VanillaPlus Magazine June - July 2015 by Prestige Media

June / July 2015 Volume 17 Issue 3 ISSN 1745-1736

BILL & CHARGE

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ANALYST REPORT Stratecast | Frost & Sullivan says the siloed billing era is ending

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TALKING HEADS Joe Hogan warns that CSPs can’t save their way to greatness

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REAL-TIME CHARGING Why the BSS happy hour can last a little longer

Are CSPs ready for an on-demand, real-time world?

PLUS: Comverse buys Acision for digital services expertise ■ Ericsson adds CENX service orchestration product to managed services offering ■ European CSPs could realise €39 billion by re-imagining the network, says Arthur D. Little ■ NetCracker 10 launched to help redeﬁne network economics ■ Gabon Telecom modernises wholesale billing with CSG International ■ Redknee wins EcoMobile SaaS converged billing deal ■ Sigma Systems takes new venture capital investor ■ Read the latest news, opinion, blogs and features now at www.vanillaplus.com

Make it Personal! Empower your customers to personalize their experience while ďŽŽƐƟŶŐ ǇŽƵƌ ƌĞǀĞŶƵĞƐ ǁŝƚŚ ƚŚĞ sĞƌŝƐΡ ^^ ƐƵŝƚĞ ĨƌŽŵ ƐŝĂ/ŶĨŽ͘

from www.asiainfo.com

C O N T E N T S

IN THIS ISSUE Joe Hogan warns that CSPs can’t save their way to greatness

Are CSPs ready for an on-demand, real-time world?

4 EDITOR’S COLUMN George Malim wonders if going large just means CSPs will get bloated with more of the same problems 5 MARKET NEWS Comverse to acquire Acision, Openet and NTT-AT collaborate on production-ready BSS using NFV 6 INDUSTRY NEWS Ericsson adds CENX service orchestration to managed services offering, Sigma Systems takes new private equity investment 7 PRODUCT NEWS Ericsson launches Adaptive Inventory 9.3, NetCracker 10 targets redefinition of network economics 9 CONTRACT NEWS Gabon Telecom modernises wholesale billing with CSG International, LG Uplus chooses Syniverse for LTE roaming

REAL-TIME CHARGING

10 HOT LIST The latest vendor deals listed 11 PEOPLE NEWS Who’s on the move

37 DIGITAL SERVICES

13 WHAT’S ON VANILLAPLUS.COM The pick of this month’s online content plus new VanillaPlus Editorial Advisory Board announcements 15 VANILLAPLUS BILL & CHARGE INSIGHT Our VanillaPlus Bill & Charge Insight report contains 24 pages exploring how the twin disciplines of billing and charging are breaking out of their traditional siloed approaches to enable greater flexibility. The Insight contains a VanillaPlus-commissioned report from analyst firm Stratecast | Frost & Sullivan and includes features and interviews to help you gain a greater understanding of the challenges facing billing and charging as telecoms moves to an on-demand, real-time world

41 THE ROAD TO TELCO CLOUD SUPPLEMENT Ten pages covering the likely journeys CSPs will make as they migrate to telco cloud architectures start here

EXPERT OPINION

42 INTERVIEW Charlie Thomas, the chief executive of Razorsight, says CSPs’ opportunity to participate in the cloud era will vanish if they fail to make use of their data 45 TELCO CLOUD Nick Booth sees the cloud as a means to liberate telecoms from long-term planned IT 48 EXPERT OPINION Pablo Martinez goes in search of dynamic value constellations 50 VIRTUALISATION George Malim explores how virtualisation is a step on the road to telco cloud CLOCKING OFF!

53 VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I JUNE / JULY 2015

52 DIARY Where to go and who to see 53 CLOCKING OFF! Nick Booth reckons the cloud could make us all less pretentious

C O M M E N T

Going large for more of the same could lead to a bloated, lethargic telecoms industry Several times in the last month I’ve heard industry insiders emphasise the need for telecoms-related companies to gain scale. The comments come both from the vendor side and from the communications service providers (CSPs) and, while each faces different pressures, there are similarities

n the CSP side it’s clear that scaling up is being seen as the way to generate cost savings through increased purchasing power and developing products and services for a larger market. Ultimately, that will give CSPs even bigger big data that they’re still working out how to monetise. However, as – at best – an amateur economist, I struggle with the concept of how investing in more of the same results in a better position. Admittedly, there is value in becoming a complete service provider encompassing mobile, fixed and entertainment and we’re seeing a raft of CSPs

make moves to accomplish a complete portfolio – as witnessed by cable companies buying mobile operators and vice-versa and CSPs such as British Telecom buying sports broadcasting rights as well as a mobile operator. However, the market consolidation moves seem to make less sense. If you’re AT&T and bemoaning dwindling margins in your core business, how does investing heavily in the same sort of assets in Mexico represent an optimum use of capital? Isn’t that just investing in more of the same in a margin-constrained business that faces substantial challenges? Scale for the sake of scale simply doesn’t work – there needs to be a reason beyond the notion of potential cost saving synergies. I don’t believe a massive CSP group will be able to achieve those across 30 different operating companies and numerous campaigns, services and propositions. Maybe virtualisation and telco cloud present opportunities to reset the cost base of CSPs, but the benefits seem as

appealing to a smaller CSP as a large one, there’s just an order of magnitude to consider. The vendor sector in the O/BSS market is also chasing scale. The last year has seen smaller BSS George Malim, companies Volubill and editor, VanillaPlus Orga Systems acquired from distressed positions by CSG International and Redknee respectively (the full story of the Orga Systems acquisition by Redknee is live at www.vanillaplus.com now). That suggests smaller vendors have less of a role to play as their customers focus on becoming bigger and want to deal with companies that have the scale to cope with their large and tangled operating units – and can handle their demands for financing, managed services and cost reductions. My fear is that in this march towards supersized CSPs and vendors, some things will be lost. Agility, innovation and non-standard approaches to unusual problems seem to be most under threat from investment in more of the same. Enjoy the magazine! George Malim

EDITORIAL ADVISORS

Louis Hall, chief executive, Cerillion Technologies

EDITOR George Malim Tel: +44 (0) 1225 319 566 george@vanillaplus.com EDITORIAL DIRECTOR & PUBLISHER Jeremy Cowan Tel: +44 (0) 1420 588638 jc@m2mnow.biz

David Heaps, senior vice president, Strategy, CSG International

Martin Morgan, vice president of Marketing, Openet

DIGITAL SERVICES DIRECTOR Nathalie Bisnar Tel: +44 (0) 1732 808690 n.bisnar@m2mnow.biz BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR Cherisse Jameson Tel: +44 (0) 1732 807410 c.jameson@m2mnow.biz

Simon Muderack, senior vice president for Marketing and Alliances, Sigma Systems

DIRECTOR OF STRATEGIC PLANNING Charlie Bisnar Tel: +44 (0) 1732 807411 charlie@wkm-global.com DESIGN Jason Appleby Ark Design Consultancy Ltd Tel: +44 (0) 1787 881623

Justin Paul, head of OSS Marketing, Amdocs

Dr Reinhard Zuba, CMO, Vipnet (Telekom Austria)

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Chris Yeadon, director of Product Marketing, Ericsson

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I JUNE / JULY 2015

M A R K E T

N E W S

Comverse to acquire Acision to strengthen digital services capability Comverse has agreed to acquire Acision, a privately-held provider of secure mobile messaging and engagement services, based in Reading, United Kingdom. The move follows the sale of Comverse’s BSS assets to Amdocs earlier this year for US$272m. Comverse will acquire Acision for a purchase price consisting of approximately US$135 million in cash, 3.13 million shares of Comverse’s common stock, and potential earnout payments of up to US$35 million. In addition, Comverse will seek to maintain Acision’s existing US$157 million senior credit facility following completion of the transaction. The Boards of Directors of Comverse and Acision have approved the transaction, which, subject to satisfying closing conditions, is expected to be complete by the end of the third quarter of this year. Following completion of the transaction, the new company will be led by a team comprised of executives from both organisations under the leadership of Comverse president and chief executive Philippe Tartavull. The company will remain headquartered in Wakefield, Massachusetts, USA. Comverse helps communication service

providers (CSPs) transition to digital service providers (DSPs) and gain competitive advantage through a portfolio of solutions that help them monetise the coming fourth wave of digital services. The combined company’s expanded portfolio will extend into new digital application areas including data analytics, secure enterprise application-to-person (A2P) messaging, credit orchestration, two-factor authentication, and machine-to-machine (M2M) communication sas well as Rich Communication Services (RCS), WebRTC and APIs for rapid service creation.

quickly building scale and market leadership in the fast-growing digital services sector. This acquisition creates a formidable platform for innovation that is expected to serve our customers’ current and evolving needs. Acision brings a diverse portfolio of mobile monetisation and rich enterprise messaging solutions complementing Comverse’s digital services platform. The combined portfolio will allow us to enable our service provider and enterprise customers to deliver and monetise a new array of advanced digital services to their customers.”

“Continued consolidation in the CSP space creates the need for strong suppliers,” said Tartavull. “Our acquisition of Acision underscores Comverse’s commitment to

Didier Bench, the executive chairman at Acision, added: “The acquisition is in line with our growth strategy to broaden our reach and capabilities, and brings two leading companies together to deliver the very latest monetisable, rich communication services for mobile operators and enterprises worldwide. The two companies are well aligned in their respective visions and strategies, yet were operating in largely complementary markets. We believe that joining forces is in the best interests of both our customers and our employees, and our commitment to them and the products we provide will remain our highest priority.”

Comverse says deal will accelerate it’s growth in the digital services sector

Openet and NTT-AT collaborate to deliver production ready BSS using NFV Japanese systems integrator NTT Advanced Technology (NTT-AT) has been announced as Openet’s latest reseller partner. The deal will extend Openet’s reach into the NTT group and significantly enhance its commercial footprint across Asia. NTT-AT, which represents the technological core of the NTT group, will re-sell Openet products and solutions to all subsidiary operators within the NTT group. NTT-AT chose to partner with Openet after successfully trialling a series of policy and control functions across NFV (network functions virtualisation) environments. Integrating solutions where NFV techniques are applied to OSS/BSS enables the NTT group to deliver on the promises of NFV, such as system agility, faster time to

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market, reduced TCO, increased elasticity and greater service availability. Following the successful test, NTT-AT will look to roll Openet’s virtualised BSS technology out across the NTT Group. “Having rigorously tested Openet’s virtualised BSS solutions, we are extremely confident of the immediate value it will deliver to the NTT group as a whole,” said Masayoshi Nagao, the sales chief of the Openet team at NTT-AT. “The level of support offered by Openet will afford us the ability to build increasingly agile systems to provide service diversity and faster time to market for NTT subsidiary operators.” Cyril Dolan, the global vice president of Indirect Channels at Openet, added: “Our partnership with NTT-AT provides us

with a variety of new access points into one of the world’s most innovative operator groups. Our virtualised BSS technology will deliver a wide variety of benefits and new revenue streams for subsidiaries Cyril Dolan: within the NTT group and Partnership clearly demonstrate the provides access points into NTT mutual value of our global group operators partner programme. We actively welcome new entrants to this programme and we believe partnerships between specialist systems integrators like NTT-AT and Openet offer CSPs the best opportunity to build an agile BSS environment.”

I N D U S T R Y

N E W S

Ericsson adds CENX service orchestration to managed services offering CENX, a provider of service orchestration solutions for software-defined and virtualised networks, has partnered with Ericsson to integrate CENX’s Cortx Service Orchestrator as a key element of Ericsson’s global Managed Services Delivery Platform. The Cortx Service Orchestrator allows Ericsson’s managed service professionals to proactively monitor customers’ data connectivity services, providing real-time visibility into endto-end circuit availability and performance, spanning multiple technologies. Cortx Service Orchestrator delivers a graphical dashboard to identify performance degradation – such as frame loss, latency and jitter, and simplifies the isolation of faults, significantly reducing mean time to repair (MTTR), increasing

network availability and enhancing customer experience. Ericsson will be able to identify degradation of ethernet circuits before they begin to significantly impact end users of the network using the CENX system, which also provides service delivery teams with the ability to measure Local Exchange Carriers and Alternate Access Vendors’ performance against key performance indicators and manage them in line with service level agreements. “We are pleased to be working with Ericsson for a global go-to-market strategy with an integrated solution offering,” said Ed Ogonek, the president and CEO of CENX. “This

deployment has proven that Cortx Service Orchestrator is able to meet the usability, scalability and performance requirements of one of the world’s largest network operations.” Jean-Claude Geha, the vice Ed Ogonek: president and global head Global go-toof Ericsson’s Managed market strategy Services Business Portfolio, with Ericsson added: “This successful provides partnership is one example integrated offering of how Ericsson Managed Services is continually using innovative tools to serve its customer base worldwide.”

European telecoms could realise €39bn by re-imagining the network Challenged by anticipated growth in fixed, mobile and IoT traffic, European communications service providers (CSPs) are devising new technology designs and standards, drawing inspiration from highly optimised technology and the business design of their cloud peers. A new report from management consultancy Arthur D. Little (ADL) and Bell Labs Consulting, the industrial research and advisory arm of Alcatel-Lucent, ‘Reshaping the future with NFV and SDN’, predicts that the shift to becoming a cloud carrier has the potential to significantly re-define how the industry competes in the cloud era. In the report, ADL and Bell Labs present an analysis of the strategic value and impact of bringing network functions virtualisation (NFV) and software defined networks (SDN) into the carrier network. Key insights from the study include:

Network virtualisation technologies are opening up the market to new competitors that could rapidly erode traditional carriers’ market share. As network ownership is no longer a prerequisite for service delivery, virtually anyone can become a service provider. Enterprise customers like banks, retailers or media companies could become powerful alternatives to the traditional telecoms network, encroaching on the mass telecoms market. Traditional providers should both observe and capitalise on this new class of massmarket competitor and develop network functionality that enable them to tap into higher-value products and services segments such as the fast-growing €18 billion IT security business and €17 billion cloud services market. As the telecoms industry prepares to advance its networking functionality to a whole new level of programmability, CSPs

must work even more closely together with manufacturers, vendors and governments to ensure the new networks allow ondemand connectivity and are interoperable with new types of computing and multiple operator networks. The report findings show that the efficiency impact of onboarding NFV and SDN for these CSPs could be worth €14 billion per year in the network domain alone, which will be augmented by a further €25 billion per year in non-network operating costs through greater automation and simplification of business processes. “The time is now for Europe’s telecoms industry to bring networking into the cloud era, it will not be trivial to execute programmability and automation at the scale required for success, but the prize is significant,” said Jesús Portal, a partner at Arthur D. Little.

NEWS IN BRIEF

Mobile devices to generate the equivalent of 10bn Blu-ray movies by 2019 New research has forecast that mobile data traffic, generated by smartphones, featurephones and tablets, will approach almost 197,000 petabytes) by 2019, equivalent to over 10 billion Blu-ray movies, according to Juniper Research. However, the research found that only 41% of the data generated by these devices will be carried over cellular networks by 2019, with the majority of mobile data traffic offloaded to Wi-Fi networks. The research, ‘Mobile Data Offload & Onload:

Wi-Fi, Small Cell & Network Strategies 20152019’, estimates that the average monthly data usage by smartphone and tablet users will double over the next four years. The daily media consumption by mobile users will continue to rise, bolstered by the rise in 4G adoption and factors such as HD video usage.

and the existing Sigma management team will form a new partnership with Birch Hill.

Sigma Systems takes new investment from VC firm

Michael Mazan, a partner at Birch Hill added: “Sigma Systems is one of the leading brands in the communications software market. They have a strong management team coupled with talented and experienced people. We look forward to working with Tim and his team to execute their ambitious growth plan in this dynamic industry vertical.”

