Next Generation Communications - Cloud Archives

Service Providers Cut Costs and Boost Agility by Taking a Cloud Approach to Operations

2013-04-17T12:51:00Z

By Mae Kowalke

The cloud is one of the hottest trends in computing, and communication service providers (CSPs) have an edge when it comes to cloud services. That’s because unlike IT and internet companies, CSPs also control their own network. This gives CSP’s a unique advantage and the carrier cloud a leg up on other offerings.

But the carrier cloud is only one way that CSPs can benefit from the cloud. They also can apply the same technique used with the cloud, namely virtualization, to evolve their own operations.

“With this approach, CSPs can virtualize communications and messaging applications, along with fixed and mobile network functions, to reap the same rewards their cloud customers are enjoying,” noted a recent Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) white paper, Network Functions Virtualization: From Vaporware to New Era .

Alcatel-Lucent has been working on virtual telecommunications for more than year and a half—which is longer than most in this fast-moving space—and its experience and economic models show that using network functions virtualization (NFV) can bring a number of benefits to CSPs.

NFV challenges the idea that purpose-built hardware delivers a better price-performance ratio than general-purpose servers with lower performance.

In fact, Alcatel-Lucent has confirmed that capital expenditures drop by up to 50 percent over a five year period using NFV due to better resource utilization, and operating expenditure savings follow capital expense savings because there is less equipment to deploy and manage.

“With this approach, CSPs can move toward a homogeneous cloud-based infrastructure where network elements and applications are implemented as sets of virtual machines, storage devices and associated network configurations,” noted the paper. “Because the infrastructure is now shared and amortized across all applications, it becomes a platform for delivering carrier cloud services to enterprises and for transforming the CSP’s own operations.”

The greatest benefits go to CSPs that leverage software-defined networking and open source options such as OpenStack or CloudStack, according to the paper, since there is the most flexibility and innovation in that space.

While cost savings are itself a good reason that CSPs should consider taking the lessons of the cloud data center and applying it to operations, agility is perhaps the greatest benefit.

“When applications are virtualized, CSPs can introduce new services much faster and at much lower cost,” according to the paper. “Installing a new service no longer involves buying new equipment and sending staff to install it in any number of field locations. Instead, an application, such as a video conferencing server, can be onboarded onto a cloud management system then automatically deployed on virtual machines in the carrier cloud. The entire process takes just minutes, rather than months.”

The bottom line is that the cloud is not just for helping customers, it is also about creating operational efficiencies.

The Five "Ps" for Service Provider M2M Success: Prioritize, Placement, Participate, Partners and Persona

2012-03-25T19:14:04Z

By Erin Harrison

The burgeoning of machine-to-machine (M2M) applications in our increasingly connected world — partly characterized as consisting of an “Internet of Things” — has made telecommunication companies look to diversify their M2M offerings beyond what can easily become ones based primarily on commoditized connectivity.

A recent Alcatel-Lucent Enriching Communications article, “The 5-Ps of M2M Key to Service Provider Success,” describes the five “P’s” as:

Prioritize opportunities
Properly place their teams
Participate knowledgeably in the supply chain
Partner effectively
Establish a credible persona

They are based on findings of research firm Analysys Mason’s recently published, “M2M Communication Service Provider Scorecard: 2011.”

The potential for the success of M2M for service providers is evidenced also in work done by Frost & Sullivan. They say M2M connectivity revenue in Europe, which was 3 percent in 2010 and 4.2 percent in 2011 of M2M revenues, will grow significantly to more than 20 percent by 2017 as the monetization of M2M data drives the aggressive growth in the forecast.

Prioritize Opportunities

Careful prioritization of these opportunities will yield healthy, profitable businesses, according to Analysys Mason. The emphasis is on the word careful because some of the highest revenue-generating M2M applications can generate low profitability for service providers. Hence, prioritizing which sectors to move into based on profitability is critical. This is particularly true given that by 2020 there will be 2.1 billion network-aware devices with 90 percent connected via wireless networks. However, prioritizing which sectors to get involved in and measuring profitability will not be an easy task.

