management, m-commerce and new business models; maximising the business’ use of its intelligence; digital media profitability; the perennial effort to drive cost out and efficiency into IT & Operations; and exploring new opportunities in defence.

VanillaPlus is in Nice this year in greater numbers than ever, and we look forward to talking to you in person. Have a profitable and enjoyable forum.

DT’s transformation programme, one of the largest in the communications industry, aims to manage digital assets across networks and devices with superior user experience. It will begin migration to NGNs with all IP and NG access (including radio), ADSL 2+, VDSL, and transport networks. NetCracker will provide the common data management and the complete fulfilment, operations support, and readiness for the NGN. eNodeB testing system for LTE planned by Aricent, Wintegra

Jeremy Cowan Editor, VanillaPlus

Aricent and Wintegra have announced plans to deliver a joint Long Term Evolution (LTE) eNodeB testing system. Integrating software and components from both companies, it is designed to accelerate the product development cycle of telecoms equipment manufacturers’ LTE infrastructure as carriers’ deployment windows draw near.

SUPPLEMENT CONTENTS S3

Welcome and News Briefing

S4

OSS News

S6

C-Level Interview with ConceptWave Software’s CTO

S9

Management World Conference Preview

S10

Exhibitors’ List & Floorplan

S12

Re-inventing real-time charging

S14

Preview: Policy Control Video Interview

EDITOR & PUBLISHER Jeremy Cowan Tel: +44 (0) 1420 588638 editorial@vanillaplus.com

DIGITAL SALES MANAGER Janna Willick janna@vanillaplus.com

DIGITAL EDITOR Nathalie Bisnar Tel: +44 (0) 1732 808690 nathalie@vanillaplus.com

EVENTS & OPERATIONS DIRECTOR Charlie Bisnar Tel: +44 (0) 1732 844017 charlie@vanillaplus.com

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR Cherisse Draper Tel: +44 (0) 1634 243869 cherisse@vanillaplus.com

Deutsche Telekom AG (DT) has chosen Massachusettsbased NetCracker Technology’s systems and services for its Next Generation Service and Systems Management (NGSSM) transformation, a core element of its enterprise-wide migration to next generation networks (NGNs). This is part of DT’s strategic initiative to drive standards-based rationalisation and automation of operations to enable significant cost savings, rapid introduction of innovative services, and improved customer experience.

DESIGN Jason Appleby Ark Design Consultancy Ltd Tel: +44 (0) 1787 881623 DISTRIBUTION UK Postings Ltd Tel: +44 (0) 8456 444137

VanillaPlus is distributed free to selected named individuals in Europe who meet the Publisher's terms of Circulation Control.

If you would like to apply for a regular free copy supplied at the Publisher's discretion visit www.vanillaplus.com If you do not qualify for a free subscription, paid subscriptions can be obtained by emailing your postal address and details to <subs@vanillaplus.com> Mark your email "Subscribe" in the Subject line. Subscriptions for 6 issues cost £99.00 worldwide (or US$195/EUR155) including post and packing. VanillaPlus magazine is published 6 times per year.

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© Prestige Media Ltd 2010

LTE software frameworks from Aricent will be integrated with Wintegra’s Layer 2 software and silicon to deliver a product capable of high performance testing of eNodeB platforms from leading telecom equipment vendors. This joint approach aims to help equipment manufacturers reduce testing complexity and shorten time to market for a variety of LTE eNodeB products including pico, micro and macrocell base stations.

Real’s messaging platform supports Syniverse’s global SMS offering Syniverse Technologies and RealNetworks, Inc. have agreed a nine-year alliance in which Real’s intercarrier short message service (SMS) platform will underpin Syniverse’s peer-to-peer (P2P) messaging interoperability systems. Real already provides the technology underlying Syniverse’s intercarrier SMS solution in the Americas, and will now supply the same platform for Syniverse’s global SMS Interworking Gateway, SMS Open Connectivity and SMS-IP solutions.

Under the agreement, Real supplies core message processing software and services while Syniverse implements, manages and maintains the SMS interoperability offerings that include next-generation reporting tools.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be copied, stored, published or in any way reproduced without the prior written consent of the Publisher

www.lhsgroup.com

MANAGEMENT WORLD SUPPLEMENT APRIL/MAY 2010

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IRIS® suite aims to give CSPs a better view of their bottom line cVidya Networks, a global provider of revenue intelligence systems for telecoms, media and entertainment service providers, has launched its Integrated Revenue Intelligence Solutions (IRIS®) suite. Following the acquisition of ECtel, cVidya is consolidating the product portfolios and now offers fraud management and margin analytics in addition to revenue assurance. cVidya’s IRIS® is designed to help operators maximise their margins, improve their customer experience and optimise eco-system relationships through revenue assurance, fraud and risk management, dealer management, margin analytics, and clearinghouse services. The end-to-end solution provides operators with a 360-degree view of their revenues, costs and margins.