Birch Hill Equity Partners has made a significant investment in Sigma Systems in support of the vendor’s continued growth plans. In connection with the transaction, Sigma president and CEO, Tim Spencer,

“This investment by Birch Hill marks a significant corporate milestone for Sigma,” said Andy Jasuja, co-founder and chairman at Sigma Systems. “It is a recognition of the tremendous success Sigma has enjoyed in the industry.”

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P R O D U C T

N E W S

Ericsson unveils Adaptive Inventory 9.3 for full visibility and control Ericsson has launched Adaptive Inventory 9.3 to bring the full visibility and control that communications service providers (CSPs) need. This includes autonomy to build new technologies, capabilities, web-based GUIs and applications. Elisabetta Romano, vice president and head of OSS & Service Enablement at Ericsson, said: “Ericsson Adaptive Inventory builds on a powerful software solution that is deployed around the world and sees Ericsson continue to redefine inventory management with capabilities that our customers need to be successful. Access to accurate network data positions

CSPs for better decision-making, including the ability to predict the future-state network from a combination of current and proposed network plans. The latest tools that Ericsson Adaptive Inventory brings to market are easy use, deploy and maintain, helping operators thrive in an everchanging environment.” Ericsson Adaptive Inventory, formerly Ericsson Granite Inventory, uses data from a broad range of available sources to offer the most complete view of a network at any given moment, including past, present and future configurations. The result is faster service rollouts, improved trouble

resolution and new network efficiencies as mobile data and IP-centric service delivery becomes more fluid. It features an enhanced Unified Inventory Engine, intuitive web interface, componentdriven design automation, and system extension kit. Ericsson has created a migration path to Ericsson Adaptive Inventory for existing Ericsson Granite Inventory customers.

Elisabetta Romano: Accurate network data positions CSPs for better decision making

NetCracker 10 launched to redefine network and IT economics

Sanjay Mewada: As CSPs shift from physical to hybrid to virtualised infrastructure, NetCracker 10 lays the foundation for a risk-free migration

NetCracker Technology has launched its latest product suite, NetCracker 10, which combines capabilities in virtualisation, cloud-based delivery of applications, embedded analytics and biometrics onto a single, unified platform. With these capabilities, NetCracker 10 fundamentally redefines the economics of network deployment and management, IT operations, customer

experience and service creation and delivery. “We are thrilled to announce NetCracker 10, the next generation of our highly sophisticated end-to-end product suite, which redefines some of the fundamental economics around network and IT, operations, deployment, customer retention and service creation,” said Sanjay Mewada, the vice president of strategy at NetCracker. “As service providers prepare for the inevitable shift from physical to hybrid to virtualised infrastructure and offerings, NetCracker 10 lays the foundation for a risk-free and seamless migration, ushering in the next wave of innovation.”

Using its revolutionary single-platform approach across network, service and customer domains, NetCracker 10 enables communications service providers to migrate seamlessly from existing environments to the next generation of virtualised networks and IT infrastructure. The capabilities incorporated in the NetCracker 10 suite have demonstrated numerous financial and operational improvements including: up to 40% reduction in total cost of ownership; more than 30% increase in infrastructure utilisation; up to 30% increase in net promoter score, according to NetCracker’s internal benchmarking.

NEWS IN BRIEF

Helix expands TEOCO’s unified service assurance suite TEOCO, has launched Helix, its comprehensive unified service assurance suite. Helix brings together TEOCO’s market performance, fault, service and customer experience management capabilities and delivers further real-time analytics and machine enhancements. Helix enables CSPs to accelerate their evolution to a Service Operations Centre (SOC) model and focus on delivering end-toend service quality. By using TEOCO’s domain, big data and process integration expertise, Helix reduces a CSP’s total cost of ownership (TCO) and enables the delivery of better customer experience.

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“Helix brings together service assurance with real time analytics and machine learning,” said Shachar Ebel, the CTO of TEOCO. “The platform is a leap forward in the ability of service assurance software to offer cross domain solutions that can boost network and service performance, as well as customer quality of experience, while prompting the implementation of predictive automated operations and processes for traditional and virtualised networks.”

Amdocs introduces actionable analytics for CSP marketing, network and care Amdocs has announced new communications-specific applications that

allow communications service providers (CSPs) to aggregate data from multiple marketing, network and customer care sources and generate business and customer insights with actionable recommendations. The new applications build on Amdocs’ big data analytics launch last year which introduced an end-to-end, communicationsspecific big data analytics portfolio and that makes data clean, accessible and actionable for service providers or third-parties to enable open innovation. Amdocs’ new big data actionable analytics applications include: high definition marketing analytics, deep network analytics and consumer and business satisfaction analytics.

C O N T R A C T

N E W S

Gabon Telecom modernises wholesale billing with CSG Gabon Telecom is in production with CSG’s Wholesale Business Management Solution. The implementation includes CSG’s Interconnect and Intermediate solutions, and will support the CSP’s wireless and wireline businesses. CSG now supports the operations of the top three CSPs in Gabon. “Revenue and net income growth are dependent upon the efficiency of our operations,” said Bernard Mbangangoye, the director for international and interconnection at Gabon Telecom. “With the CSG solution we are able to control our wholesale process from end-to-end,

correctly capturing data records, accurately invoicing our partners, and shortening the time to settlement. Thanks to CSG, we are able to monitor the operations through KPI dashboards updated daily and proactively address any anomalies.” Gabon Telecom, which operates under the Libertis brand, was the first CSP in Central Africa to launch LTE, and made the strategic decision to not just modernise its network but also the systems responsible for monetising its network traffic.

clients who recognise the value our solutions add to their operations as well as the domain expertise we George Fraser: bring to every Increased engagement,” said George customer base in Africa Fraser, the vice president demonstrates of CSG’s Europe, Middle functional depth of East and Africa regional offerings operations. “Our increasing footprint in dynamic markets such as Africa is a testament to our knowledge and the functional depth of our offerings.”

“CSG builds strong relationships with our

LG Uplus launches VoLTE roaming over Syniverse IPX network Syniverse has announced that it is enabling South Korea’s LG Uplus to launch a commercial VoLTE (voice over LTE) roaming service, featuring HD voice. Made possible by Syniverse’s IPX network, the service allows LG Uplus subscribers to roam onto the KDDI network in Japan and will allow LG Uplus to expand coverage and services in additional markets. Syniverse’s IPX interconnects the networks to make LTE roaming possible. With nearly 800 LTE roaming routes, Syniverse’s IPX reaches more than 200 CSPs in 44 countries. This reach includes 104 direct

connections that enable Syniverse to launch VoLTE trials and deployments around the globe. As a result, Syniverse recently enabled the transoceanic VoLTE roaming call and has direct LTE connections with 14 of the 16 CSPs that have launched VoLTE. “Because LTE roaming is the prerequisite to launch VoLTE, Syniverse’s reach to nearly every CSP that has launched LTE roaming enables us to achieve the critical reach and coverage our subscribers will demand,” said Hong Jun Choi, general manager, LG Uplus.

With the Syniverse IPX, CSPs have the flexibility to implement VoLTE through S8 home routing, local breakout or VoLTE interconnect, which are three key emerging VoLTE implementation models. LG Uplus is launching VoLTE over IPX through Syniverse’s S8 home-routed LTE data roaming platform, which allows CSPs to rapidly deploy VoLTE by using their existing LTE data roaming connections. In addition, the Syniverse IPX is prepared to offer other IP-based multimedia service features such as video over LTE (ViLTE) and rich communication services (RCS).

NEWS IN BRIEF

StarHub selects Neural Technologies fraud management system Neural Technologies has won a contract with StarHub, Singapore’s first fully integrated info-communications company. The deal is valued at approximately US$1 million and is the first strategic collaboration between Neural and StarHub. StarHub is the second largest telecoms company in Singapore. The company provides a full range of information, communications and entertainment services for both consumer and corporate markets and operates a mobile network that provides 4G, 3G and 2G services.

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The new supply agreement with Neural Technologies will provide comprehensive protection against a broad range of fraud types throughout StarHub’s entire business. Stephen Kai Sui, the group chief executive at Neural Technologies, said: “It’s a real privilege to work with StarHub. Singapore is regarded worldwide as an innovative market, and we think that the installation of our Minotaur Fraud Management system here will be a great example to operators in other regions facing similar challenges. This new deal continues to extend our global network of customers and, on Neural Technologies 25th anniversary year, it reinforces our position as the risk management software provider of choice for global companies.”

Comptel wins Telefónica Argentina analytics deal Finnish vendor Comptel has announced that it has agreed the first deal for its new integrated analytics solution, called the Operational Intelligence SoftBlade. This strategically important deal with Telefónica Argentina Movistar demonstrates the value of the Data Fastermind analytics embedded to the customer’s existing Data Refinery and EventLink technology platform. The deal consists of software licenses and related services with a value exceeding €890,000.

H O T

L I S T

VanillaPlus Hot List: June / July 2015 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)

Client Country

Product/Service

Alcatel-Lucent

Windstream, USA

Provision of Alcatel-Lucent Velocix content delivery network (CDN) system as well as professional services to enable IPTV launch

Awarded 5.15

Allot Communications Vodafone, Germany

Allot WebSafe Personal chosen to power new Secure Net security as a service proposition for mobile users

5.15

Amdocs

Linkem, Italy

Amdocs Virtualised Policy Controller and Home Subscriber Server chosen by Italian wireless broadband provider

5.15

Amdocs

Telefónica, Chile and Peru

Selection of Amdocs data management services for operating data store operations in Chile and Peru

Anite

China Telecom, China

Anite’s SAS platform selected for LTE throughput testing

5.15

CoralTree

UPC, Poland

Poland’s largest cable TV provider selects CoralTree Renaissance CRM to increase operational efficiencies across customer services and sales functions

5.15

CSG International

Charter Communications, Five-year contract extension to existing residential billing and customer care deal at fourth-largest US cable operator USA

5.15

CSG International

Gabon Telecom, Gabon Modernisation of wholesale and billing operations with deployment of CSG’s Wholesale Business Management Solution (WBMS)

5.15

Ericsson

Telstra, Australia

CSP selects Ericsson Media Delivery Network as a fully managed CDN service to support growth in IP video

5.15

MDS/Tech Mahindra

iD, UK

Provision of billing, customer management and services infrastructure for retailer Dixons Carphone’s new MVNO, iD

5.15

MycomOSI

FarEasTone, Taiwan

Selection of MycomOSI NIMS-PrOptima for LTE performance management

6.15

Myriad Group

Vivo, Brazil

Deployment of Myriad SMS service gateway to support Vivo Twitter SMS service

6.15

NetCracker Technology Consolidated Deployment of catalogue-based OSS offering to enhance service inventory and management at business and broadband CSP Communications, USA

5.15

NetCracker Technology C-Spire, USA

NetCracker converged billing and active mediation deployed to support pre and postpaid wireless services on a single rating and billing platform

5.15

NetCracker Technology Andorra Telecom, Andorra

Deployment of NetCracker end-to-end systems as part of complete BSS and OSS transformation

6.15

NetCracker Technology Vivacom, Bulgaria

Quad-play provider goes live with upgrade to NetCracker revenue management system to enable convergence of rating, billing and charging

6.15

NetCracker Technology Schurz Expansion of relationship by establishing a standardised business process across all CSP’s properties using NetCracker’s Communications, USA billing and revenue management system

6.15

NetCracker Technology Vast Broadband, USA

Deployment of NetCracker revenue management system under multi-year hosted managed services agreement

6.15

NetCracker Technology Turkcell, Turkey /NEC

Turkcell Superonline chooses NetCracker systems to optimise business to business and business to consumer service fulfilment and assurance

6.15

Neural Technologies

Replacement of fraud management system with Neural Technologies’ systems to provide comprehensive protection across entire operation

6.15

Starhub, Singapore

OpenCloud

Spark, New Zealand

OpenCloud Rhino Sentinel VoLTE Application Server chosen by Spark to support virtualised VoLTE proof of concept

6.15

Openmind

Life, Ukraine

Deployment of Openmind Short Message Service Centre (SMSC) to enable bulk application-to-peer (A2P) messaging to 13.9 million users

5.15

Redknee

EcoMobile

MVNO subscribes to Redknee cloud-based converged billing and customer care fully managed, software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering

6.15

Syniverse

Ooredoo, Qatar

Syniverse IPX Network Solution deployed to enhance 4G roaming service for Ooredoo customers. Deal builds on 20-year relationship with Syniverse

5.15

Syniverse

LG UPlus, South Africa Syniverse IPX enables CSP to launch commercial VoLTE (voice over LTE) roaming service, featuring HD voice

6.15

Redknee wins EcoMobile converged billing deal

Lucas Skoczkowski: CSPs are selecting Redknee’s cloud services for greater business agility

EcoMobile, an MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) that operates on the Sprint network, has chosen a fully managed, software-as-a-service, cloud-based converged billing system from Redknee.

Garvin Garmo, the chief executive of EcoMobile, said: “We selected Redknee’s cloud-based billing and customer care solution to support our growth strategy, while minimising risk, reducing our cost base, and enabling us to launch new services quickly to the market. With Redknee’s end-to-end managed

solution we have the flexibility to efficiently manage our customers from activation and retention to full customer care support. Redknee is providing us with fast time to market, which is crucial for EcoMobile to increase market share and drive differentiation and innovation in a competitive environment.” Lucas Skoczkowski, Redknee’s CEO, added: “EcoMobile is the latest customer to launch Redknee’s cloud-based converged billing solution, which increases our footprint in the US market and adds to the growing portfolio of customers that are selecting Redknee’s cloud solution for greater business agility. ” Redknee’s cloud-based converged billing

and customer care system offers a fully virtualised platforms, enabling communications service providers (CSPs) to launch a new brand in a matter of weeks. It provides Mobile Virtual Network Enablers (MVNEs) with an agile, flexible and modular suite of solutions on which to build a profitable wholesale business. CSPs can take control of the services and promotions they launch with a real-time billing, rating and charging with integrated policy, promotions, analytics and business intelligence. Provided as a SaaS offering, Redknee Cloud allows consumer brands or retailers, who may not be experienced in the mobile sector or billing, to concentrate on their sales, marketing and distribution strategies rather than the management of their billing system.

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P E O P L E

N E W S

Ben McCafferty joins MDS as senior vice president of Sales and Alliances MDS, has announced Ben McCafferty has joined the company as senior vice president of Sales and Alliances. Reporting to MDS chief executive Mark Edwards, McCafferty has responsibility for driving MDS’ sales growth and international expansion. McCafferty’s role will engage service providers in thinking about how they will approach digital transformation and includes a focus on the increased demand for managed services and cloud, which MDS is well positioned to take advantage of. Partnerships will also be a key growth area for the business and a way to deliver even more value to customers. McCafferty joins MDS from Redknee, a BSS provider, where he was head of sales and responsible for growth in the Middle East and Africa markets. He successfully closed several new contracts and increased revenue significantly in an emerging and dynamic region. Previously, McCafferty was vice president of global sales for Volubill, a provider of real-time charging and policy solutions, serving mobile and fixed-line Service Providers, acquired by CSG. He built and managed both the global sales and presales teams, launched a successful partner programme and closed contracts with major operator groups and services providers. He also held senior sales positions at Subex and ATOS, focused on the service provider market. “I am excited to join MDS,” stated McCafferty. “A strong product, innovative customers, expert in-house team and an established private cloud services delivery model, provide a proven combination for digital service providers (DSPs). I believe that MDS is perfectly positioned to enable service providers seeking transformation to a cloud-based DSP business, and I am looking forward to supporting MDS’ customers and driving international growth with strategic partners.”