Proper Placement

The most successful service providers have overall M2M organizations of 50-100 employees with centralized staff for R&D, partnership management and product marketing, according to Analysys Mason. Certain resources will need to be centralized including R&D, partnership management and OSS/BSS support, but variances among organizations means they need to consider, for example, where the technical pre- and post-sales resources should be placed and what the size or headcount of each M2M functional areas should be.

Participation

Based on the Scorecard, there are three ways for service providers to participate in the M2M supply chain, which include: co-selling a partner’s solutions; selling/reselling a service provider’s own solutions; and acquiring solutions

Alcatel-Lucent believe service providers should partner to provide M2M hardware (modems/modules and equipment) and they should sell or resell their own connectivity, platform and integration services.

Partnerships

Due to the enormous number of opportunities in the market, no one single service provider has all of the resources and tools to offer an end-to-end M2M service. Therefore, partners are necessary as service providers develop their M2M market approach, according to Alcatel-Lucent.

Carefully selecting the right partners – rather than having the biggest number of partners – is critical in developing a profitable M2M business. To select the ideal partners, service providers need to consider their options to include geography, market sector and M2M application.

Persona

The fifth “P,” persona, could be the most important consideration for service providers looking to implement a successful M2M product for their business. Associating your company as an M2M provider is critical to market success.

Analysys Mason recommends a two-pronged approach to developing a service provider’s persona. Service providers first need to develop a strategy to determine where they will participate in the M2M value chain, which will help them create their M2M persona and build brand awareness with potential buyers and partners.

Knowing who you are – understanding perceptions and realities

In addition, service providers need to engage in market research to understand existing market perceptions of their M2M persona. As Alcatel-Lucent points out, “service providers that do not create a strong M2M persona may be overlooked in favor of a systems integrator (SI), other IT channel partner or an IT vendor.”

Together We Can Go Far: Alcatel-Lucent's ng Connect Program Drives Innovation for New Communications Technology Concepts

2012-03-19T17:40:39Z

By Mae Kowalke

Thanks to significant advances in broadband communication technology in the past few years, people from many industries and disciplines are coming up with some pretty innovative ways to work, play and do business. These often-disparate innovations represent growing opportunity for even greater changes, and greater rewards, if devices, applications and infrastructures were more effectively brought together.

With that vision in mind, Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) founded the ng Connect Program, intended to create an end-to-end ecosystem for rapidly delivering next generation services and applications, by combining the resources of industry, business and academic leaders. Enterprises, consumers and service providers all stand to benefit.

The ng Connect Program rightly claims that, “The opportunity is unprecedented. “ It has eight main goals:

Bring together companies that would not otherwise be linked to drive innovation
Blur the lines between wireline and wireless broadband user experiences
Foster concepts for innovative applications and devices
Integrate and validate new service concepts
Deliver new services, revenue models and applications to enterprises and service providers
Enable deployment of simple, innovative applications and services for consumers
Improve time to market for new concepts
Address key issues around early adoption of LTE and other broadband technologies

Connectivity, ALU points out, is rapidly converging in ways transformative to business, daily life, entertainment, and other areas. Individual companies, however, do not have the resources or expertise to rapidly deploy innovative services, create profitable new business models, or remove barriers to mass adoption.

The ng Connect Program addresses five main areas that represent barriers to success: innovation, connectivity and distribution, digital media management and QoS, applications and service integration, and business models and cases.

Addressing these barriers to success requires driving top line revenues, increasing competitive advantages, lowering OPEX, reducing churn, leveraging assets across networks, creating new business models, accelerating time to market, and speeding up resolution of standards and regulatory issues.

The ng Connect Program is driving innovation through three main elements:

Innovative Ecosystem – community of pioneering organizations and individuals
Innovative Environment – physical and virtual innovation spaces and leading edge tools and techniques
Concept Development – help for service providers to agilely create, evaluate and validate service concepts

The programs summarized below exemplify how various technologies and services are being brought together in innovative ways through ng Connect.