The latest BSS & OSS News is found at: www.vanillaplus.com HP system for LTE networks links data across silos HP’s new Subscriber Data Management (SDM) system enables CSPs to integrate valuable customer data that is dispersed across an organisation in multiple repositories, including the Home Subscriber Server, location solutions, data services platforms, user device profiles, and operations and business support systems (OSS and BSS).

By creating a unified, in-depth view of each customer, HP SDM helps service providers assemble an integrated picture of their customers’ profiles. This capability is even more important as networks evolve from 3G to 4G and LTE. With faster networks and smarter devices, data traffic and service options are rapidly increasing. Mobile users are enjoying thousands of web-based applications, many of which are delivered by ‘over the top’ internet service providers and smartphone vendors.

S4

To help mobile operators entering the machine to machine (M2M) market, Comarch has designed a platform which contains the necessary BSS and OSS (business and operations support Piotr Piatosa, Comarch systems) features for operators to provide services for M2M partners. It includes a selfservice portal for M2M partners, provisioning of services, data mediation, rating of events, inventory, mass SIM card management, business process management and more. The integrated B2B Gateway exposes certain features of the platform and network directly to partners, allowing them to self-manage and provision their M2M subscriptions.

“It is estimated that the number of connectable machines is five times greater than the number of people who can be connected, the churn rate for M2M subscriptions is extremely low and

bandwidth requirements are minimal. In consequence, it seems that M2M is rapidly becoming an important market segment for mobile operators and can entail additional revenues,” says Piotr Piatosa, VP Telecommunications and Member of the Board at Comarch SA. Operators can supplement this platform to existing systems in the same way that they add MVNE platforms to support MVNOs. In addition, with this type of platform operators can enter the M2M market without the need for complex changes to existing systems, thus limiting the risk and increasing profitability.

The number of connectable machines is five times greater than the number of people who can be connected

Comarch also has the M2M Transaction Gateway in its product suite for companies that use M2M communications in their services for end customers.

For example, these types of enterprises can be electricity suppliers, logistics, insurance or retail companies. These businesses can use the M2M Transaction Gateway to perform control, rating and charging processes for their services, with flexible rulebased configuration to support the needs of individual business types.

DigitalRoute and Netezza team to deliver data warehouse systems to telco market Sweden’s DigitalRoute, a provider of embedded and standalone mediation and data integration software, has agreed with Netezza Corporation, a leading producer of data warehouse and analytic appliances, to integrate Netezza’s TwinFin data warehouse systems with DigitalRoute's MediationZone® product.

The Netezza® TwinFin™ appliance is designed to curb the rising costs and complexity of data warehousing and analytics, which it achieves through its patented software streaming architecture and a set of database accelerators integrated with blade servers.

DigitalRoute's MediationZone provides a single data acquisition layer, giving customers flexible data access and self-

MANAGEMENT WORLD SUPPLEMENT APRIL/MAY 2010

sufficiency. With MediationZone, service providers can consolidate all mediation requirements and provide flexible data integration and loading capabilities for efficient data management. It empowers service providers to rapidly address new demands with short turnaround times.

“In an increasingly competitive industry, it’s vital that communication providers are able to operate efficiently under the complexity and diversity of multi-vendor and multi-technology networks,” said John Gillespie, General Manager and Vice President of Telecommunications at Netezza. “Working with DigitalRoute creates a united offering to help telecommunications providers run their business at the highest levels of efficiency and performance.”

www.lhsgroup.com

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Jan Baan, Cordys: Google Apps was a logical choice

Cordys, a supplier of software for business process innovation, has added Cordys Process Factory™ and MashApps® to the Google Apps Marketplace™, Google's recently launched online storefront for Google Apps™ products and services.

Cordys Process Factory reportedly offers a simple, effective mechanism for anyone to create and deploy situational applications and MashApps, delivering business process management (BPM) capabilities to the Google Apps suite of communication and collaboration tools.

The Cordys MashApps are mashups of different services or web-based, processcentric applications for small and mediumsized enterprises and departmental deployments. The availability of Cordys Process Factory and MashApps through the Google Apps Marketplace reportedly allows 2 million Google Apps customers to

NEWS IN BRIEF

create and use applications and business processes on the fly, at low cost and without IT involvement.

“Cordys is committed to bridging the gap between on-premise enterprise software and the Cloud, so integrating with Google Apps was a logical choice for us," says Jan Baan, Cordys Founder and CEO. "By adding Cordys Process Factory and its online applications to the Google Apps Marketplace, we've made it possible for Google Apps customers to continuously improve their core business processes, orchestrating data from the Google messaging and collaboration platform with heterogeneous systems and processes within their enterprise.”

Cordys Process Factory claims its webbased applications – such as Asset Management, Employee Onboarding, Change Management and Expense Management – are easy to use. Users can also create their own applications with Cordys Process Factory, to integrate Gmail™, Google Docs™ and Google Spreadsheets™ with back office applications and business processes, or other online services.