Gabi Schindler: Admirer of Nexmo’s disruptive approach to cloud communications

chief marketing officer and a chief financial officer to help support the company’s further growth. The company has appointed Lewis Black as chief financial officer and Gabi Schindler as chief marketing officer.

“I am thrilled to welcome Lewis and Gabi to Nexmo,” said Tony Jamous, the chief executive of Nexmo. “Both of them personify our company values of being disruptive, having a passion for impact, valuing our customer’s success as much as our own, and having the integrity and focus to get things done. With their help, we will continue to lead and revolutionise the cloud communications space.” Black joined Nexmo from Citrix Systems where he was most recently the vice president of Finance and Operations for the Enterprise and Service Provider Division. Prior to Citrix, he held leadership roles at AT&T, Lucent Technologies and Avaya. Schindler joined Nexmo from Amobee, where she was also chief marketing officer and helped establish the company. Prior to Amobee, she held marketing leadership roles at Apple, AT&T, Saba Software and PalmSource. “I have long admired Nexmo’s disruptive approach to be the leader in the global cloud communications space, and I’m excited to work with such a talented, global team as we continue to raise the bar in the industry,” said Schindler.

Woon joins Etiya to lead international unit Catalogue-driven B/OSS for digital and communications service providers vendor, Etiya, has established Etiya International to drive its growth worldwide and appointed Chun-Ling Woon as the group’s chief executive.

Nexmo expands management to accelerate growth

Established in 2004, Etiya is now one of Turkey’s largest corporate software providers. With the formation of Etiya International it is taking an integrated worldwide approach to meet global demand for its services.

Cloud communications platform provider, Nexmo has announced the addition of a

“Our innovative, easily applied, flexible, and

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I JUNE / JULY 2015

affordable solutions enable us to stand out from our competition,” said Ali Durmus, founding partner and chief executive of Etiya. “Etiya International will enable us to bring those solutions to a broader market and to accelerate our growth and innovation around the world.” As chief executive of Etiya International, Woon will lead product management and drive the business and innovation globally. He has more than 20 years of technical and management experience in the telecom industry. Woon has extensive experience with every aspect of the business, from systems architecture and implementation to driving products to the market and brokering deals. He was vice presdient of marketing and business development at ConceptWave, which was acquired by Ericsson, vice president of marketing at Nortel Networks and has held management positions at Ericsson, Architel Systems, which was acquired by Oracle, and Siemens.

Anam recruits Carberry to managed SMS service team To support the launch of the Managed SMS Service offering, Anam has appointed Hugh Carberry as senior commercial analyst to its managed services team. Prior to joining Anam, Carberry spent more than ten years at Telefónica O2 where his responsibilities included interconnect reconciliation and billing, Premium SMS billing and settlement, direct carrier billing and application-to-peer (A2P) SMS billing. In his role at Anam, Carberry will use his first-hand operator experience to advise on the operational and budgetary challenges faced by mobile operators so Anam’s services are developed in-line with current and future market expectations. Brian D’Arcy, the chief commercial officer at Anam, said: “The development of the Managed SMS Services is designed to address some of the biggest challenges facing mobile operators. They are unable to reap the rewards of the growth in the A2P SMS market due to traffic terminating on their network without their knowledge so they cannot bill for it, and their subscribers are receiving spam. In order to leverage the benefit of A2P revenue monetisation mobile operators need a combination of technical, industry and commercial knowhow.”

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Hot on VanillaPlus.com this issue Orga Systems exclusive update: Employees to be retained, deal price fair not cheap, says Redknee CEO With its planned acquisition of Orga Systems from the German equivalent of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for €38 million, Redknee will gain what its chief executive, Lucas Skoczkowski, tells George Malim is a “great customer base”.

Cowan, “This is problematic, the first experience seems a breach of trust.” http://www.vanillaplus.com/2015/06/14/ 9026-why-arent-bills-customer-centriccommunications-to-build-loyalty-andcut-the-cost-of-calls-to-care/

Why aren’t bills customer-centric communications to build loyalty and cut the cost of calls to care? “Imagine a customer buys a new device instore and signs up to a $29.99 a month plan, but the first bill is $54.00. They walked in mid-billing cycle so they have been billed for 45 days.” As Alan Coleman, founder and CEO of Brite:Bill tells Jeremy

http://www.vanillaplus.com/2015/06/26/ 9444-how-one-oss-company-was-builtfrom-an-unanswered-need-to-seecustomers/

Executive Snapshot

Lucas Skoczkowski

http://www.vanillaplus.com/2015/06/24/ 9403-orga-update-employees-to-beretained-deal-price-fair-not-cheapsays-redknee-ceo/

drove him and his co-founders to launch an OSS company against such giant opposition. The first part is also still available online.

Nan Chen, the cofounder and executive vicechairman of CENX, talks ethernet and martial arts in our latest executive Nan Chen profile. http://www.vanillaplus.com/2015/06/01/ 8053-nan-chen-cto-of-cenx-talksethernet-and-martial-arts-in-our-latestexecutive-profile/

Oracle Communications virtualises products to support NFV initiative

How one OSS company was built from the need to see what happens to customers

Oracle has released four products that underscore its commitment to provide communications service providers (CSPs) with a fully virtualised, network function virtualisation (NFV)-ready system portfolio. With new releases of Oracle Communications Session Border Controller, Oracle Communications Converged Application Server, Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper, and Oracle Communications Policy Management, Oracle is to help CSPs conquer the layers of complexity inherent in bridging physical and virtual environments as they continue on their journey toward NFV.

In the second part of this interview, Anand Gonuguntla, the chief and cof-ounder of Centina Systems, tells VanillaPlus what

http://www.vanillaplus.com/2015/06/23/ 9336-oracle-communications-virtualises -products-to-support-nfv-initiative/

New appointments to the VanillaPlus Editorial Advisory Board The VanillaPlus Editorial Advisory Board is in the process of adding new members. We’re delighted to announce that Martin Morgan, the vice president of Martin Morgan, the marketing at marketing manager Openet and Justin of Openet Paul, the head of OSS marketing at Amdocs have agreed to join the refreshed line up and we are poised to make further announcements in the coming weeks. Martin Morgan has more than 25 years’ experience in mobile communications software and has worked in mobile billing since the earliest days of the industry. A prolific conference speaker and

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I JUNE / JULY 2015

Justin Paul, the head of OSS marketing at Amdocs

contributor to the telecoms trade press, he has served on trade association and company boards. At Openet, he is responsible for marketing thought leadership and market interaction.

Justin Paul has worked in 17 years in product marketing and product management roles for telecoms companies. Prior to joining Amdocs in 2013 he worked as an independent consultant to the Scottish Government – Digital Strategy and Programmes team running a technology innovation project that covered areas such as M2M, mobile backhaul, social housing Wi-Fi and small

cell deployment. He has worked for Airwave, the UK Public Safety Network operator (TETRA) as head of product marketing, running the product management, partner management and solution architecture organisations. In addition, he has worked at Alcatel-Lucent as head of segment marketing for mobile for the UK and Ireland; at Logica as head of business development for Intelligent Networks; and at Nokia Networks Netherlands as a system marketing manager working on 3G networks. Further board announcements are expected shortly and we are especially keen to increase our members from the CSP sector globally. If you would like to put yourself or a colleague forward please contact the editor, George Malim, at: george@vanillaplus.com

BILL & CHARGE Are CSPs ready for an on-demand, real-time world?

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VanillaPlus Insight June/July 2015

CONTENTS 17

TALKING HEADS: CSPs CAN’T SAVE THEIR WAY TO GREATNESS Openet’s Joe Hogan says communications service providers (CSPs) need to move from a mentality of saving costs to one of creating new sources of revenue

BILL & CHARGE ANALYST REPORT Our specially-commissioned analyst report, authored by Karl Whitelock, the director of global strategy for Operations, Orchestration, Data Analysis and Monetisation at Stratecast | Frost & Sullivan and Troy Morley, a strategy analyst at Stratecast | Frost & Sulllivan

EXPERT OIPNION Eyal Amit and Jonah Pransky argue that billing and charging are critical enablers of great CEM

REAL-TIME CHARGING Jonny Evans says the BSS happy hour can last a little longer

INTERVIEW Redknee’s Chris Newton-Smith tells George Malim why CSPs of all types are turning to cloud and SaaS for billing and charging delivery

DIGITAL SERVICE Alam Gill explains why innovation in the digital world requires CSPs to let go of their heritage

EXPERT OPINION Vic Bozzo says it’s time CSPs get their M2M partner settlement ducks in a row

17 TALKING HEADS

Joe Hogan

32 REAL-TIME CHARGING

34 INTERVIEW

Chris Newton-Smith

37 DIGITAL SERVICES

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TA L K I N G H E A D S

Joe Hogan: BSS needs to enable CSPs to rapidly develop, launch and monetise new offers

CSPs canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t save their way to greatness, new offers and services will be their salvation Communications service providers (CSPs) need to move from a mentality of saving costs to one of creating new sources of revenue. Those can come from effective use of CSP data, greater exploitation of the customer relationship and improved agility and flexibility to introduce new services over virtualised networks, Joe Hogan, the founder and chief technology officer of Openet, tells VanillaPlus CSPs move from a commodity model to selling based on value? Joe Hogan: The race to the bottom is happening among CSPs that are in danger of commoditising data

anillaPlus: Every day we see CSPs cutting prices and increasing data volumes in bundles. Does this signify a race to the bottom and the commoditisation of data? If so, how can

IN ASSOCIATION WITH OPENET VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I JUNE / JULY 2015

TA L K I N G H E A D S

The cost saving implications of using Wi-Fi are huge but in order to take full advantage, CSPs need to ensure that they’re delivering the quality of services that customers expect

if they just sell data as a product. Every week we see another CSP announce data increases in their basic bundles and associated price cuts. This is fine if you’ve got a new source of revenue to compensate for the loss but if you don’t, then there is a real danger that data could be commoditised. We are seeing CSPs develop new revenue sources – from selling more products and services to looking at new business models. Working with content partners and upselling television, entertainment and music services, for example, is happening. Also providing better direct customer engagement is helping boost revenues, such as from selling roaming passes or add-ons. Either a data block at the end of the month, or a content upsell is helping augment the fixed monthly data bundle revenues. BSS needs to enable CSPs to rapidly develop, launch and monetise new offers – this is often not possible with service heavy legacy systems. BSS needs to be all real-time, have a centralised offer catalogue that can enable fast time to market for many, many more offers. VP: With free Wi-Fi becoming increasingly widespread and reports that between 60-70% of mobile data traffic currently being carried by WiFi, is there a danger that CSPs could even lose out in the fight for basic connectivity? How can they better harness Wi-Fi to their advantage? JH: The importance of Wi-Fi is increasing. Just look at the connectivity models for Google’s Project Fi. It’ll be Wi-Fi connectivity where possible and then LTE as a fallback. As long as the quality is good customers probably don’t know and don’t care over what technology their mobile data is going. The key point here is that the customer will be happy as long as the quality is good. CSPs are selling high-speed LTE services, people are watching television on their devices so the network experience must be good otherwise customer will turn off.

The cost saving implications of using Wi-Fi are huge but in order to take full advantage, CSPs need to ensure that they’re delivering the quality of services that customers expect. The impact on BSS is that as CSPs look at multiple access methods – LTE, LTE-U and Wi-Fi there does need to be a capability to extend policy to the device to ensure the customer network experience is as expected. In many cases CSPs are losing out to free Wi-Fi. Some prepaid customers top up infrequently and then don’t even bother switching mobile data on. They use public and free Wi-Fi. CSPs are offering service passes that stress the convenience of cellular data as well as low cost. For example, we see CSPs in some countries offer a one-day, 50MB data pass. We’ve also seen application service passes where CSPs offer a service pass for WhatsApp. This is low cost and allows only the use of WhatsApp. We’ve seen this in countries with a large migrant workforce that uses WhatsApp to call their family back home. Here the CSPs stressed the low cost and convenience of WhatsApp service pass, as opposed to walking around shopping malls or public libraries trying to get free Wi-Fi. VP: One of the main assets that CSPs have is their customer base but when you compare the level of engagement a CSP has with its customers, compared to a say, Facebook or LinkedIn, there’s no comparison. Is it fair to say that CSPs are not engaging with their customer base and therefore are at risk of ignoring their most valuable asset? JH: Yes, a CSP’s customer base is their most important asset, but they have to ask some very hard questions of how relevant they are to their customer base and measure themselves against the competition. In this case competition can be the digital service providers such as Google, Facebook or LinkedIn. These companies engage with mobile customers day in, day out and, more importantly, customers engage with them. The main reason is relevance. On the whole most CSPs don’t really engage that much with their customers. Many customers just get a bill emailed to them once a month, and some don’t even open the email. If they’re lucky they’ll get a call from a call centre once a year asking them if they’re happy with the service. The level of engagement is not great. Which is strange as CSPs have the data that can drive

In order to deliver the type of network experience customers expect there is a role to play for network selection intelligence. This is a combination of ANDSF (access network detection and selection function) and policy management. This not only identifies available Wi-Fi hotspots for offloading data traffic to but also can measure the quality of the Wi-Fi hotspot and also set the rules as to what traffic goes to Wi-Fi and what stays on LTE. This could mean video traffic for some

types of customers on certain devices gets offloaded, for example.

IN ASSOCIATION WITH OPENET 18

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meaningful, personalised and relevant customer engagement. For example, a subscriber spends a lot of time streaming music to their phone – perhaps they’d like to try a free month of Spotify premium? BSS needs to be able to drive real-time, relevant customer engagement – from upselling a new service to providing a customer notification on a loyalty offer. CSPs already have the data in their systems – the key is harnessing this data and turning it into relevant and timely intelligence to drive customer engagement. VP: We hear about BSS moving to all real-time, but what about functions like business intelligence? These have traditionally used historical data to build a view of customers. Is there an opportunity for real-time network and usage data to enhance business intelligence? JH: As BSS moves towards all real-time so does the opportunity to use the data collected for deeper analytics and to drive customer offers. BSS collects data on customer behaviour and usage in real-time and this is passed to a data warehouse where it can be used to provide historical business intelligence, such as churn propensity score, lifetime value, net promoter score and customer experience indicators. However, while data warehouses provide a good historical view of customer behaviour, they don’t provide a picture of what’s happening here and now. This why streaming analytics is being used on real-time data so that it can also be used to provide a real-time trigger, along with the historical customer business intelligence, to activate context-aware offers. The problem is not all CSPs are providing real-time context-aware offers, so many are missing out on additional revenue streams. Traditional upsell offers are not real-time; they are usually based on pre-planned schedules or off-line processing based on historic activity. Whilst CSPs continue to create innovative data services to generate more revenue, they may not be maximising their revenue potential with traditional upsell approaches. Every time there is an opportunity to upsell, CSPs should be able to do so. This means having the capability to take into account the real-time and historical customer context to send the most suitable offers to their device in real-time; customers should then be able to purchase and activate the services instantly. The context can be based on a combination of historical and real-time data including the subscriber activity, usage, application accessed, location, profile and more. By enabling such real-time

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contextual offers, CSPs can maximise upsell opportunities and the chances of uptake by customers as they receive the most relevant offers at the most opportune time. In a recent survey of 87 operators by Openet, respondents indicated that they could increase offer uptake rates by 75% and data revenues by 15% if they could deliver real-time contextual offers. VP: CSPs are reducing their network and IT capex and opex budgets. Does this make them more vulnerable, or is this a result of new dawn of agility and implementation of NFV and SDN?

