Next Generation Communications Blog

February 2010

You are browsing the archive for February 2010.

Network Providers and Partners: A Perfect Marriage

Service providers looking for a way to boost their business initiatives often have a balancing act to perform. They need to keep maintaining their investments and services while trying to keep costs down.

Hey Network Operator: Wanna Focus on Strengths, Partner?

By David Sims

If you're a service provider today you have something of a conundrum: You want to maximize revenue, of course. This means keeping your network infrastructure delivering services reliably and cost effectively, which means investing in new access and delivery improvements.   And you have to do it without "alienating existing subscribers and applications, including those running on existing legacy systems," as TMC's Erik Linask has noted.   A recent paper from Alcatel-Lucent recommends considering partnerships, to allow you to focus on your core business competency, or strength. "Delivering the experience that end users and ecosystem partners want requires a shift to open business models. This evolution creates opportunities to develop partnerships with new revenue models and shared risks and rewards as well as opportunities to outsource some parts of your network or operations."   Generating revenue in a cloud computing environment is tricky. Industry analyst Jeff Kaplan wrote last June that the cloud computing industry "will borrow some of the best practices of previous generations of tech partnerships to solve today's revenue sharing challenge.

A New Opportunity for Network Operators

Given that the past 18 months have seen an explosion in the number of applications that are available to end users - mobile applications, widgets on TVs and PCs, as well as enterprise applications of all types - network operators are compelled to reconsider their business models and look for new streams of revenue to succeed.   As people continue to vigorously adopt a mobile and social lifestyle, it is increasingly important for service providers to move beyond traditional models and embrace an application enablement vision, according to the experts at Alcatel-Lucent.   Finding new sources of sustainable, profitable revenue isn't an option for service providers, but rather a strategic and financial necessity. Working with application and content providers - or ACPs - can give network operators leverage and new capabilities that will increase the relevance of their value chain.   According to Alcatel-Lucent, new partnership structures and business models allow network providers to achieve several common goals: 1) offering greater efficiencies in serving the demand for long tail applications; 2) allowing network providers to tap new sources of innovation spawned by broader development communities; 3) offering improved scale and speed in application delivery and; 4) establish new revenue opportunities both directly and indirectly associated with greater application adoption.

Changing Strategies with Open Development

As the fast-paced communications technology market continues to evolve with new products and announcements, network providers often face challenges in how to better address their audience's needs. As end users' demands increase for more applications for their connected devices, network operates need to shift their strategy to fulfill those needs and learn how to capitalize on effort

Open Development Platforms Offers Options

It's great to see how companies are embracing new technology. Many are finding innovative ways to stay on top of the various technological changes. And one popular method is to establish an open development platform.   Open networks, for example, give network operators a way to help customers access content from multiple devices across any network. For developers, it lets them be more productive and lessens the learning curve when migrating to new technology.   Verizon Wireless is one good example of how a company boosts its business with an open development initiative. It first kicked off the effort within 2008 with Intertek, a company that specializes in wireless, telecommunications and mobile application testing.   The Open Development program lets customers use any device and application on Verizon Wireless' national voice and data network after they have met relevant specifications and certification.

Alcatel-Lucent Gaining Contact Center Market Share

Recognition by third-party analysts, like Frost & Sullivan will only serve to enhance its presence. In fact, Alcatel-Lucent has already made significant strides: Frost has named it the EMEA Inbound Contact Routing Systems Market Penetration Leader for 2009, signifying Alcatel-Lucent's growth in the market. Specifically, the award is given to the vendor that has gained the most market share in the past two to three years.

Alcatel-Lucent Scores Another Key LTE Win in the U.S

Whether AT&T's strategy will allow it to catch up to Verizon, which will leverage its LTE network primarily for wireless broadband access at the outset, or not, remains to be seen. What is certain, however, is that Alcatel-Lucent has cemented itself in the global market as a dominant LTE supplier.

Five Ways to Boost Revenue in a Changing Wireless World

In the days when wireless technology, the Internet and applications rule, network operators are in a constant struggle to fulfill the demand for new Web applications. Meanwhile, application and content providers face a quandary of their own - the need to enhance the end-user experience.

Alcatel-Lucent Increases its Research Capabilities in Dublin

To further expand its research capabilities out of Dublin, Bell Labs has announced it is that it is expanding the scope of its reserach there, which, in turn, will create more than 70 new high-tech jobs over the next several years.

Shifting Strategies to Fulfill Wireless Experiences, Demand

These days, there's not much you can't do without a wireless connection. In an age where content is king, consumers and businesses are in the driver's seat paving the road for network operators to evolve to their needs. As the demand for new and larger Web applications increases alongside the need for more bandwidth to support those needs, network providers have to face the inevitable: that change is on the horizon. To capture consumer attention and drive new revenue streams, network providers need to change their marketing strategies.

Featured Events