Best Practices for Improving Time to Market of New Products and Services

Next Generation Communications Blog

Best Practices for Improving Time to Market of New Products and Services

For today's network operators, the key to creating new revenue streams lies in their ability to quickly and cost effectively bring new services to market. It's an accepted fact that future success depends on applications and content that is delivered to the end user, not in the network itself.
 
Naturally, the network infrastructure must be in place to make these services available, which is why Alcatel-Lucent is heavily pushing its application enablement strategy, including its high leverage network theory, which will enable faster, more reliable, and more flexible service delivery, while promoting increased collaboration between network providers and their third party partners - the application developers and content providers.
 
While investing in intelligent network infrastructures is necessary, as they provide the physical foundation for making new products and services available, ultimately, the ability to quickly deliver new services rests largely on operators' ability to build strong third-party relationships. More specifically, they will need to move past mere marketing and branding agreements to include deeper technology integration to increase the value for both parties. This will have the added benefit of shortening time to market of new services, as partners will have greater insight into the network resources to allow them to more effectively build applications that will require less testing and modification.
 
This change in behavior - to date, network providers have been reluctant to allow access to their resources, and their partners, therefore, have been less motivated to collaborate more closely with them - is key quickly introducing new services. The network capabilities - application enablers - that will drive the creation of new revenue producing services includes, an ability to provide differential QoS, user demographic and behavioral data, end user devices and presence information, billing and provisioning abilities, hosting of content and applications, call control and messaging platforms, and, not least, customer support.
 
These capabilities, made available to in-house developers or third-party partners, will allow for increased efficiency in the development of new services that can run on different platforms to support a wider user base. They will also dramatically increase the number of partners network operators have access, since they not only promote a trusted two-way relationship, but also provide valuable resources developers and content providers are looking for as they seek to engage targeted audiences that are most likely to want their services, increasing the relevance of the entire value chain by leveraging contextual information to deliver services to users where and when they want them, on whatever devices they want them on.
 
Of course, there is also the question of identifying the right applications and services, the capacity for which is also enhanced through this sort of closer collaboration and sharing of information - and revenue. While it is nearly impossible to predict which specific applications will have the greatest impact, a few common traits that are likely to deliver the most significant return include:
  • A focus on multimedia capabilities
  • Personalization and customization
  • Leveraging collaboration and social networking
  • Anywhere, anytime, any device availability with seamless switching between platforms
  • Automation of installation and maintenance
  • Integration with other applications and services
What this list really means is that the most successful services will be more flexible and more adaptable to different user environments than ever before. In other words, they will leverage the need to personalization and customization.
 
For more on how third-party relationships can be developed to improve time to market of new services, read Alcatel-Lucent's white paper, Working with Third Party Services - An Action Plan for Network Providers.


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