As BSS moves towards all realtime so does the opportunity to use the data collected for deeper analytics and to drive customer offers

JH: Reduction of capex and opex budgets are all part of CSPs becoming leaner and more agile organisations. SDN (software defined networking) and NFV (network functions virtualisation) are playing a major role here. CSPs are looking to turn up services in minutes rather than months. With CSPs looking at NFV it’s important to examine how NFV impacts BSS. Many CSPs’ existing network operations models and OSS/BSS systems are not prepared for emerging new technologies like NFV. New thinking is required on how legacy OSS/BSS systems will need to evolve in order to support NFV. Simply extending existing OSS/BSS models to account for virtualisation will not be sufficient, because this approach will not support the new value-added capabilities and services provided by NFV. In addition, there is also the need for real-time processing of a huge amount of data, including data analytics, based on several data sources. Structured and unstructured data from the infrastructure is a further key challenge in the OSS/BSS and NFV context. On its own, network functions virtualisation is not enough. NFV concepts need to be applied in the OSS/BSS to deliver on the promises of NFV such as agility, reduced total cost of ownership, increased elasticity and greater service availability. This is particularly important for policy and charging functions. There is little point in having a dynamic network if the monetising, access control, and revenue handling systems are not similarly endowed. The nirvana, which is five to ten years away, is running NFV over SDN and that is where the capex and opex reductions will really become significant. It will come in steps but if you’re just hacking away at budgets you won’t get the agility you need to stay in business. I don’t think you can save your way to greatness.

www.openet.com

ANALYST REPORT

The authors are Karl Whitelock, the director of global strategy for Operations, Orchestration, Data Analysis and Monetisation (ODAM) at Stratecast | Frost & Sullivan (left) and Troy Morley, strategy analyst for ODAM at Stratecast | Frost & Sullivan (right)

Introduction

ntil approximately four years ago, automation of the charging and billing processes centred almost exclusively on the business-to-consumer (B2C) model in support of millions of customers. The largest part of any mobile and fixed-line communications service provider (CSP) business today continues to focus on the business challenges from consumers. And for good reason. Addressing the service and billing needs of millions of customers is not easy and comes with multiple business challenges Globally, the vast majority of consumers receive broadband access through a mobile network operator. But, customers continue to ask why is it so hard for these operators to offer services through the same type of self-care mechanism as internet-based retailers do and at the speed of the internet as well? Must all customers subscribe to the same data plan offerings? Are pick and choose service options something of a nirvana that cannot be delivered by the global CSP community at large? Are there alternative ways to pay the bill for service access beyond a pre-defined pricing plan or prepaid data usage bucket? From these and several other questions, it is easy to see that what customers really want is a better experience based

on their expectations from working with internet retailers and ecommerce providers. Billing and charging solutions installed to address the consumer services market more than five to seven years ago were implemented as solution silos tied to support for a particular type of network technology, with little thought about the overall customer experience involving services from potentially multiple service silos such as voice, broadband and video. These systems contain multiple databases, duplicated functionality, and are integrated through rigidly-defined business processes. But times have changed and business requirements today are much more complex. In

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Figure 1: The global communications marketplace is at the centre of the transformation experience strategy of all other industries

fact, it is not uncommon to hear the frustration of CSP chief marketing officers (CMOs) â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the installed business and operations support systems, especially the monetisation systems, are constraining the CMOâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ability to increase revenue by attracting new customers and in introducing new services. Enter the world of real-time monetisation solutions designed around the customer experience. These new solutions incorporate the benefits of policy management with real-time rating and charging along with contextual awareness and near instantaneous customer notification. Discussion about the real-time world of charging and billing for consumer services is the first part of this story. Though very important, B2C (business-to-consumer) is not the full billing and charging story the communications marketplace must address today. With the advent of cloud services, some of the billing industry momentum tied to consumers has shifted to the back office business-to-business (B2B) relationships that make complex services work for the B2C marketplace. B2B wholesale

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relationships are the lifeblood for any large business or enterprise. However, the operations and monetisation needs of the B2B world are similar, but still different, from those that support B2C retail services. In the pursuit of providing customers a better experience, most industries are not only blending mobile communications capabilities with the goods and services they have always delivered, but network technology advances, computing dynamics and data storage capacity are allowing them to bring to market solutions that extend well beyond their traditional business focus. Such new market solutions include shopping malls that bring customers and retailers together through online access, to better facilitate customer interaction. Other solutions involve healthcare institutions that provide gourmet cooking clinics as part of a patientâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wellness programme; automobiles with mobile access; insurance services based on consumption and driver performance; and support of other customer needs within industries such as public services, education, publishing, financial services, logistics and the transportation sector.

ANALYST REPORT

Figure 2: Real-time charging and revenue management systems for consumer billing

Multi-part business ecosystems are redefining how the communications marketplace of the future will address the needs of industry from the Internet of Things (IoT) solutions to virtual services offerings. Operations and monetisation capabilities within the B2B world form the second part of the charging and billing story.

Consumer-focused B2C charging and billing The global billing solution supplier community has done a good job with delivering systems that can address the end-to-end billing process for the consumer-based marketplace. However, most installed solutions lack a real-time element, and have grown together in a tightly woven architecture that was never designed to address rapid change or market-based service innovation. In fact, most CSPs believe the greatest business challenge they presently face in meeting the needs of new business opportunity is directly linked to the multi-system business solution environment they now maintain. Timely change management and system redefinition often fall short of expectations, especially when modifications across multivendor functions require market-speed flexibility. Many CSPs still have multi-vendor business solution architectures Today’s competitive mobile services environment involves applications, content and cloud services suppliers working with network operators to rapidly deliver innovative, optimised, and

value-added customer service offerings. For many CSPs, installed systems and processes no longer meet the needs of today’s business environment. Yet, today, rapidly-emerging competitors are making a big play for customer attention, customer mindshare, customer loyalty and the customer’s pocketbook. CSP competitors such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, have a very different IT-systems mindset and solution structure that enables a fast and adaptable response to customer needs, and rapid optimisation capabilities developed in the internet industry. CSP systems have remained divided into functionality sets tied to various business processes from their earliest beginnings. The end-to-end monetisation process, often supported through a multi-vendor best-of-breed environment, consists of mediation, policy management, rating and charging, invoicing, collections, customer notifications, partner settlements and now, usage insight analysis. This environment provides a powerful ability to address the needs of millions of customers with a relatively small number of service offerings. However, when business change is rampant, and competitive pressures are significant, a lack of configurable systems and flexible processes fails to satisfy rapidly emerging customer opportunities. This level of change often requires simultaneous updates across all systems. In spite of disparate IT systems suppliers’ valiant efforts to keep pace with change, agility and flexibility is simply not practical in a multi-vendor and multisystem integrated architecture. Systems silos across several customer management,

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monetisation and service assurance processes operate in a less than optimally-defined solution definition environment. Systems silos tend to create data duplication issues, functionality mismatches, cost excesses, upgrade complexity, slow responsiveness to market change and, ultimately, dissatisfied customers. To interact, monitor and understand end-user behaviour requires real-time functions and services such as real-time selfservice and real-time policy-enabled charging. Real-time enduser interaction is also required for contextual customer notifications and optimal offer conversion. This user engagement capability is a critical gap that is significantly limited by mobile carriers in comparison to internet services competitors. An inflexible monetisation environment is no longer conducive to meeting the rapidly-changing business needs defined by new network technologies, virtual networking and virtual data centre services. A lack of responsiveness from existing systems and processes leaves a gap that can negatively affect the way new business models are enacted and consumer needs are addressed. If left unchecked, such gaps will result in missed commitments, lost opportunities and unmet financial objectives. Cloud-based mobile services enablement architecture With the realization of cloud-based software solution technology, important differences exist between what can be delivered by traditionally integrated multi-system, multi-supplier business support architectures, and what is now possible through a cloud-based, single supplier design focused on the needs of mobile customers. To compete in an increasingly aggressive market, CSPs should consider a solution in the newly emerged category of customerengaged mobile services enablement. The three defining elements of this architecture are: • Agile cloud-based service platform – To enable service agility and service innovation, CSPs need to move key mobile business support functions to a single integrated business logic stack and database. For operational efficiency and rapid responsiveness to change, this stack should reside in a cloud-based environment defined by a single supplier. A

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multi-supplier cloud-based configuration would be subject to the same limitations that presently-deployed solution architectures suffer when a rapid response to changing market conditions is needed. A single supplier cloud-based approach always provides a solution with the most recent features and functions. This integrated stack is not related to network functions virtualisation (NFV), which is tied to the network traffic plane. • Contextual user engagement – To efficiently reach the customer, the solution stack includes a new architecture element – the user engagement platform – which is essential and fundamentally designed to work with on-device, realtime user experience software to: - Sense the current real-time context of the user: what is the user doing now? - Deliver real-time, on-device interaction, based on user context, to help users understand their service or ecommerce options; and to complete transactions including service purchases based on those options. - Be definable by business logic in the back-end, and be adaptable in real-time. - Set mobile services policy to address issues concerning network efficiency. - Provide on-device, out-of-the-box, account and device activation capability. • Integrated service creation environment – To truly allow service innovation by the network operator, the system must be managed by a single, secure web environment to allow a small team of marketing and IT professionals to very quickly design, beta test, perfect and commercially launch the following aspects for services and ecommerce offers: - Service plan offering catalogue, service allowances for each plan, pricing for each plan, on-device catalogue appearance/branding for each plan, on-device contextual marketing triggers for offering plans and services with immediate user actionable notifications. - ecommerce offering catalogue with pricing and contextual marketing triggers for offering ecommerce goods and services on-device. - On-device marketing via user interface (UI) notification definitions, and contextual trigger conditions to present

ANALYST REPORT

actionable marketing offers. - Integrated segmentation capability for targeted services, and improved monetisation and sub-brand creation, plus micro segmentation for agile new service testing. Major reductions in IT vendor costs accrue when moving from a multi-vendor, hardware-based architecture with high IT project costs, to a cloud-based, single supplier service creation solution. In addition, a rapid service definition and deployment process allows CMOs to validate winning services ideas with customers, which reduces the cost associated with launching new services. It also eliminates the sizeable percentage of the IT and marketing budgets associated with unsuccessful service launches. Such actions free resources for promoting the most proven services on a larger scale. The benefits from a cloud-based mobile services enablement solution A cloud-based mobile services enablement architecture would be comprised of various software modules that display solution flexibility when market conditions change or customer service preferences transform. The solution would involve customer interaction and reduce the need for custom software development. It would also sharply decrease the time-to-market needed by more traditional approaches. The advantages of this type of mobile enablement solution are: • On-device presence and user engagement – Within a cloud-based business solution construct, on-device user engagement and ecommerce enablement can be designed into the mobile services solution. User context awareness, analytics and on-device policy enhancement can all be made available. Incorporating these functions in a common set of business logic and tightly integrated functional modules results in a holistic architectural approach to a mobile operator’s business needs. This solution environment can also deliver flexible service offerings and ecommerce capabilities at a lower implementation cost compared to traditionally defined solutions. Most, if not all, of the

functionality to support new service ideas is already included in the solution. • Best of breed service experience – Modern mobile bornin-the-cloud competitors and cloud-client solution providers have used the power of devices to uplift their value proposition towards end-users. By incorporating different categories of devices into the design of a solution, a more elegant and compelling user experience is developed to engage customers; for example, discovering new services in a contextual fashion, enabling a one-click purchase customer journey and transforming the perceived value of the CSP offering. • Solution flexibility and agility – A cloud-based, singlesupplier, mobile services environment would manage all aspects of service policy, rating and charging, ecommerce and user engagement through a seamless set of business logic, without the functional boundaries imposed by API integrations. Through this approach, end-users are exposed to new service offerings via a product catalogue. The catalogue can address individualised customer service plans, and handle any level of change without incorporating the time-consuming step of an IT project to define, update, test and then release software each time change is needed. In addition, on-device user content can be incorporated to qualify all aspects of network policy, self-help user interaction, and ecommerce offers. The cloud-based mobile services approach delivers a seamless end-to-end design of service and user experience. • Rapid innovation through an integrated service creation environment – All aspects of network policy, pricing, charging and on-device user self-care for new service offers are programmed into a single graphical service design and deployment environment. This type of approach eliminates IT project time – and cost – associated with updating each system and API definition. The cloud-based mobile service architecture and service creation environment enables CSPs

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to rapidly create, test, optimise and then launch new consumer services in a matter of weeks rather than the months that are typical when defining new services through the traditional service creation process. The rapid service design model, which an integrated, cloud-based, mobile services solution enables, allows a CSP to market-test and optimise multiple service offerings in the time a traditional monetisation architecture could launch a single service. This technology actually eliminates certain steps within the traditional service delivery model because the rapid design model incorporates some service creation steps as built in capabilities. Another advantage of the rapid service design model is that multiple service ideas can be tested simultaneously with different customer groups, thereby accelerating the pace of responsiveness to changing market conditions. Still another advantage for any CSP engaging in this rapid service design approach would be quick recognition by its customer base as an innovator of services and capabilities designed by direct customer feedback. Such a label is what breeds customer loyalty. Enterprise-engaged B2B charging and billing CSPs are challenged today to address the billing needs of bundled network services such as voice, text messaging and data access for their consumer and small business customers. They have the added challenge of profitably providing broadband connectivity to their enterprise customers; and managing multiple B2B relationships with solution partners for several new business endeavours â&#x20AC;&#x201C; some of which include mcommerce, cloud-based virtual services, IoT communications and enterprise use of mobility services within their product offerings to deliver a more enhanced experience for their customers. Monetising this complexity, including compensation to a growing number of business solution partners as revenue is received from customers, means that CSPs must adopt new business strategies, new business models and new business

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management solutions. â&#x20AC;˘ B2B services need flexibility and negotiable pricing Enterprises demand personalised and individualised contracts containing service definitions and pricing agreements that are unique to the organisation. In addition to usage-based charges, enterprise monthly billing requirements involve complex components such as service packaging and pricing without restrictions, monetisation of managed services, and pricing based on a variety of business models. Addressing these needs requires a flexible and configurable approach to service selection, pricing and usage monitoring. Enterprise B2B agreements are binding business contracts that define the terms and conditions that an enterprise negotiates with its services supplier for each of its data service and applications options. The contract contains pricing discounts, loyalty focus and payment schedules for these services. In addition, an emerging table-stakes requirement for any deal now is the providerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ability to show consumption tracking against agreed upon terms. This level of tracking is essential to prevent enterprise-level bill shock and to eliminate endless manual calculations in determining how charges are computed, and whether they are part of an agreement. Automating such tracking capabilities within the regularly delivered enterprise payments invoice would save onsiderable reconciliation time for both the data services provider and the enterprise. Stratecast believes that enterprise data services providers need the business support infrastructure to innovate their own pricing and selling models; and that they must have the ability to distribute and monetise their offerings to customers and partners in a fully automated manner. Without this capability, these providers will struggle to meet the market demands of an increasing customer base, as they continuously update their customised business support solutions.