IPv6 migration launched for carriers and ISPs A10 Networks™, a specialist in Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs), has launched IPv6 migration systems for carriers and internet service providers (ISPs) within its AX Series platforms: the Large Scale NAT (LSN) and Dual-Stack Lite (DS-Lite).

Demand for internet protocol (IP) addresses is rapidly increasing for carriers and ISPs with more IP-enabled devices pushing the existing available IPv4 address pool to exhaustion. The popularity of applications on smartphones and other mobile devices has exacerbated this problem.

As a solution, the progressive introduction and transition to IPv6 in network and service infrastructures shows a need for both IPv4 and IPv6 networks to coexist.

The industry is currently focusing on

“A10 is working with several of the world’s largest carriers and ISPs with Large Scale NAT and DS-Lite solutions within the AX Series appliances. Our DS-Lite and LSN solutions leverage A10’s revolutionary Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS) to deliver unparalleled performance and scalability,” said Lee Chen, Founder and CEO of A10 Networks.

“IPv6 migration technology is a strategic focus area for A10 with significant growth potential. The co-existence of IPv4 and IPv6 is very likely to last several years, if not decades. A10 continues to expand the AX Series solutions for carriers and ISPs to become the technology leader in this early stage market,” Chen told VanillaPlus.

www.lhsgroup.com

New Jersey-based Expand Networks, which optimises wide area networks (WANs) for branch office consolidation and virtualisation, says its advanced WAN optimisation systems have been validated by Inmarsat, the world's leading provider of global mobile satellite communications services.

Building on a successful relationship as an Inmarsat Connect Partner, this technology validation means Inmarsat’s global network of distribution partners can now enhance their offerings by delivering and managing ‘virtual’ capacity as part of their service, assuring the user experience for customers worldwide.

Expand’s approach enables service providers to pass on increased quality of service and control, higher bandwidth throughput, reduced latency, and seamless delivery of business critical applications to customers via WAN Optimization-as-a-Service.

Sigma Systems, Cedar Point partner to deliver carrier-class VoIP for next gen operators

DS-Lite LSN capable devices to address the IPv6 migration issue.

The latest BSS & OSS News is at www.vanillaplus.com

Expand Networks optimises global satellite services with Inmarsat

Sigma Systems, an advanced IP service fulfilment systems specialist, and Cedar Point Communications, a worldwide leader in integrated Voice over IP (VoIP) switching technologies for service providers, have partnered to provide next generation operators with an integrated VoIP solution for faster commercial and residential deployments.

Sigma Systems’ portfolio of fulfilment solutions has demonstrated interoperability with Cedar Point's SAFARI C3 Multimedia Switching System in a live, residential VoIP service offering with an unnamed cable operator. Sigma Systems and Cedar Point will be working together to provide tight integration in a complete, end-to-end commercial voice solution for the same cable operator.

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Ivan Chochlekov - CTO, VP Product Development and Co-Founder Dr Chochlekov is a proven authority in Systems Architecture, and directs developments at ConceptWave Software, Inc. His roles have included work on industry standards and time spent with UNITEL, Nortel Networks, and Architel. Dr Chochlekov holds a Masters degree in Science and a PhD in Software Development.

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Whether surfing the ’net over Wi-Fi, chatting on a mobile, or watching IPTV, we are becoming increasingly dependent on new services. While they may be fun for the end user, delivering new services quickly and profitably is still a growing challenge for communication service providers (CSPs) who face aggressive competitors, demanding customers, siloed services and worries over the return on investment (RoI) of their chosen solutions. Here, VanillaPlus talks to Dr Ivan Chochlekov, CTO of Canada-based ConceptWave Software Inc, about the answers for CSPs caught in a flat-rate world amid spiralling service costs.

Consolidated view offers hope for CSPs amid service frenzy, says ConceptWave’s CTO “The majority of BSS and OSS systems were built with concrete services in mind.”

VanillaPlus: CSPs are bringing together their voice and data infrastructures for greater efficiency, to improve the customer experience and the bottom line. But what challenges are being created for their business and operations support systems (BSS & OSS)?

The other part of the challenge is that the CSPs have to deliver new services and some of these are completely unsupported by the existing (OSS and BSS) systems.

How is ConceptWave aiming to help operators transform their business

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ConceptWave’s software can be completely configured.

We don’t have a fixed model that we follow, the software is built so that we can configure any new services

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Dr Ivan Chochlekov: New services are appearing very fast and they have new features and requirements that were not mandatory in the old services, or the systems that supported them. So there is a need to maintain BSS in a way that they can support not just the services that we have today but the services we will see tomorrow. The majority of BSS and OSS systems were not built this way, they were built with concrete services in mind and with concrete pictures of concrete provisioning processes. But they don’t easily accommodate new services with completely new features and new provisioning procedures.

delivery? And how does this differ from your competitors?

or products. This way, we are flexible and can handle with minimal effort the creation of completely new services, or provisioning and ordering of new services. This is not the classic approach, in which you build software with certain types of service in mind. Our approach has always been that eventually we will encounter a situation when we don’t know what the future service is. We have to configure our software to allow us to support these new types of service.

There’s fierce competition out there. Coupled with today’s economic environment, it has changed the way that CSPs do business. There is a transformation in being able to turn around product offers in a multi-plane environment, where it’s about turning up and turning on services and product offers not within months but literally within days, or even hours. One of our customers used our software for precisely that reason, because the fact is that – even after a product bundle is put out on the market – in the CSP environment today (particularly in wireless) you’re going to get competitors who come up with another offer within days if not hours.

From Day One this was the main concept of our software, that it should be flexible, and able on the back end to order or orchestrate the service. The marketing departments of our CSPs are very competent at launching new products and services, but then on the operations side they can execute the complete offer.

What are the advantages of a unified product and service catalogue?

Service providers are saying there are services they would like to change, enhance, evolve. If they can do that in a descriptive way (if they have a way to define the service that they want to sell) without thinking too much about what is needed in order to do that, that will be a great advantage for the speed and the quality of the service.

So our idea was, if we build a catalogue which we give to the marketing department, and then we provide powerful mechanisms by which this definition of the services is linked to the provisioning processes this will allow CSPs to considerably reduce the time needed to introduce new services. Secondly, it will allow them to create more and more rich services without the need to re-work the OSS and BSS systems. So that’s one of the

biggest advantages of our approach, by putting the services catalogue at the heart of the system we can both increase the quality of the services and reduce significantly the time needed to implement them.

How much it reduces the time by depends on the type of services and the systems that the customer has in operation, but we are speaking about between 30% faster time to market and up to five or six times faster. Once you define what your service is then it should be extremely quick to attach the necessary business processes for provisioning systems, and attaching the corresponding network elements should be a simple and straight-forward job. The major effort will be to define what you want to sell, not how you provision this.

That’s quite a change for operators. Are they ready for that?

As with any new approach it takes some time to be accepted. But the benefit is there in reducing time to market. The ability to create a bundle and almost instantaneously know that the new bundle can be order fulfilled doesn’t exist today.

Typically, the organisations are separated; marketing and operations. And secondly, there’s no application on the market doing that, either focusing on the product catalogue side or giving you the ability flexibly to compose the product.

It’s not linked to order orchestration and then you’ve got order orchestration or management systems that are not linked to product catalogues.

A few years ago the industry was full of talk – especially among Tier 1s – of massive back office transformation programmes. Has this changed simply for budgetary reasons?

Budget is one of the major factors. But in the last few years there appears to have been a discrepancy between the speed with which new services can be introduced and the speed at which they are requested by customers.

The other factor is human resource. Systems have to work well with one another. Oftentimes you walk into an environment at a CSP where systems are home-grown, some are silo-based within the department, across departments the systems aren’t linked together. We come in and our software has to work across it, and has many of these touchpoints across the organisation. So, it comes down also to acceptance of the product and training, for example of the CSR (customer service representative).

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We’ve been able to demonstrate to our customers some huge reductions in training time and therefore labour as well as cost. When I say huge I

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mean from months down to days and that obviously has an RoI component to it as well which we’ve been able to measure.

At one of our cable customers, it took them on average about 6 weeks to train their CSRs. Now, factor in that on a yearly basis they would have about 50% staff turnover as CSRs come and go.

The cost of that is substantial. We were able to bring that training down to 5-7 business days.

The software has to fully implement the requirements of the software users. Not like in many cases, where the users have to adjust themselves to the software. We’ve provided an integrated view of the whole system which the CSRs can work with. So, they don’t need to learn and manipulate different systems, they have one universal workstation where they can do everything they want without being concerned about the systems behind it.

You’ve said in the past that there’s an opportunity for smaller, more discrete and focused initiatives. Can these address the full scale of CSPs’ back office problems?

Our approach is a consolidated view, we’re not just talking about the marketing or the service side. By having one consolidated view ConceptWave has a huge advantage right down to the CSR level where they can look at what the offer is to the customer and provide better customer service. So, advantage number 2 is an increase in customer service. Basically, the CSR no longer becomes an ‘order taker’ or troubleshooter, they get more concentrated on up-sell or cross-sell opportunities.

The third advantage is rapid changes. Having a catalogue that’s centralised in terms of the view, you can make changes quickly and effectively – dare I say, even once the product bundle is delivered changes can be made due to competing market pressures.

"CSRs are able to concentrate on upsell and cross-sell opportunities (and providing a better subscriber

The other thing that we’ve found concerns revenue leakage. When systems don’t have this consolidated view, you may find pockets in different parts of the organisation, particularly on the operations side, where there’s a repetition of tasks, data entry, and basically the workflow is just not smooth; there’s a lot of inefficiency.

We’ve been able to go in and correct that by an end-to-end customer experience management (CEM) approach.

experience) instead of order trouble-shooting."