ANALYST REPORT

• Monetisation of enterprise data services is no simple task Enterprise data services take on many forms, and quickly create behind-the-scenes complexity for the service provisioning, business management, and monetisation processes. For example, enterprises typically purchase broadband connectivity from one or more network operators according to geographic coverage needs, pricing flexibility and service availability. This provides evidence from the general enterprise marketplace that CSPs are the best suppliers of network connectivity. Enterprises also purchase data centre services such as unified communications, remote data storage, elastic bandwidth, and computing capacity from one or more cloud services providers. In addition, enterprises purchase cloud-based applications including ERP, customer care, office automation, sales management and specialty applications from these same cloud services providers; or, in some cases, directly from the developer, according to business relationships and service needs. While some enterprises are now considering network access and virtualised data centre services from a single supplier, setting aside the reasons for this trend and focusing on the enterprise market in general, the most important aspect associated with enterprise customer billing is the need by enterprise customers for unique contract agreements and the tracking of usage to agreement terms. These agreements are based on numerous factors, such as the enterprise customer’s changing business needs, willingness to spend and flexibility demands pertaining to pricing options, usage discounts, loyalty focus and brand awareness. In addition, there is a high probability that different partners will be involved with the delivery and maintenance of each service combination package that a cloud service provider sells. From a monetisation perspective, this means complexity as services are billed, revenue is collected and partners are compensated. Managing the impact from multiple terms and conditions for each exchange or use of goods or services – an event – can be complex, but necessary to provide proper accountability

of charges and distribution of payments. In addition, business needs can change quickly; so, to swiftly negotiate or change agreement terms enables a service provider to differentiate in this complex environment by adapting to the needs of new markets, new business models, or competition. Given the complexity associated with virtual service offerings, or enterprise-level services of any kind, the monetisation processes should fit the business model a company chooses to run, rather than forcing the business model to match what the billing system can address. Billing systems should also allow a company to define its products and pricing strategies in a way that provides flexibility to react to changing market and customer needs at the speed of business, not at the speed of IT, which is usually measured in weeks or months. • The key requirements for addressing enterprise B2B billing complexity To better understand the complexities that virtual services now bring, key requirements that a billing solution should address in support of today’s new business realities include: Pricing models – Pricing model support should include on-demand, reserved, usage-based, location-based, free trials, promotions, bundling, peak and off-peak business scenarios. Usage rating for hybrid clouds – Usage rating must include support for any computing model; allow creation of product bundles from multiple sources; and bill channels or partners for the components defining each. Chargeback for private clouds – Deliver ability to chargeback or bill IT departments that use transfer pricing and departmental chargeback policies. Corporate and settlement hierarchies – Allow for configurable billing and settlement hierarchies, including grouped commitments across corporate hierarchies. Virtual bundle support – Allow service bundle billing

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based on partner contributions and revenue sharing agreements. Channel compensation and multi-party settlement – Manage channel behavior through creative compensation options – incentives, discounts, and penalties – and support multi-party settlement – retainer, residual, shared, and settled. Settlements should include ability to handle multi-party agreements where a single transaction can involve three or more relationships. Enterprise agreements – Support individualised negotiation for enterprise agreements. Online bill – Provide customisable online billing with re-branding for partners and customers. Dynamic scaling – Dynamically scale to flexibly accommodate peak periods, including bursting from private to public clouds. Product changes – Ability to change product pricing quickly – in hours or at most days – to respond to market demand and competition positioning. Combined payments processing – Account for enterprise customer billing and third-party payments, commissions and incentives from the same platform. SLA enforcement – Provide automated support for contract commitments tied to service level agreements (SLAs). Though this is less of a function of billing and more a concern of the service delivery and quality of service processes, it is an important topic for network operators and cloud providers. Regardless of the exact terms and conditions an SLA agreement may require, a clear audit path defining all billing-related customer charges and partner settlement payments is essential for not only the customer and partner management processes, but the SLA management function as well. Beyond both of these, such detailed accountability is mandatory to satisfy corporate governance requirements.

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Conclusion Digital service personalisation has changed the course of direction for nearly all CSPs throughout the world. Unfortunately, most installed systems do not allow them to react to changing market conditions quickly enough to take full advantage of the opportunities the market now provides. The longer-term billing implication is that as customer services are consumed, all parts of the end-to-end service definition and supply chain process must be reconciled in shorter and shorter intervals. To achieve future business success, it is imperative that new service offers and new business models not be saddled with the limitations of currently defined systems that can not show a high degree of flexibility and configurability along with the business processes they support. Some billing suppliers understand the changing business landscape, inside and outside the communications sector, and are now satisfying those needs with solutions originally intended to address complexities found only within the communications industry. The difference between suppliers that can support the billing needs of multiple industries, lies in how these systems are engineered. The complexities of the continuously changing CSP environment, to include simultaneous support for multiple business models will no doubt affect the way billing suppliers meet the future needs of this changing environment. If a single billing solution, initially made for the communications industry, can simultaneously address hundreds of business models that define the operations needs of complex enterprises in multiple industries, such as a large international airport today, imagine what could be accomplished with a similar solution in meeting the business relationship and monetisation needs of business strategies yet to be defined.

COMPANY PROFILES

Company summary

Founded

1982

Founded

1999

Chesterfield, Missouri, United States

Dublin, Ireland

Employees

More than 22,000

Employees

More than 800

Revenue

US$3,564 million (2014)

Revenue

Undisclosed

Customers

Over 250 CSPs in 80 countries worldwide. Key customers include: AT&T, Bell Canada, BT, Comcast, Deutsche Telecom, MetroPCS, Sprint, Telefónica, T-Mobile, Verizon and Vodafone.

Customers

Partnerships

Strategic partnerships with EMC, HP and IBM. A wide range of partnerships with systems integrators and independent software vendors.

Key customers include: AT&T, A1 Telekom Austria, Bell, Charter Communications, CTBC, Orange Group, Softbank, Sprint, Telus, Time Warner Cable, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Videotron and Vodafone.

Partnerships

A wide range of partnerships with equipment vendors, systems integrators and independent software suppliers.

Financial Status

Privately held

Financial Status

Publicly Traded (NASDAQ:DOX)

Bill and charge products Amdocs Customer Amdocs CES brings together a full suite of Experience OSS/BSS functionality, including revenue Solutions (CES) management. A selection of revenue management related offerings include: • Amdocs Convergent Charging – Real-time convergent charging across all services, networks and customer types. • Amdocs Policy Controller – Serves as the policy decision function, providing real-time usage metering, and service control for advanced data services. Ties in closely with the convergent charging engine. • Amdocs Master Enterprise Catalogue – Centralised data repository that manages all products defined through various CES modules and external OSS/BSS. • Amdocs Mediation – The mediation platform supports all networks, services and processing modes. It operates in real-time or batch mode, with active or passive interaction. • Amdocs Partner Management – Provides a comprehensive partner management and settlement system to support the complete partnership lifecycle. • Amdocs Invoicing – Creates all charges, including recurring charges, discounts, taxes and invoice totals. • Amdocs Accounts Receivable – Enables CSPs to gain an instant and accurate snapshot of their financial position at any given time. • Amdocs Collection – Facilitates an accurate and manageable collection process.

Bill and charge products Openet Fusionworks Framework

High performance framework utilised by all of the company’s modular software products. The framework centralises common functionality, provides support for custom logic and eases integration.

Openet Policy Manager

Enables CSPs to dynamically control network resources with real-time policies based on service, subscriber, or usage context. These policy rules do not just control network capacity and quality of service, but also enable new business models and innovative new services.

Openet Evolved Charging

Pre-integrated with the Openet Policy Manager, Openet Evolved Charging can be deployed as a standalone online charging system or as an adjunct system. It supports spend alerts to reduce bill shock, dynamic pricing models with real-time notification triggers, shared device plans with usage dashboards, and service bundling – for fixed and mobile, family plans and dual persona enterprise plans.

Openet Convergent Mediation

An enterprise-wide platform with the scalability and configurability to address the billing mediation, network event processing and data collection challenges within fragmented and diverse operator networks.

Key differentiation and competitive pressures Key differentiation and competitive pressures Amdocs meets the OSS BSS functionality needs of any size of CSP as shown by its current customer base. The Amdocs CES solution modules operate as pre-integrated suites or as standalones according to functional need. Amdocs features a global services organistion to install and operate its solutions. The company has a strong innovative spirit that allows it to address the needs of any organisation, while maintaining a leadership position within the global billing marketplace.

Openet offers a real-time data collection, analysis and management solution capable of addressing both customer experience and business management needs. Its data management capabilities can be configured to address multiple mediation, rating and charging, or policy requirements. The company has proven it can deliver on the data management challenges for some of the largest CSPs in the world. Competition within the rating, charging, mediation and now data analysis domain space is fierce, but Openet continues to remain aggressive and innovative in addressing the changing needs of the communications marketplace.

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Company summary Founded

1996

Vienna, Virginia, United States

Employees

160

Revenue

Undisclosed

Customers

Global customer base includes tier one CSPs and OTT providers in Asia, Europe, North America and South America. Key customers are: América Móvil, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Twilio, Sprint, Switchco, Telefónica and Verizon.

Partnerships

The Telarix Technology Alliance Partner Programme includes: Amdocs, Arptel, Ascom, IceHook, NxtGn, PurgeFraud and XConnect.

Financial Status

Privately held

Bill and charge products Telarix iXTools

The company’s solutions focus on wholesale charging and billing. A selection of revenue management functions addressed by the iXTools suite include: • iXBill – Ensures billable activities are captured, rated and billed, allowing CSPs to address agreement types and rating scenarios such as multi-party settlements and revenue sharing partnerships. • iXConnect – Is a business intelligence platform, for collecting and managing information. iXConnect defines and manages agreements between CSPs and partners, and applies rates to different types of traffic within the scope of each agreement. • iXRoute – Enables CSPs to identify and implement optimal routing strategies, to keep the network profitable. • iXTrade – Allows CSPs to simplify and automate the buying, pricing and selling processes within the wholesale interconnect business. • iXAudit – Streamlines the validation of interconnect invoices, reconcile charges, and manage settlements.

Telarix iXLink iXLink is an information exchange platform that enables CSPs to automate the exchange of business documents for the interconnect processes and to electronically share documents, such as pricing quotes, rate and dial code changes, numbering plans, invoices and declarations. iXLink has more than 4,000 members with 40 million transactions monthly.

Key differentiation and competitive pressures Telarix addresses what it calls interconnect business optimisation, which aims for more efficient carrier-to-carrier relationships through its portfolio of wholesale solutions. iXTools can be a pre-integrated suite or delivered as standalone modules. The iXLink exchange service allows members to apply business rules that are specific to each partner and/or service to validate transactions, meet internal business objectives and capture errors so that the sender can be notified immediately. Telarix is a market leader within the wholesale charging and billing domain, though it continues to face competitive pressure from other suppliers and clearinghouses.

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About Stratecast Stratecast collaborates with our clients to reach smart business decisions in the rapidly evolving and hyper-competitive Information and Communications Technology markets. Using a mix of action-oriented subscription research and customised consulting engagements, Stratecast delivers knowledge and perspective that is only attainable through years of real-world experience in an industry where customers are collaborators; today’s partners are tomorrow’s competitors; and agility and innovation are essential elements for success. Contact your Stratecast Account Executive to engage our experience to assist you in attaining your growth objectives.

About Frost & Sullivan Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, works in collaboration with clients to utilise visionary innovation that addresses the global challenges and related growth opportunities that will make or break today’s market participants. For more than 50 years, we have been developing growth strategies for the Global 1000, emerging businesses, the public sector and the investment community. Is your organisation prepared for the next profound wave of industry convergence, disruptive technologies, increasing competitive intensity, Mega Trends, breakthrough best practices, changing customer dynamics and emerging economies? For more information about Frost & Sullivan’s Growth Partnership Services, visit www.frost.com.

Customer experience management relates to you, billing and charging professionals As communications service providers (CSPs) focus more and more on creating differentiation through superior customer experience management, it has become clear that billing and charging are critical enablers of great CEM, write Eyal Amit and Jonah Pransky Proactive online charging is also critical for supporting personalised plans, which service providers hope will help keep their customers loyal

ut a group of different telecoms professionals in a room, mention customer experience management, and each person will think you’re talking specifically to them – that’s how focused the telecoms industry has become on how to deliver the right customer experience. So you’ve got the network engineers bringing up quality of service and experience, the care team talking about call handling and resolution, and with the billing team, it’s all about bill accuracy and clarity. They’re not wrong though – customer experience management definitely means different things to different people, but you can break it down into two major aspects. • The experience your customer has when actually consuming your products • The experience the consumer has when interacting with their service provider Most of the customer’s daily experience is about being a consumer, when they are actually using their devices and applications. Unless quality of service is either really good or really bad, the service provider isn’t consciously – or actively – associated with this daily experience. Yet there are also those moments when the consumer behaves like a customer – shopping for and ordering new products, contacting the call centre, receiving and paying a bill. It’s in those moments that CSPs need to shine in order to keep their relationship with that customer, and maximise the value of that relationship.

Why the focus on real-time? As part of an ongoing process to protect consumers against bill shock, governments and legislative bodies have been collaborating to establish a unified code of conduct. So European Union legislation currently mandates CSPs to notify their end customers at the exact moment they have consumed €50 worth of services in their monthly billing cycle. This applies whether they are roaming or in their home country. In parallel with this, CSPs have also been working towards giving their customers the ability to set their own personalised preferences when it comes to receiving notifications, such as when nearing the end of their service allowance. The customer also gets to decide the course of action following that notification: whether to end the service, freeze it, add funds and so on. These courses of action necessitate real-time notifications, which are driven by constant real-time metering of the customers’ allowances. The online charging system is the primary component responsible for performing these processes, assuring notifications are accurate and sent at the right time, managing top-up payments and more. Proactive online charging is also critical for supporting personalised plans, which service providers hope will help keep their customers loyal. Service providers are ramping up their quality of experience beyond just technical capabilities, by making it personal – they want to give customers the ability to create individualised plans so they can to choose the exact services they want, the networks they will run on, the validity period and so on.

That’s where charging and billing come in – when it comes to delivering an exceptional customer experience, charging and billing play a key role in both of these aspects.

Online charging is moving centre stage in real-time

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Shared data plans – a single data/voice allowance for all members of a family or group, and hybrid plans, which combine prepaid and postpaid customers into a single entity, are both particularly challenging to support. In order to ensure that quality of experience is met with these service plans, the parallel consumption of data or voice services need to be monitored in realtime. Consumption notifications must be provided to users ahead of time by the online charging system, as well as a wide range of system services, including plan activations, real-time changes and quota re-allocation for group members.

A new billing experience is interactive While the monthly bill may be a CSP’s most consistent – and usually most frequent – interaction with their customers, most customers don’t regard it a positive one. Receiving and paying bills often leaves customers questioning the value of the service they receive, and the bill itself is generally business-like and unclear to the average consumer. Not to mention that today, a paper bill, or even a PDF, leaves a lot to be desired in terms of a ‘wow’ user experience. And despite pressure to go green, in reality CSPs haven’t been able to replace the paper bill with electronic bill presentment – although many have tried. In fact, a recent Amdocs survey of global service providers found that an average of only 22% of their customers have gone paperless. This may be due to the perceived convenience of the paper bill mailed

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directly to the home, as opposed to online self-service channels which are guarded by logins and passwords. This leaves CSPs spending large amounts of money on paper bills that at best leave customers feeling unengaged and at worst, confuse or upset them, thus driving them to contact the call centre. Clearly, it is time for a new billing experience – not just paperless, but also interactive, and one that customers will find easy to use. As part of our CES 9.3 release, Amdocs has launched the Omni-Channel Billing Experience solution – an end-to-end system for bill processing, bill generation and bill presentment. It allows CSPs to easily design and personalise bills for print, PDF and online channels and ensures that data is consistently displayed across those channels. But most importantly for the customer experience, it also includes new interactive email bill functionality. This provides customers with an interactive HTML bill where they can simply tap or click for explanations of their charges, information on promotions or to pay or dispute a charge. The interactive email bill is pushed conveniently to your customers’ mailbox, giving them the best of both worlds – the convenience of a push communication with the interactivity of digital bill presentment. This will help CSPs provide a better billing experience, and drive higher adoption of paperless billing. So for all of you billing and charging professionals. The next time you are in a room and someone brings up customer experience management, raise your hands. They are talking to you.

The authors, Eyal Amit (above) and Jonah Pransky, are product marketing managers in the revenue management division of Amdocs

www.amdocs.com

REAL-TIME CHARGING

Is it sunset for traditional BSS or can happy hour last a little longer? Billing and charging for CSPs now encompasses a wide range of one-time services in addition to flat rate bundles. Traditional systems are no longer fit for purpose, but what is required for CSPs to continue to bill for their own services and charge for the services of others in a realtime, on-demand world, asks Jonny Evans?

Jennifer Kyriakakis, the co-founder and vice president of marketing at Matrixx Software, says: “Billing and charging in real-time for any service presents a range of complications for CSPs, from authorising the service, to delivering it, then tracking it and ensuring that it is being billed for correctly.”

ommunications service providers’ (CSPs) billing processes are becoming increasingly complex as they work to support traditional services side by side with new and sometimes unpredictable OTT business models – and all in real-time.

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Authorisation isn’t simple From over-the-top (OTT) service access privileges to current data and credit allowances, CSPs need to be able to accurately query multiple systems in real time and deliver services within agreed SLA parameters. Handling such queries against CSP, OTT and other systems demands lots of interoperability. “Billing has always been complex. Add in these new services and it’s more important than ever that CSPs have a unified system in place to ensure not just the billing but rating, trading and routing are done correctly,” says Vic Bozzo, the senior vice president for worldwide sales and marketing at Telarix. Parimal Mohile, the chief architect at Tech Mahindra, advocates the necessity for a real-time charging mechanism. “In terms of billing, CSPs will move to a real-time charging mechanism, irrespective of whether they bill the customer in real-time or not,” he says. “In the future the charge records will form the basis for supplying billing intelligence to consumer systems like bill formatting and printing, electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP), self-care, enterprise resource planning and dunning. These charge records will be dumped in a big data lake for analytics, business intelligence and real-time action perspectives. This will also bring in, at the required low cost, extreme billing flexibility which will become the mainstay for all billing needs.” Michelle Nowak, the vice president for product management of global BSS solutions at CSG International, all of this capability needs to be available regardless of the service or network type. “These capabilities need to be network, service and event agnostic to support a wider range of services that add perceived value to the CSPs overall communication services,” she says. CSPs can try to meet the future by patching existing systems, but this may not be ideal in the long-term, adds Bozzo. “CSPs need to be in a position to not only deal with the issues they have now but also any new innovations the future may bring. In many cases patching existing systems doesn’t solve the problem but rather creates even more complexity.” Mohile warns patching and extending existing systems may not be viable, or worthwhile. “CSPs need to atomise the capabilities provided by their current systems and aggregate these atomic functions through a common data model into a service layer,” he says. “Not all systems can provide such capabilities and these must be marked for sunset.” So, extending existing systems may not always be the best way forward, but that’s not to say adjunct systems can’t do the job, at least at times. “It depends on if the systems they have are meeting their needs and how sophisticated they are,” says Bozzo.

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The rapidly evolving market means CSPs need to remain flexible as they develop billing systems, observes Timo Ahomaki, the chief technology officer of Tecnotree. “There is currently no sensible status quo available to build rigid contractual structures or IT systems around,” he says. Deploying support for third-party services is very new to some CSPs: “Some have simply not offered thirdparty charging as an option, but they may find themselves missing out on any potential OTT business in the future,” warns Tony Poulos, market strategist at WeDo Technologies. CSPs must ensure any adjunct systems they may deploy don’t cause other complications in their system. Facing such a complex mix, some CSPs are choosing to roll out new solutions strategically, says Martin Morgan, the vice president of marketing at Openet. “Increasingly CSPs are going for an adjunct approach and putting a real-time charging system in place to cater for all data traffic for all customers,” he says. “Rated data records are then sent to the billing system for inclusion on the bill. This enables them to phase out legacy systems in line with the move all IP services and avoid the risks of high cost, lengthy billing transformation projects.” Poulos adds: “CSPs that have not yet undergone some major transformation of their legacy back-office will have no choice but to work with adjunct systems – but in the long term, the exercise may not be costeffective.” For Kyriakakis, virtual network operators have demonstrated that integration of new systems can be achieved rapidly and cost effectively. “The rapid rollout of MVNOs in recent years is proof that integrating new systems into a network can be done rapidly and cost effectively,” she says. “The benefits of being able to offer new services to customers and bill for them in real-time will, over time, offset the initial cost and time of overhauling a billing solution.” Some CSPs have implemented separate platforms, such as for MVNE operations, others have taken the chance to create fresh brands to serve specific verticals. “Relatively few, on the other hand, have managed to successfully combine radically new business models with the mainstream business processes and IT systems,” says Ahomaki. One BSS system to cater for all possible scenarios seems unachievable. Focusing on core business needs and remaining open to unforeseen opportunities while collaborating with extremely innovative partners may be the best way to square this rapidly evolving and complex CSP environment as business models, customer demand and foundational technologies continue to undergo extensive disruption and systemic change.

Jennifer Kyriakakis: Billing and charging in real-time for any service presents a range of complications for CSPs

Vic Bozzo: It’s more important than ever that CSPs have a unified system in place

Martin Morgan: CSPs are going for an adjunct approach and putting a real-time charging system in place to cater for all data traffic for all customers

Michelle Nowak: Capabilities need to be network, service and event agnostic to support a wider range of services

INTERVIEW

Billing-as-a-service benefits beat the capex burden and constraints of in-house systems Chris Newton-Smith, the vice president of marketing at Redknee, which has just signed up US MVNO EcoMobile to its cloud-based billing and customer care solution, tells George Malim the pay-as-you-grow, success-based model is appealing to CSPs of all types

s communications service providers (CSPs) turn to cloud-based IT, often provided on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis, some are willing to trust on-demand IT to support services as business critical as billing and charging. Few of the largest CSPs are prepared to jump with both feet into the cloud era when it comes to these systems, but they are willing to engage with them to support specific offerings, or in areas of their business where the accelerated time-to-market offered by cloud systems is appealing. “I tend to divide the market for cloud and SaaSbased billing and charging systems into a few different categories,” explains Chris Newton-Smith, the vice president of marketing at Redknee. “From a retail perspective, tier one and tier two CSPs have a different approach than tier two and three MVNOs. Larger CSPs want to maintain full control over their core retail businesses, but the others, particularly new entrants, see the benefits of cloud and SaaS services.” Newton-Smith sees two key areas of appeal for these types of CSPs. “With a lower capex, it is easier to get up and running more quickly, allowing these service providers to focus more on marketing and sales,” he says. “In the retail sector, there is a split between larger and smaller CSPs, but even the larger ones are adopting some of the technologies behind cloud and SaaS. After all, these same technologies are driving the overall trend towards virtualisation, where even the largest CSPs are gaining some of the benefits of a cloud system.”

It’s when we move away from the large CSPs’ traditional heartland – away from their core retail business – that they begin to show a greater

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willingness to adopt cloud and SaaS systems. “Other areas of the business, such as wholesale, B2B, machine-to-machine (M2M), hosting MVNOs, and even parts of the enterprise market, are all areas in which CSPs are very open to SaaS models,” adds Newton-Smith. “You can see the trend towards delivery of IT services as a cloud offering in the broader enterprise IT market, but for network operators, the challenge is how to interact in real-time with the other core systems. The technical challenge is surmountable, but issues such as service level agreements, real-time integration and network attributes need to be taken into account.”

business goals. “The issue of focus is important,” explains Newton-Smith. “CSPs are looking to focus their efforts on activities that provide their business with greatest amount of opportunity, but replicating billing and charging functionality doesn’t achieve that. They really want to focus on sales, new services and their go to market plans.”

Cloud for adjunct systems

Taking the IT headaches away and moving towards a service-based model resonates well with the mood of most CSPs. “They want to innovate and experiment and bring new services to market, but if they have to make a large IT investment to do so, it becomes a high risk approach,” Newton-Smith says. “SaaS gives them the means to try new things without committing to a large upfront expense, and that is what’s driving cloud and SaaS adoption.”

“For larger service providers, their primary interest in SaaS comes when they realise they can’t do certain things with their existing systems, such as introduce a new service or address a new market quickly enough,” he explains. “CSPs of all sizes and in many markets use our system because, upon evaluating their in-house systems, they realise that the time and costs involved would be too high for the business case they are pursuing to actually work. Even for a very large CSP it can make sense to move towards a SaaS approach.” Elimination of capex is the clear headline attraction here, but Newton-Smith identifies a series of other benefits for CSPs, regardless of their market segment. “CSPs like seeing a system up and running in the cloud; they like the pay-as-you-grow, success-based model, and they like that they can start prototyping services and launch them to market very quickly,” he says. “In addition, the risks associated with cloud based solutions are significantly lower. A new CSP focused on sales and marketing doesn’t want the financial risk of building a complete IT stack.” “Such players often don’t have the necessary experience – especially if they’re an entrant from an industry outside of telco, like many MNVOs,” he adds. “Worse, in some markets, they can’t even find the necessary skills. The workforce just isn’t there. In the US or Europe it’s quite easy, although highly competitive, to get the right people, but in other markets it can be difficult to recruit people with the right sets of skills, so the idea of using cloud based billing and charging as a way to improve operations and share resources is appealing. It means you don’t need the same staff in place in every point of presence.” Even where the skills are available to set up and operate in-house systems, there’s a potential cost for CSPs to pay in terms of lost focus on their prime

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I JUNE / JULY 2015

“SaaS gives them the opportunity to free up resources to focus on what’s important to the business,” he adds. “The added benefits are that they know the system will be continuously upgraded and it has to adhere to service level agreements.”

Chris Newton-Smith: CSPs are looking to focus their efforts on activities that give them the greatest opportunity

Follow the business case Newton-Smith adds that for those concerned about ceding control of such critical systems to an IT service provider that this doesn’t have to be a permanent state. “It makes sense to go with a cloud or SaaS approach first because you always have the opportunity to bring things back in-house if the business case justifies it,” he explains. In addition, he thinks many of the cultural, technical and regulatory barriers are starting to recede. “There is a cultural aspect to deciding whether or not to deploy a cloud system, but it’s not the prime issue, which is really more about understanding what your starting point is,” he says. “Some CSPs have been in business for decades and have built up extensive IT assets and they want to get the most out of these assets as possible. Some look at SaaS systems as just another set of partners to manage and another system to invest in that you can’t even see.” “CSPs have understandable caution to issues such as data protection, which is why they’re testing cloud and SaaS in areas adjacent to their core businesses,” he adds. “These barriers will decrease over time, and if there’s a good business reason, CSPs will make the investments required. It requires time and experience for people to become familiar with these models, but the drivers are there for more uptake of cloud and SaaS – after all, on a personal level, we’re all familiar with and using cloud services now.”

www.redknee.com

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Today 4 Billion people live in cities

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D I G I TA L S E R V I C E S

Innovation in the digital world requires letting go

Not so long ago, communications service providers (CSPs) had large IT staffs to manage massive infrastructures, designed to support a small number of products and services sold to large volumes of customers. Now, the dynamics have changed and IT must do more with less staff and stagnant budgets, writes Alam Gill

he uptake of digital services by consumers is staggering and continues to surpass all projections. Today, almost three billion people – that’s 40% of the world’s population – are using the internet, with many accessing this superhighway of content through their smartphones and other communication devices. Nowhere is the growth trajectory more impressive than in the developing world, where, according to the International Telecommunication Union, nearly twothirds of the world’s internet users – 1.9 billion in 2014 – are from. And while the figures continue to skyrocket, so too do the challenges and opportunities for CSPs. As they transform into digital service providers (DSPs), CSPs are faced head-on with the challenge of managing the two speeds of IT. As research firm Gartner puts it, two-speed IT is the conundrum that many IT organisations in telecoms and other industries face in today’s accelerated digital world. On one hand, they must continue to optimise and maintain legacy systems that are responsible for the very fundamentals of the business: from billing to order management, mediation, network management and beyond.

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Gartner’s 2014 poll of CIOs showed conclusively that businesses now face the challenge of straddling a second era of enterprise IT and a new, third digitalisation era – moving from running IT like a business within a business, into a period characterised by deep innovation beyond process optimisation, exploitation of a broader universe of digital technology and information, more-integrated business and IT innovation, and a need for much faster and more agile capability.

Alam Gill is senior vice president of international managed services, at CSG International

And while there is pressure internally to innovate within IT to support new services, Gartner’s CIO survey showed that IT budgets are only marginally growing. All of this begs the question: how do CSPs continue to innovate in this rapidly evolving digital world? Can cost cutting the legacy environment fuel the investment required on its own? If so, is that a long term sustainable funding model? There are many questions without straightforward answers, but one emerging response is to give anything that is not a core competency to trusted partners. Not so long ago, the telecoms industry had large IT staffs to manage massive infrastructures, designed to support a small number of products and services sold

But they must also focus on implementing new IT infrastructure and business processes that can deliver a seamless customer experience, manage increasingly

complex partner relationships and rapidly launch new digital services to seize market share.

D I G I TA L S E R V I C E S

to large volumes of customers. They had the resources internally – and often complemented by an off-shore strategy – to manage existing systems and add new ones as the business demanded. Their teams had unique skillsets so they could support the specialised applications humming along in their infrastructure. Now IT must do more with fewer staff and stagnant budgets. It’s no wonder that many CSPs are moving to a managed services model as they evolve into DSPs. Managed services has become a viable model for many CSPs as they look to free up internal resources to innovate new revenue-generating services. A study led by Technology Business Research shows the appetite for managed services will continue to grow – in fact, TBR predicts that the IT outsourcing managed services market in the telecoms industry is expected to exceed US$12 billion by the end of 2016. TBR’s research shows the trend toward managed services is growing worldwide, driven by the need to innovate faster to retain customers, deepen the variety of products and services, and often to expand the reach of services to new geographic markets. Telecoms providers from across the world are also looking for outside experts to offer skill sets that are often in short supply – those needed to optimise, manage and maintain existing key systems like wholesale, retail and enterprise billing, data mediation and beyond. Because managed services partners are often tapped to handle a CSP’s critical systems like billing, they must be a proven and trusted partner. After all, if you can’t bill for a new service properly, driving a profit becomes nearly impossible. Managed services partners deploy and operate new environments to help underpin their rapid growth into digital services – often the key to future growth for the

CSP. As a result, today’s managed services partnership is becoming re-imagined as more of an integrated business partnership than the old school vendor vs customer relationship. At a time when IT organisations are trying to push the pedal to the metal while simultaneously stepping on the brake, the re-imagined managed services partnership provides a viable model that gives CSPs agility like they’ve never had before. Some key benefits to this model that we are hearing from CSPs are: • Lowered capital expenditures and other costs. With shrinking profit margins and costly rollouts for new digital services, lowering capex continues to be a big push for CSPs in moving to a managed services model. In fact, nearly 73% of those polled in TBR’s survey said that reducing costs through outsourcing was a key driver for shifting to this approach. The evidence is clear that lowered capex costs is a real benefit to managed services. With lowered costs, CSPs can implement new services and the systems to support them; invest incrementally in other business priorities and reinforce their bottom lines. • CSPs want partners in transformation. While lowering costs is an integral part of managed services, it isn’t the only one. Managing change effectively is a critical component as well while CSPs are experiencing business transformation at all levels – from business models to people, process and technology. CSPs say they are looking for experts to not only run core systems, but also to help manage this wave of change. As a result, they are increasingly looking to partners to play this role. And it makes complete sense. Why not entrust the companies that actually make the platforms to operate, optimise, maintain and evolve them? Through these managed services partnerships, CSPs gain trusted partners who can play a long-term role in supporting their business today while planning for the future and helping to manage future risk.