Getting to your question, I don’t think smaller, more discrete focus initiatives can address the full scale (of challenges). No. But you have to have systems such as ConceptWave’s where the systems are small, agile, but they have a complete end-to-end view of the product.

Are there any other features that CSPs should look for in a service fulfilment system?

Yes, if there is an easy way to customise their

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repository of services then it allows them to be competitive, to provision services quickly. But only having a repository of definitions of these services is not enough. These repositories have to connect with many other systems and then there are important aspects like how they communicate, and the standards used. All new products have to adopt the standards established in the last several years and that’s what our products do, following the standards of the service oriented architecture (SOA) so they can communicate easily with other systems from a different source.

We have customers that have millions of orders a month and these put huge stress on the systems which process these orders. The stability and the performance of the new systems become very important. And there are many different channels by which the services can be sold. On the other hand the systems that support these services should not be multiplied to support these channels.

We have to have a way to define these services once, and provision them through different channels without the need to develop separate silos for each channel. This way the integrity of the service is maintained; it’s defined in one place, it can be verified in one place, and then the channels are merely different business processes or user interfaces.

One more important part of our approach is that all systems and processes we’re speaking about are de facto workflows. So it’s important to have not only a catalogue but a catalogue which is able to support and define business processes.

And these business processes are two-track, one is the business process that maintains the information of the catalogue itself, and the other business processes are those needed to negotiate, sell and provision services.

All these business processes, and the ability to define them, to customise them, should be an integral part of the catalogue.

Can you give any other examples of how network operators have benefited from this approach?

In one multi-play service provider offering wireless broadband services content, on the first day of production we dropped the error rate from 40% to 0%. The cost saving of that was US$25 million over three months. The second point is that we implemented a single point of application for this provider, in a way that aided selling. So that when the order is being taken (based on the eligibility of the package) it recommends to the customer a bundle and accessories. Over the same three months the increased upsell was 125%. This is a fairly sizeable provider with 1.6 million subscribers.

With this set of capabilities, the providers that we are now entertaining in the 5 – 15 million subscriber range are making savings and increasing revenue to a much larger extent.

MANAGEMENT WORLD, NICE PREVIEW The 15 Catalyst demonstrations are divided in six themed areas: 1. Cloud Services - Enabling the business of Cloud Services.

Catalyst Projects: “Cloud Encounter” – 4 Integrated Projects addressing Cloud management scenarios Cloud Service Broker; Inter-Cloud Service Management; Service Model; IPsphere: Bringing Quality to the Cloud

Topical conference with real world links

2. Revenue Management and mCommerce - Addressing revenue management challenges and new business models in a complex and changing market

Now in its 11th year, TM Forum’s Management World 2010 (Nice, France, May 18-20) is established as one of the communications industry’s ‘must see’ conferences. It attracts more than 3,000 attendees, with over 50% of delegates holding senior management positions.

Offering a blend of thought-leadership, real world case studies and interactive panel debates, the event will help companies focus on growing revenue through new business models, increasing operational efficiency and cutting costs, while addressing the challenges of revenue assurance, customer experience and retention.

Management World 2010 will bring together key players to tackle tough issues, across six conference summits: New Content & Innovative Services; Cloud Services; Successful Business Transformation; Driving Operational Excellence; Revenue Management & Profitability; and Excellent Customer Experience.

Keynote speakers Liu Aili, Executive Vice President and Board Member, China Mobile, and Sally Davis, CEO, BT Wholesale will be joined by panellists from across the communications, cloud, enterprise and media industries to discuss critical business strategies, challenges and tactics for the coming decade. Others in the keynote lineup include; • Dr Steffen Roehn, CIO, Deutsche Telekom AG • Akil Beshir, Chairman, Telecom Egypt • Jan Vorstermans, Executive Vice President Technology & Solutions, Telenet • Nick Ogden, CEO, Voice Commerce (formerly CEO, World Pay, Royal Bank of Scotland) • Thomas Capka, COO, A1 Bank • Emily Nagle Green, President & CEO, Yankee Group • Thierry Zylberberg, Executive VP Strategic Partnerships, France Telecom • Gerd Leonhard, Media, Technology & Communications Futurist • Giovanni Chiarelli, CIO, Telecom Italia • Mehrdad Mansourpour, Managing Director & CIO, UPC Broadband • Iain Morris, Editor, Technology Briefing Telecommunications & IT, Economist Intelligence Unit

In Forumville, Management World will showcase themed zones reflecting hot topics in the industry. Each of these zones maps to a conference track as well, enabling visitors to link what they learn in the conference and what they experience in the real world as demonstrated in Forumville.

Within each zone, visitors will be able to experience a range of TM Forum programmes and see its multi-member Catalyst Demonstration Projects, where hype meets reality!

A record 15 multi-company Catalyst Demonstrations are taking place this year. In all, 20 service providers and over 40 vendors are joining forces to show TM Forum-based solutions for timely management and IT challenges including managing cloud, customer experience, analytics, mCommerce, and delivering digital services.