A study led by Technology Business Research shows the appetite for managed services will continue to grow

• Freedom to innovate. A common theme we hear with our clients and prospective clients is ‘we don’t have time to innovate.’ This sentiment is echoed by the TBR survey, in which 53% of CSPs surveyed said that the managed services model frees up additional resources within the company to support new initiatives. With new services, the ecosystem of partners and content continuing to grow at great speed, innovation is critical to the success of a CSP. Time spent on managing existing systems could be better spent on planning for the future, accelerating the rollout of firstto-market services and collaborating with internal stakeholders like marketing and customer service to create a differentiated offering. It’s clear that it’s a new world, and traditional models are breaking down. In their place, exciting new opportunities are emerging. These new models promise to put CSPs in the driver seat for delivering new services in this digital world – but not without skilled partners as their trusted co-pilots.

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I JUNE / JULY 2015

It’s time to get your M2M ducks in a row The rise in partner settlement complexity needs to be addressed to ensure IoT success, writes Vic Bozzo

nalysts are predicting there will be up to one trillion potential M2M (machine-to-machine) connections by 2020 – a number that more than doubles the size of the telecoms market today. That’s a lot of growth over the next few years, and its growth that isn’t coming from the traditional set of services such as voice and broadband. It’s coming from the connection of things, with communications service providers (CSPs) creating new platforms for partnerships with enterprise businesses and OTT players that want to offer new applications and connected solutions to their customers.

volume/low value M2M transactions be managed when many of today’s service providers are using outdated settlement and revenue assurance systems that were built for another era, and often still depend on manual processes? In addition, many revenue assurance teams are lacking experienced personnel, yet they are about to encounter a tsunami of data that needs to be audited and validated. Billions of different types of events require rating and analysis; agreements are complex and quality of service requires constant oversight. In such an environment, CSPs need a partner settlement solution that can manage new service launches with complex tariff plans and revenue-share agreements.

A partnership explosion New partnerships and connected ecosystems are popping up like dandelions in the spring time, and as all of these various partners scramble to figure out how to best participate in the new M2M economy and determine what business model works best for them, it’s important not to overlook a very important piece – partner billing and settlement. Telecoms companies will need a way to manage potentially thousands of new partners and a highly complex value chain. M2M will give CSPs the ability to derive new revenues from settlement and interconnect opportunities, and many of these M2M transactions will need to be accounted for based on usage, with often complex key performance indicators (KPIs), commissions and revenue share deals to account for.

New complexity, new challenges Traditional telecoms services such as voice are well covered by revenue assurance, however, as TM Forum states in a recent report, coverage of services identified as ‘the future growth engines’ for CSPs, such as digital services and IoT, is still low, and further investment is needed in these areas. There is no doubt that the increase in these highly complex M2M revenue streams will give rise to new avenues of revenue leakage. Revenue leakage thrives on complexity and change, and it can spell huge losses for companies and affect business profitability. The question is, how can all of these new high

The author, Vic Bozzo, is the senior vice president of worldwide sales and marketing at Telarix

It’s all about automation Experience shows that vendors overcharge an average of 4-9% of the total invoice value, and 50/50 settlements of disputes are often agreed to only because CSPs lack the compelling evidence to win disputes. There is real money at stake, and it’s only going to get worse as the number of transactions continues to climb. The only way around this dilemma is through automation. Billing, settlement, and dispute management functions need to be highly automated and designed to mutually support each other. The Telarix solution gives the billing and settlements process a major revenue assurance boost as it validates data upon receipt, normalises that data, and removes the errors that always occur whenever human hands touch high volumes of data. Traditionally, lack of automation has made auditing one of the most overlooked components of a comprehensive revenue assurance strategy, but now is the time to get your proverbial ducks in a row when it comes to partner billing and settlement. Ensuring your back office can manage tomorrow’s front office challenges is the only way to protect your investment as partner complexity and data transactions continue to climb at a frightening pace. The opportunities M2M is bringing to CSPs are tremendous, just be ready for the challenges.

www.telarix.com

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June / July 2015 Volume 17 Issue 3 ISSN 1745-1736

Exclusive interview with Razorsight’s CEO, Charlie Thomas PLUS: How cloud is liberating the telecoms industry from the constrained choices of five-year planned IT economies ■ Ericsson’s Pablo Martinez on why network functions virtualisation is a critical step on the journey towards telco cloud ■ Can telco cloud provide the flexible environment for CSPs to run their businesses efficiently and agilely? ■ Read the latest news, opinion, blogs and features at www.vanillaplus.com

INTERVIEW

Charlie Thomas: Some on-demand, burstable services will become the new norm

If your data flows through your fingers, so does your opportunity to participate in the cloud era

As communications service providers (CSPs) set out on the road to telco cloud, theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re utilising virtualisation technologies that enable them to reset the economics of their infrastructure cost. Cost economy gains aside, the big strategic question remains how will they grow revenues and overcome significant changes to their business models in the face of increased competition, revenue compression and subscriber saturation. The answer resides in the vast volumes of data passing through CSP networks regarding customer location, activity, preferences and behaviour. Banding together and deriving insights from that data could put them in an enviable position to monetise the impending on-demand era of burstable consumption via the cloud. Charlie Thomas, the CEO of Razorsight, tells VanillaPlus that CSPs are well positioned â&#x20AC;&#x201C; if they think differently and move quickly. He suggests that making use of cloud app driven data, coupled with predictive analytics, would enable CSPs to proactively know what users want and when, and enable whole-hearted participation in the cloud ecosystem. Using their knowledge and their infrastructure could put CSPs at the heart of the market, rather than positioning them solely as broadband providers connecting users, app and content providers IN ASSOCIATION WITH RAZORSIGHT

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I JUNE / JULY 2015

I think CSPs are in the best place of anyone in the entire ecosystem to use the data to deliver proactive, superior customer experiences

VanillaPlus: What do you see as the key cloud offerings that CSPs are moving towards offering? Charlie Thomas: They have already migrated to some offerings. They have some B2B offerings, especially in the data centre market, and enterprises are all moving to VoIP and hosted PBXs as well as looking to move their own IT infrastructure to the cloud – often provided by CSPs. Some have dabbled in apps by putting up app stores but I don’t think they’ve been very successful. They could be in a very good place to play in the security market. We now hear of security breaches and hacking that has jeopardised consumer and enterprise data. With mobility and cloud becoming ever more ubiquitous, I see security and protection, such as proactive fraud monitoring, being the sorts of applications that CSPs will be in a unique position to offer. The chief executives of CSPs are thinking beyond participating in cloud-based delivery toward providing turnkey services and solutions. For example, certain applications – such as healthcare and financial – require constant network quality so quality of service for delivery becomes extremely important with far greater consequences for failure. VP: What do CSPs need to be successful in offering cloud services?

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I JUNE / JULY 2015

VP: To what extent are CSPs in a unique position to capture, collect, analyse and react in real-time to rapidly shifting consumer and business demands and desires? CT: I think CSPs are in the best place of anyone in the entire ecosystem to use the data to deliver proactive, superior customer experiences. They’ll be in a better position even than Google, although Google is now moving into some aspects of the network, and of course controls the operating system in the majority of mobile devices. CSP’s ownership of the network and access to the data that passes through networks, provides a substantial opportunity to benefit from being at the epicentre of all the data. They can use that data to understand consumption patterns and become much more proactive. They’re in a better position than anyone when it comes to location data. However, thus far, CSPs have yet to realize the value of this data. They have not demonstrated they can be innovative when it comes to creating exciting new applications and they tend to move in a me too or herd mentality. Telefónica was an early leader in looking at ways to monetise mobile data and all of the tier one CSPs have had teams all looking to do this for several years. That said, the innovation continues to

CT: Some on-demand burstable services will become the new norm. Hence, being in a position to manage those will require the ability to react very quickly. CSPs

are normally reactive to rapidly changing customer desires and behaviours so having the right set of analytical tools will become essential in order to proactively understand changing demands on their networks and the propensity for burstable demand emerging at specific times of day or in specific locations.

INTERVIEW

There is no question that, when it comes to the delivery model, CSPs will migrate to cloud and there is no question that they’ll deliver business applications to enterprises

come from application developers and OTT apps. The CSPs need to move beyond looking at only their subscribers as that relegates them to a closed ecosystem. They need an open systems approach that links with all other CSPs in order to deliver the ubiquity that users demand. For example, if Sprint offers data driven, targeted based ads to Audi, based only on the preferences of its 50 million subscribers, it’s missing 95% of the market. CSPs would benefit greatly by working collaboratively to deliver allencompassing insights based on the full ecosystem of users and data driven insights – powered by predictive analytics – across the full spectrum of networks. CSPs have been very closed and somewhat myopic. They would collectively benefit from a more open approach and across all infrastructure, not just their own. If they don’t, they risk the OTT providers continuing to outrun, outthink and outpace them. There is no question that, when it comes to the delivery model, CSPs will migrate to cloud and there is no question that they’ll deliver business applications to enterprises. That said, the true innovators will fully monetise their data to better serve the desires of the market. Imagine what Google or Facebook would do if they continue to evolve toward the communications services market. VP: Is this a chance for CSPs to finally move away from being network operators and redefine themselves and their role? CT: Yes. it really is an ideal time. I believe that this is one of those opportune moments for the telecoms industry. You can’t argue with the success CSPs have experienced, but they’re now at another one of those inflection points that poses both opportunity and risk. Growth has reached a plateau and price compression is accelerating. We’re seeing massive consolidation on a global basis to offset these trends and this is increasingly a scale business. CSP business models need to shift and shift quickly and those that do will be in a great position. It’s not enough to hang on to what they have for as long as they can. That approach will result in continued customer and market erosion.

www.razorsight.com

They can deliver valuable services to businesses and consumers and ultimately they have a great opportunity if they can create, innovate, design and develop solutions. The question remains whether they will rely primarily on network equipment vendors,

device manufacturers and OTT providers, or are they going to participate themselves and layer on value and monetise such? I believe they are in a great position to capitalise but it requires new thinking, new business models and using the data that today flows right through their fingers. VP: How does Razorsight complement and enable CSPs in the progression towards all things cloud? CT: We have a range of analytics solutions that are productised for the specific business needs that CSPs have. Our products address business challenges around the delivery of data insights. We provide executive insights which deliver key business and operational metrics in real-time that reflect network consumption and utilisation by both consumers and enterprises. When you look at the much broader and on-demand arena of cloud service delivery, for example increasing data capacity just for a big upload – something that is burstable in nature – it’s readily apparent that predictive insights into available capacity versus demand would be very valuable. The way Razorsight participates is multi-faceted. One way is by helping CSPs understand network consumption on a real-time basis. The most powerful products we have are predictive analytics, which we’ve deployed across tier one, two and three service providers as well as content and OTT providers. One example is our predictive product that helps CSPs proactively know by customer and market when they’re most likely to migrate from TDM to IP. Thus far, CSPs have been reactive with regard to visibility for this migration. IP offers greater bandwidth at a more economical price but the rapid shift is hurting the tier one CSPs who haven’t had the analytical tools to understand who is leaving or who is at risk of leaving. I see a similar parallel in the migration to all things cloud because, without proper analytics tools and insight to understand consumption, demand and customer sentiment, CSPs are likely to encounter many surprises – much like occurred with AT&T when it introduced the first iPhone. CSPs will benefit greatly by utilising predictive analytics to forecast likely demand and behaviour with a very high degree of accuracy as they accelerate along the path of all things cloud.

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I JUNE / JULY 2015

TELCO CLOUD

CSPs wary of cloud as years of limited IT choices come to an end The cloud is liberating the telecoms industry from the horrors of Soviet style, five-year planned IT economies, but the struggle is just beginning writes Nick Booth

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. The modern state that telecoms operators have evolved into – communications service providers (CSPs) – is a perfect example of this phenomenon.

When the cloud ushered in a completely different way of working, it created both cultural changes and a wealth of business options so vast that they have yet to be fully explored. If cloud computing is an offering, many CSPs have yet to walk the full length of the counter, because they have so many choices to consider.

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I JUNE / JULY 2015

Cloud computing offers all the exciting purchasing choices of the free market

The freedom to make small purchasing decisions with far more frequency, has liberated decision makers and made for a faster business culture where new projects get signed off more quickly. The elasticity of supply and demand is initially being used to helps CSPs face the universal challenges of managing costs while meeting the demands of their customers, says Guru Grewal, global head of Virtusa’s telecoms division. “Cloud creates elastic pay-per-use services like infrastructure as a service for lines of business to consume on demand,” says Grewal. At the same

Gone is the old fashioned Soviet style centrally planned IT economy, where committees would have to agonise over platform purchasing decisions, for systems that had to last at least five, often more, years. If an IT manager got it wrong, they’d be sent to career Siberia, amongst all the clunking grey boxes of proprietary hardware and remote silos of information.

Cloud computing offers all the exciting purchasing choices of the free market. Never mind five-year plans, with cloud computing you can rent five apps in five nations for five milliseconds each. Every component, from processing power to petabytes, can be rented in the cloud.

TELCO CLOUD

time, it helps them create new business by enabling CSPs to crunch masses of consumer data, work out what the customer wants and deliver those services over a newly created seamless omni channel of personalised customer experience.

Guru Grewal: Cloud creates elastic pay-per-use services like infrastructure as a service

Chris Halbard: CSPs can retake ownership of the user experience from their OTT rivals

In previous industrial eras, cloud would have been a machine for slicing and dicing resources and rebadging them. Infrastructure, office software and customer relationship management systems have all been virtualised. This changed the customer base too, Grewal says. The cloud gives small and medium enterprise (SME) clients access to powerful computing – not just for development but for hosting and product development. Now a small video player in the UK can work with a games developer in Poland and a social media expert in San Francisco. They retain the advantages of being an SME, such as rapid decision making and low overheads, and can match the weaponry of their bigger opponents. They can nip in and out of markets, make quick gains and then get out once the bigger beasts enter the competition. “In many ways cloud enables SMEs to out-innovate their competition and helps them punch above their weight,” says Grewal, “these days business applications are designed with the mobile cloud in mind.” The CSP’s business and operational support systems – the BSS and OSS – need to be equally fluent as the cloud market but, for continuity’s sake, many are still rooted in the past. The cloud and the attendant hyper automation of application development could help CSPs get these systems updated faster. Modern cloud-deployed

BSS/OSS functions should be managing, marketing and monetising the entire range of CSP activities, says Gerry Donohoe, Openet’s technical director The agility, faster time to market, breadth of service and lower liabilities will not be achieved without challenges, warns Donohoe. Unlike typical enterprises or hyper scale cloud players, CSPs face strict latency targets and fine-nines availability. “They need to be engineered into a telco cloud architecture in order to achieve carrier-grade [reliability and resilience],” says Donohoe. On a new front, cloud services could arm CSPs in the OTT wars with the makers of over the top videos, films, music and social media. “CSPs can retake ownership of the user experience from their OTT rivals by taking the enabling role in providing all cloud content to the subscribers,” says Chris Halbard, the executive vice president and president, international at Synchronoss Technologies. The key to this is establishing and securely curating a unique digital profile for each of their subscribers. Gathering that personal information means you can act as the subscribers’ identity in the cloud, says Halbard. By simplifying things for your subscribers, you will win their affections and loyalty in a way that customer relationship management systems never achieved. The cloud, in other words, sets subscribers free and, as a consequence, they will keep coming back. The tiny increments of cloud services could create the unobtainable magic quality – customer loyalty – in a way that big old fashioned, authoritarian systems of management could never match.