Service provider demos Service providers participating in these projects are from around the world and include BT, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, Swisscom, Qwest, Telstra, China Telecom, China Unicom, ZAIN and a host of others.

Vendors include some of the biggest names such as Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, Ericsson, Huawei, and Amdocs.

Each Catalyst is a multi-company team of suppliers and service providers that is addressing requirements defined by the service providers who play the role of project champions. The service providers drive the Catalyst topics, and as a result provide an important view in to what their high priority management challenges are.

Catalyst projects typically run for 3-6 months, enabling service providers to have possible solutions to their requirements in a much shorter time than a standard RFx and lab testing process.

www.lhsgroup.com

Catalyst Projects: Revenue Assurance Coverage Model; Developing a Scalable mCommerce Model 3. Customer Experience and Business Intelligence Proactively managing customers and revenue to increase satisfaction and the bottom line Catalyst Projects: Standardising Customer Experience Management; Decision Analytics 4. Digital Media - Profiting from Digital Media Services and New Business Models Catalyst Projects: Dynamic Content Delivery 5. Technology and Operations Driving Operational and IT Excellence Catalyst Projects: Driving the Costs out of IPTV; Enterprise Identity Management; Next Generation Data Migration; COMPASS - Catalogue Data Driven Order Automation; Effective Sell of Advanced Network Services and Solutions 6. Defence - Applying TM Forum Best Practices and Standards to meet Defence Needs Catalyst Project: Defence Catalyst: Rapid Communications Deployment

For details on Management World visit: www.tmforum.org/mw2010

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EXHIBITORSâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;

Company

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Stand Location

2operate ApS 50 Accanto Systems 39 Agilent Technologies 28 Aktavara AB 19 Alcatel-Lucent 70 Amdocs Management Ltd 1 Amdocs Management Ltd Forumville Aran Technologies Ltd 26 Aria Networks/ www.aria-networks.com 10 Aricent Ascom Deutschland GmbH, Systems & Solutions 5 Aviat Networks Forumville Axiros GmbH Forumville Bouygues Telecom Forumville BroadHop, Inc 64 BT Group plc Forumville Bull Telecom & Media Forumville CA 53 CACI Ltd 68 Casewise 65 CellVision 51 Celona Technologies Ltd CHR Solutions 15 Cisco Systems Forumville Clarity International Ltd 2

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Company

Stand Location

Comarch S.A. 57 Comptel 21 Comptel Forumville Compuware Corporation EAS ConceptWave Software EAS Connectiva Systems 60 Connectiva Systems Forumville Convergys Cordys 66 Croatian Telecom - HT Forumville cVidya Networks, Inc 34 Datanomic Ltd EAS Dataupia Forumville DAX Technologies Forumville Defence Science & Technology Laboratory Forumville Deutsche Telekom AG Forumville Dimetis GmbH 52 Distributed Management Task Force, Inc Forumville Dorado Software 18 EMC 45 Empirix Inc Ericsson Truck / Forumville EXFO (Service Assurance) 73 Fenavic Ltd 67 GDI Systems Inc Forumville

www.lhsgroup.com

EXHIBITORSâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;

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GE Energy generationE Technologies GlobeTOM Hewlett-Packard Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd IBM Corporation iisy AG Infonova Infonova Infosim GmbH & Co. KG InfoVista INTEC Telecom Systems International Turnkey Systems JDSU Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab Juniper Networks, Inc Level 3 LogNet Systems Matrixx Software MetraTech Corp.

Microsoft Corporation Microsoft Corporation Mycom International Inc Nakina Systems Net Evidence (SLM) Ltd

13 48 24 36 44 29 Forumville 33 11 3 EAS 38 Forumville Forumville Forumville Forumville 54 EAS 75 Forumville 42 49 25 EAS

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NetCracker Technology Netezza Corporation Netformx, Inc. NetScout Systems Nexus Telecom AG Nokia Siemens Networks Nokia Siemens Networks N-Pulse AG Objective Systems Integrators Ontology Systems Openet OpenNMS project Oracle Corporation Outbox Sp z.o.o.

Parallels Progress Software Progress Software Quantellia Qwest Communications International, Inc RAO Infosystems Red Zinc Salesforce.com ServicePilot Technologies Siemens AG Square Hoop Limited Sterling Commerce Subex Subex Swisscom AG Tail-f Systems Tata Consultancy Services Tech Mahindra Tekelec Tektronix Communications Telcordia Technologies Telenor ASA Telstra Corporation TELUS Tieto Tribold Tribold TTI Telecom TTI Telecom Verecloud Versant Corporation Vertica Systems, Inc Vodafone D2 VOIPFUTURE Volubill WATCH4NET SOLUTIONS, Inc WeDo Technologies XTRAC, LLC Zain ZTE Corporation

www.lhsgroup.com

B Forumville EAS 31 23 32 Forumville Forumville 12 EAS 4 Forumville A 56 35 Forumville 61 Forumville Forumville Forumville Forumville EAS 20 58 Forumville Forumville Forumville Forumville Forumville 62 30 14 26 40 Forumville Forumville Forumville EAS 7 Forumville Forumville 41 Forumville 69 17 Forumville 6 63 43 46 EAS Forumville 59

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EXPERT OPINION:

Re-inventing real-time charging Service providers need to fill the profitability gap that is growing between the explosion in mobile data traffic and the tariffs they charge. Nothing less than a re-invention of the charging and policy management system is needed, says Dave Labuda, CEO of MATRIXX Software.

The author is Dave Labuda, CEO of MATRIXX Software

Service providers are experiencing a widening gap between explosive mobile data traffic growth and a small increase in revenue. To fill that gap, service providers are faced with how to more effectively monetise data, content and applications. Real-time charging and policy seem to be the key, but the economics of deploying real-time systems are in question. A clearer picture of the Cost Per Transaction (CPT) of delivering mobile data services would alleviate many of the challenges associated with the current influx of mobile data. But existing charging and policy engines do not enable this analysis.

If service providers better understood CPT, they could focus on lowering it so that services move from the red back into the black. So, how do they break out of the one-size-fits-all tariffing structure of recent years and build a profitable real-time financial relationship with their subscribers?

It seems foolish to be talking about how a service is monetised. The very idea that a new service is about to be launched and yet is not, somehow, going to be properly monetised is a worrying thought. Is monetisation an oxymoron? Doesn’t it follow that there’s no point in launching a service if it cannot be monetised?

Yet, this is how the industry has approached seeking profitable revenue generation in a difficult market. But why is the market difficult?

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Zero price tag Gartner says that of the 4.5 billion applications downloaded during 2010, 80% will have a zero price tag. All the subscribers will pay for is the data tariff linked to their service bundle, which is likely to be flat-rate. The growth in app usage is one reason why service providers are facing strain on their business model. By 2013, Gartner concludes there will be a whopping 21.6 billion app downloads, and yet by then, 87% of them will be free. The meaning of this statistic for service providers is clear: find a new way to handle the huge tidal wave of data traffic, and monetise it.

That’s not to say there’s no revenue to be generated in the mobile data traffic market.

Informa puts this figure currently at US$208 billion worldwide, rising to $330 billion in the next three years. That’s a lot of revenue, but there are two factors that dilute the amount that falls to the bottom line; the cost of delivering the service and the fee that can be charged in return. The two are diverging at an alarming rate.

Ovum predicts there will be over 2 billion mobile broadband users by 2014, a growth rate of about 50% per year from the 475 million mobile broadband users today. Alongside this, there is the growing amount of traffic they produce, with some service providers reporting an annual doubling of traffic volumes. With more subscribers using their mobile device to

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“Find a new way to handle the tidal wave of data traffic and monetise it”

Put simply, a very noticeable profitability gap has opened up between the steep growth in mobile data traffic and the relatively low incremental revenue that service providers can charge for the data influx. It’s a business model that is being stretched as far as it can go, and one day soon it will break.

While the astounding growth in data traffic shows there is demand for compelling, interactive mobile multimedia applications, today there isn’t a predictable and profitable tariffing structure behind it – or even a way to accurately discover what the operational overhead is to deliver each transaction for each service.

conduct micropayments, act as a conduit for widgets that constantly monitor and report on information changes, and for chat, video sharing and email, it’s no wonder that traffic levels are building up in the network.

So, how long before the flat rate tariff model collapses? And when it does, how will service providers make money from the relentless ‘more for less’ consumption of services followed by little growth in revenue?

A three-point plan I’d suggest a three-point recovery plan, and I predict that there will be a new metric as widely talked about in the future as ARPU: Cost Per Transaction (CPT). If service providers could find a method for reliably discovering the CPT per service, they would know in advance if a new service could be profitably launched, or how to tweak an existing service to keep it within profitable margins.

Until today, there has been no way to do this, based on the old batch-processing method of rating and charging for services. Indeed, it’s a lack of dynamism in the very notion of ‘batch’ processing that has left service providers wrong-footed as they sweated their old billing, rating and charging assets well beyond their natural lifespan.

Understand your CPT The first point of my recovery plan is for service providers to move towards sustainable, new real-time rating and charging functionality that helps them instantly understand what it costs to service each subscriber transaction. Armed with an accurate CPT for each service, they can then focus on making more profitable new services, rescuing unprofitable services, or replacing them with new ones based on stronger, predictably profitable business models. They can even offer real-time upselling such as a special discount on buying a whole album based on the two tracks a subscriber just downloaded. Knowing in advance the exact CPT and margin of every usage event takes the guesswork out of the equation and unleashes the business.