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I JUNE / JULY 2015

EXPERT OPINION

NFV transforms passive CSP value chains into dynamic value constellations A critical step on the road to telco cloud is network functions virtualisation (NFV). Pablo Martinez explains how the technology is moving communications service providers (CSPs) to an agile environment that enables rapid new service introduction and improved operating margins The author, Pablo Martinez, is product marketing director of OSS at Ericsson

s every businessperson knows, there are two ways to make more money: increase revenues or decrease costs. Many words have been written about the new services and revenues that network functions virtualisation (NFV) will make possible, thanks to its elasticity and flexible support of new business models and ecosystems. However, very little is said about the second, perhaps more immediate, benefit of virtualisation – its ability to decrease service costs and improve operating margins. NFV enables the on-demand instantiation of functions in a format that is easier to load balance and scale up or down. It allows you to move functions dynamically across distributed hardware resources in the network, while maintaining service continuity and maintaining or even improving quality of service (QoS). With that kind of real-time fluidity, virtualisation can be exploited to morph a network automatically. Its functions can be executed on the nodes running at the lowest cost at any given time, to maximise operating margins. This is an aspect of NFV that is often overlooked.

This kind of consideration drives the business case for NFV. Even if you do not immediately use virtualised network functions (VNFs) to offer completely new services, you can use them to increase the profitability of any service, and without increasing prices.

Orchestrating better margins NFV is all about flexibility – making services and networks more responsive to customer needs with an infrastructure that is more elastic. But without the right kind of orchestration, this flexibility may still impair profitability. VNFs are automatically instantiated to run on specific hardware resources based on factors such as

NFV lets you factor in both technical and financial optimisation. You can dynamically calibrate the right level of operational flexibility into virtualised functions to reduce operational costs, improve operating margins and confidently implement more profitable business models – even for existing services. In turn, by maximising the financial value of services, you maximise business performance.

Figure 1: Financial value and operational flexibility lead to enhanced business performance through virtualisation

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VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I JUNE / JULY 2015

Figure 2: The virtualised operational environment consists of a closed-loop system

resource utilisation, workload levels and service level agreements (SLAs). But to fully harness the benefits of virtualisation, a comprehensive type of NFV orchestration is needed – one that is able to consider all aspects of a virtualised function, including the fluctuating costs of running it on any given hardware resource at a specific time. This is the subject of the TM Forum catalyst project ‘Maximizing Profitability with NFV.’ It addresses the analytics and policies needed to dynamically determine orchestration decisions for well-rounded NFV instantiations. The mission of the project is to delineate an operational environment where VNFs are instantiated and dynamically adjusted according to policies that optimise both business value – minimal costs, maximum profitability – and customer experience. As shown in the following figure, this operational environment consists of a closed-loop system consisting of monitoring, mediation, analytics and policy-driven instantiation and restoral. The resulting NFV orchestration considers the technical and financial metrics that make up the cost, revenue and QoS aspects of service offerings. Orchestration is optimised against a wide range of financial and technical objectives, such as infrastructure operational costs, network performance and service level agreements (SLAs). Policies are structured accordingly. The goal is a level of business agility not previously possible, enabled by the inherent flexibility of NFV orchestration. This capability is critical. It is possible to assign functions in a way that maintains service quality but is economically inefficient at a given point in time. This can result in satisfied customers but an unsatisfactory or even negative operating margin on the provided service. Ideally, functions should run wherever operational costs are the lowest, as long as SLAs and other key criteria are also met. Some of this information is already monitored by data centres and other third parties and is accessible to CSPs. For instance, the cost of electricity can be monitored in data centre locations and network nodes and factored

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I JUNE / JULY 2015

into cost calculations. Obviously, NFV orchestration will require a data analytics-enriched policy management capability, programmed with an algorithmic equation, to make the proper real-time determinations and maintain the specified operational cost thresholds. The complexities of NFV require tight coordination with a highly automated OSS/BSS. For this reason, NFV orchestration should be able to work with OSS/BSS product catalogues in the larger service orchestration framework. This ensures consistency across all functions, including planning, ordering, provisioning, configuration and activation.

NFV removes barriers between the financial and technical aspects of running networks

NFV as a source of operational efficiency NFV removes barriers between the financial and technical aspects of running networks. This enables a more cohesive business, where customer experience, services and the network are part of one orchestration – capable of optimising business value, such as operating margins, while coordinating resources, service quality and lifecycles. The elasticity of virtualisation expands existing value creation systems, transforming them from passive value chains into dynamic value constellations. These may make it possible to operate emerging digital service ecosystems at the lowest possible cost without compromising service quality. By dynamically moving VNFs in real time, even across service provider boundaries, you can comply with and more confidently guarantee SLAs while you also maximise operating margins – something not possible with only physical functions. New product development is widely seen as a source of greater profitability, but it is not the only source. Higher profits can also come from a more prosaic source: operational efficiency. This is achievable with NFV orchestration that allows combined business and financial objectives to play a more direct role in the daily operation of the underlying infrastructure. As a result, service providers will have more control over their reputations, branding and financial performance.

www.ericsson.com

V I R T U A L I S AT I O N

It’s cloud Jim, but not as we know it for CSPs The twin innovations of NFV and SDN will see communications service providers move away from hardware-defined networks to software defined, virtualised architectures. The move will take several or many years but the end game is telco cloud, a flexible agile environment in which CSPs run their businesses using cloud based software – even for OSS/BSS, writes George Malim

All CSP systems must now be engineered for fivenines – this is where a telecoms providers’ needs diverge from those of a typical enterprise customer

aking such systems as services from third parties has a series of benefits, among which speed of deployment and flexibility are key attractions but the end game of telco cloud seems a distant prospect. In addition, the downside for CSPs is a perceived loss of control and ownership of the software that supports their businesses. Put simply, CSPs have to look at cloud differently to other enterprises. “It’s cloud, Jim, but not as we know it,” says Justin Paul, the head of OSS marketing at Amdocs. “The term cloud in the network context is misleading because it makes assumptions that telco networks are synonymous with IT networks, when in reality they are very different. CSPs will certainly embrace network functions virtualisation (NFV) and software defined networking (SDN) to make their networks more IT cloud-like, particularly in terms of business agility and flexibility in which areas they do aspire to emulate the IT cloud, but in other areas telco-cloud will have its own unique identity.” For Gerry Donohoe, the technical director of Openet, it’s the traditional five-nines imperative that sets CSPs apart. “All CSP systems must now be engineered for five-nines – this is where a telecoms providers’ needs diverge from those of a typical enterprise customer,” he says. “Cloud-based SaaS offerings present a series of challenges for the CSP. One such challenge is a CSP’s need to provide low latency, high capacity links to public or hosted clouds. Another is the concern over data security, in particular personal data governed by increasingly strict data protection regulations.”

Others thinks CSPs will target specific systems and reap cloud benefits where they appear. “CSG has delivered cloud-based BSS as a service to CSPs for many years,” says Rob Morrison, director of product management, CSG International. “It enables them to re-focus on innovation, to better serve their customers and to do so faster to differentiate themselves from the competition. It can stop them being a software development house for day-to-day applications and processes.” Andy Stubley, the vice president of strategy at SysMech shares that view. “Some CSPs are already embracing cloud-based services, and some are hosting their own services in their own private clouds – the technology is proven, but the commercial and operating models are still in their infancy,” he says. Tom Griffin, the vice president of systems engineering for EMEA at SevOne, advocates caution and acknowledges there is mistrust of cloud propositions among CSPs. “For OSS/BSS systems there’s an inherent risk and mistrust from CSPs to deploy offpremise,” he says. “They will always be deployed

Dr Andy Tiller, the vice president of product marketing at AsiaInfo, thinks BSS is just too complex for public

cloud models. “We are not seeing a trend to BSS-asa-Service in the public cloud for CSPs because BSS is too complex for a lowest common denominator, one size fits all models to work,” he says. “However, we are seeing a trend to private cloud deployments of centralised systems within a large operator group. For example, we have helped China Mobile and China Unicom to standardise and centralise their BSS across their numerous operations in China, and we are in the process of helping Telenor develop a strategy to centralise and standardise BSS across multiple business units in Europe, using multi-tenancy.”

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I JUNE / JULY 2015

Justin Paul: Telco cloud will have its own unique identity

Dr Andy Tiller: BSS-as-a-Service is too complex for one size fits all models to work

in-house even if the management and administration of them is outsourced.” There is, in effect, a SaaS line that CSPs won’t cross for some systems. “SaaS is most suited to solutions that can be commoditised, and anything the CSP considers as a differentiator will be difficult for a SaaS deployment model,” adds Donohoe. “Billing would certainly be considered as a differentiator by CSPs and typically involves significant customisation. Instead CSPs are looking to virtualisation technology to better suit their BSS needs. This is because it offers some of the benefits promised by SaaS including lower operating costs and faster deployment, whilst still providing control and ownership of the software and infrastructure.” There’s obvious value in passing on the integration, upgrade and management burden to a third party cloud service provider but CSPs are still cautious of the economics of shifting their previous system operation investments to a monthly, rental model. “CSG has found CSPs actually save money by moving to a service based model,” adds Morrison. “When entering into such partnerships with customers CSG delivers immediate cost savings to the business and continues to deliver value as we help CSPs transform their operations and architecture for the future.” Donohoe thinks a standard SaaS model isn’t going to work for all CSPs. “A typical SaaS consumption based model is less than ideal for CSPs that need predictable costs over longer time periods and a way to capitalise investments,” he explains. “However the elasticity required to handle things like intermittent peak activity or fail-fast innovation, are hampered by the traditional licence models. CSPs need a better

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I JUNE / JULY 2015

way to balance the capex and opex cost. This is most likely to come in the form of licence flexibility for virtualised deployments than in the form of true SaaS.” In spite of their concerns, executives think at least some form of telco cloud will emerge, most like composing a hybrid situation. “A hybrid cloud and non-cloud situation will of course continue to exist, at least for the foreseeable future,” says Donohoe. “Yet the pace at which technologies such as NFV and SDN are progressing will increase the speed at which the telco cloud adoption becomes a reality. Proof of this comes as many CSPs start to merge and consolidate their network and IT groups, evolving to a common cloud-based architecture for both telecoms and IT domains.” Morrison warns of conflicting definitions. “This depends on how you define telco cloud,” he adds. “Outsourcing network infrastructure and operations to third parties as a service is already a reality, as it is for BSS. If you define telco cloud as only being NFV, then this vision is a long way off. Traditional infrastructure will be in place for many years to come.” Paul at Amdocs is convinced that telco cloud will become are reality. “It is not simply the adoption of IT cloud in the network domain, but a unique approach to implementation of cloud principles in a manner that addresses the core requirements of the robust and resilient CSP network,” he says. “While we are seeing the rapid adoption of software-defined networking and some very advanced NFV proof-of-concepts, hybrid networks will become the reality for the next five-toten years, with only the occasional greenfield CSP or early adopter breaking the trend.”

Rob Morrison: Telco cloud can stop CSPs being a software development house for day-to-day applications and processes

Tom Griffin: For OSS/BSS systems there’s an inherent risk and mistrust from CSPs to deploy off-premise

DIARY

Upcoming events

Cloud Latin America 1-2 September, 2015 Sao Paolo, Brazil Organiser: Informa latam.cloudworldseries.com

Super Mobility Week 9-11 September, 2015

Network Virtualisation Forum 15-17 September, 2015

Las Vegas, USA Organiser: CTIA www.ctiasupermobility2015.com

Madrid, Spain Organiser: Informa networkvirtualizationeurope.com

Telco Big Data Summit @ Super Mobility Week 9 September, 2015

LTE Voice Summit 2015 29-30 September, 2015 London, UK Organiser: Informa voice.lteconference.com

Las Vegas, USA Organiser: Informa usa.telcobigdata.com

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CLOCKING OFF!

The cloud could make us all less pretentious Cloud computing could change meeting cultures and time wasting at the clients’ expense, writes Nick Booth

echnology always has unintended consequences, many of which are terrible but often they are brilliant. The cloud could unexpectedly change some horrible social attitudes.

Technology changes us in ways we don’t anticipate. Historians have identified the invention of glass, for example, as the catalyst for massive strides in the advance of civilisation. Letting light in on homes, pubs and work buildings allowed the population to see their way to create cleaner environments, which cut disease and gave them more hours in the day when they could function more usefully. By cutting death rates and raising productivity alone, glass had a fundamental role in fomenting the industrial revolution. Its other roles in the creation of machinery are too numerous to go into here but the point is that glass created changes in society that its inventors would have never dared to dream of. On the other hand another product of silicon, the computer, has had mixed effects on our culture. If – as some Latin scholars insist – education is about bringing out our qualities, then social media seems an awful side effect of the IT revolution. It seems to bring out our basest instincts and has inspired us to become a community of pugnacious trolls. Who could have predicted that something with a cute name like Twitter would be a modern Pandora’s box? Cloud computing is another technology whose name gives it lovely fluffy associations. This issue, we make the argument that this technology liberates CSPs from the tyranny of centralised, rigid, planned economies and gives them access to a vibrant, fast moving free market economy for IT resources. However, there is another consequence of the cloud which I’m far more excited about. I’m indebted to Mark Edwards, the CEO of billing company MDS, for pointing this out. The cloud could civilise the executive classes. When companies like MDS offer their services to clients, the model of delivery changes. Since they get paid on a pay per use model, that concentrates everyone’s minds. Since MDS doesn’t start earning money until the system is up and running, everyone is incentivised to get the job done as quickly and efficiently as possible.

VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I JUNE / JULY 2015

This has changed the dynamic of meetings completely. Once a gathering of telecoms executives was a place where it was important to be seen and heard. My experience of creating a channel study for a large British telecoms company indicates that everyone in a big corporation feels they must contribute something in every meeting – or risk corporate social death. The fact that these interventions multiply the complexity of the project is the least of their worries. So projects could take ten times longer and cost ten times as much, but it didn’t matter because somebody else was paying. A telecoms engineer – who didn’t know he was speaking to a journalist – once told me how he’d spent a day at a Harley Street clinic, playing solitaire on his laptop and listening in to patient phone calls. He was stringing out the job by looking busy. Fixing a PBX was the work of minutes, but he had to stay on the premises to justify the massive fee the client was going to be charged.

The author, Nick Booth, is a contributor to VanillaPlus and a technology journalist

Cloud computing has changed that social dynamic. Payment by results means that nobody wants to be the one who extends meetings longer than they need to. Anyone who wants to modify the project will need to be absolutely certain that they are contributing an improvement. Once, a development meeting was like a long leisurely lunch. Now they’re conducted with the urgency of half-time team talks – everyone is on their feet and the basic realities are discussed. The cloud has also changed the nature of applications. Some traditional office apps, for example, were offered in much more basic form once Microsoft began selling them on the cloud. We don’t need 95% of the stuff in most applications anyway. Whatever doesn’t add – according to the editing mantra – detracts. Now that there’s a mutual incentive, between clients and CSPs, to get the job done as quickly and efficiently as possible, everything is starting to change. Often the cloud provider will try and coach the client to keep things simple, which would never have happened in the days when fees were based on the amount of work that could be created. Some CSPs are changing faster than others. That telecoms engineer I met at the parents’ evening? Judging by his van, he’s still in a job. I wonder how long he’ll be playing solitaire though.

A telecoms engineer – who didn’t know he was speaking to a journalist – once told me how he’d spent a day at a Harley Street clinic, playing solitaire on his laptop and listening in to patient phone calls

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