Closer subscriber relationships Once strong business models are developed, the next job is to exploit real-time as a platform to generate a closer financial relationship with subscribers. A large part of why the data revenue needle is stuck on ‘almost empty’ is

because subscribers are resistant to paying for something they don’t understand – like bits and bytes. This culminates in ‘bill shock’ as subscribers find they’ve been charged a lot for service overages they knew nothing about until they got their statement.

To resolve this, it's important to have the charging platform interact with the policy management system and trigger real-time alerts that let the subscriber know when they’ve reached pre-defined spending limits, and have them understand their spending at the moment they pass one of these thresholds.

“By 2013 there will be a whopping 21.6 billion app downloads, yet 87% of them will be free.”

-- Data source: Gartner

At MATRIXX, we believe that subscribers will pay more for services they actually enjoy using in an environment where their relationship with the service provider is much closer, because the service provider can offer special, personalised discounts and services based on historical usage. We also believe that subscribers will spend more money if they’re able to set their own personalised limits for each service, and manage those metrics online for themselves, their family or business.

Hammer down operational costs The final stage of my plan is to drive down the operational costs of delivering these services by making the real-time charging layer drastically more efficient. Today’s real-time rating and charging systems require significantly more hardware and operational infrastructure than equivalent batch solutions.

This creates an economic hurdle against operators moving to a full real-time charging environment and realising the benefits mentioned above.

As mobile data usage continues to explode, what operators really need is a real-time charging solution that can process tens of thousands of transactions per second on a minimal set of off-the-shelf hardware. This type of solution will not only drive down CPT, enabling operators to embrace the explosion of new services and usage, but it also drastically reduces data centre costs, power consumption and carbon footprint.

Armed with highly efficient online charging and predictably low CPT, service providers will finally break out of the one-size-fits-all tariffing structure and build a profitable real-time financial relationship with all of their subscribers.

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PREVIEW: POLICY CONTROL VIDEO INTERVIEW

Video Coming Soon to www.vanillaplus.com

Real-time charging and dynamic policy control as a key enabler Due to today’s telecom markets experiencing fundamental changes, the need for sustainable growth will not in future be met by more subscribers, but by increased connections. Data services and multimedia content will be the growth drivers in saturated markets. In the meantime, it is also important to focus on new customers and business areas. Real-time charging and policy control can create new opportunities – the market is expected to be US$5 billion in 2012. Borders will fall – internet usage for TV and vice versa will increase market share. Ten years after the first cameraphone, 4G speeds have arrived and smartphones are the fastest growing category of handsets.

Rising traffic – falling revenues A video interview on this subject with Ramez Younan, the newly appointed CEO at Orga Systems, will be posted shortly on www.vanillaplus .com

“Operators need to prioritise access to deal with data volume.”

Mobile data traffic is growing fast but revenues are lagging behind the cost that operators face in providing it. Operators have recently reported increases in data usage from an average of 5-6 Gbps in 2008 to 24 Gbps in 2009, a fourfold increase in just one year.

To generate sustainable revenues from data services, providers are now seeking ways of supporting subscriber management along with real-time policy and charging control. They have to create interfaces to the network elements responsible for collecting and aggregating usage information, for related charging and billing processes.

Why the world cannot be flat Flat-rate offerings will not be an efficient business strategy. The global mobile phone industry has been extremely successful in the past decade, with average year-on-year subscriber growth of 24%. Despite a contraction in the mobile handset market in 2009, smartphone shipments still grew by 15%. Due to the smartphones’ greater market share and an increase in application focus by handset manufacturers, mobile network operators (MNOs) are predicted to grow their yearly app revenues from US$1.94 billion (2009) to US$15.65 billion (2015).

The application market's growth is driven both by the rising number of smartphones in use, and an increasingly connected global subscriber base.

This trend will continue, seeing global smartphone users numbering 970 million by the end of 2013.

Customer satisfaction and service differentiation User interaction and real-time charging will be the way ahead. Convergent real-time billing platforms, charging and billing applications and dynamic policy management are needed. They allow for customers’ flexibility and minimise internal operating costs while improving customer satisfaction. Operators need to prioritise access to deal with data volume: customer network service differentiation is the best way ahead rather than flat-rate pricing.

To learn why successful convergent billing systems will need to handle far more subscribers within one system (100 million, says Orga Systems), and why they will have to cope with smart metering and new industries stepping into the market, watch the video interview with Ramez Younan coming soon on www.vanillaplus.com

Ramez Younan was appointed CEO at Orga Systems in January 2010. He holds three degrees; in Engineering, Management and Business Administration and has more than 20 years experience in the software and services industries. As a former senior executive of Oracle Corporation, he was a key player in developing Oracle's telecommunication strategy as well as mergers and acquisitions.

Ramez has run global organisations advancing BSS and OSS solutions at service providers in over 45 countries worldwide.

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VanillaPlus Video Talking Heads Reach a global audience with your interview streamed from www.vanillaplus.com

For more information contact: janna@vanillaplus.com Tel: +44 (0) 1732 252500