Acquisition – interactive mobile game that allows users to check in at physical locations, own locations virtually and rent out space to friends for a small fee.
Avatrainer – a fitness experience build on Microsoft Kinect, using personal avatars for virtual group setting workouts.
Connected Classroom – application that allows students to locate classes on a campus map and locate friends in real-time, and educators to provide lesson plans and collaborate with other teachers.
Connected Service Vehicle – suite of cloud-based services for commercial vehicles using tablet-to-care linkages, speech recognition for secure login, high definition video surveillance, and other applications.
Connected Shopper - combines online and in-store shopping through tools like QR codes and 3D kiosks.
Fan Cam – allows spectators and fans in sports venues to live-stream the view from their seat to editors who can then select from the content to display on the big screen.
GameTime Media Table – network-connected table for retail and hospitality environments, giving customers a chance to try-before-they-buy.
Next Gen TV – interactive TV experience for video calling, e-health services, home power monitoring using RFID, and other tools.
Striker – public safety vehicle with built-in communications platform featuring push-to-talk radio, iPad integration, high definition video over LTE, and other capabilities.
TeleConsult – healthcare application that allows consumers to ‘visit’ healthcare professionals using video conferencing, Bluetooth, and text apps.
Virtual Concierge – LTE-connected digital platform for 2-way video interaction, easily deployable in airports, hotels and other locations.

Want to be part of helping create the future? Participation in the ng Connect program is a way to explore how working together with other innovators is the path to accelerate your progress on the road to success.

Leveraging the Power of the Cloud to Deliver Teleworking, Social Networking Services

2012-03-19T16:00:15Z

By Beecher Tuttle

The idea that a company exists within the four walls of an office is quickly becoming antiquated. Today's enterprises are increasingly relying on remote workers – aka, “teleworkers” – to contribute to their core business.

The newfound prevalence of teleworking is due to a variety of factors, including recent advancements in technology, social trends and the sheer number of benefits that it can provide to both enterprises and their employees. These factors were recently referenced in a recent Enriching Communications posting, The Office is Not Always the Premises, by Bryan Davies, Director of Advanced Communications Solutions at Alcatel-Lucent (ALU).

Companies have begun to accept teleworking as a viable option because of its proven ability to help reduce costs. By hiring remote workers, enterprises can continue to grow in their current facility without needing to add office space or absorb an uptick in energy consumption. In addition, companies can reduce absenteeism by creating fewer impediments to an employee coming to work, says Davies.

But perhaps best of all, teleworking enables a company to recruit and retain top level talent from across the country and even the globe, rather than resigning themselves to hiring the best candidates within a 50-mile radius. Finally, hiring remote working can increase a company's operational reach, enabling them to retain employees in several different time zones and locales.

Looking past operational incentives, teleworking also provides a number of social benefits. Offering this option can take cars off the road, minimizing carbon emissions, and give commuting time back to each worker, further improving employee morale. Another contributing factor is the widespread adoption of social networking, which has made people more accustomed to online interactions.

Clearly, enterprises ready for teleworking just need the technology and the broadband access necessary to make it happen. As such, service providers are in a tremendous position to help enterprises succeed with teleworking helping to make enterprise more productive, flexible and profitable.

Service Providers Well-Positioned to Lend a Hand

Teleworkers cannot thrive with average technology or less than adequate connectivity. To exchange large assets and be mobile, remote employees require faster and more flexible wireless connections in addition to the obvious bandwidth requirements needed to support video telephony and conferencing.

As owners of evolving 4G LTE access networks, service providers are well-positioned to provide these necessary services to enterprises. Operators can tap into the trend of teleworking in a few different ways.

Promote Cloud-Based Communications: Cloud services enable employees to work not just from home, but from any location with an Internet connection. Service providers have unique advantages in this area because, unlike other types of providers, they can guarantee a superior quality of service (QoS). Available carrier-provided cloud services include hosted IP-PBX, hosted IP Centrex and hosted unified communications solutions.
Accelerate the Deployment of Video Telephony and Conferencing: These hosted communication solutions benefit enterprises – as they make remote interactions more personal – and service providers, who only need to enable one good connection at each location.
Hosted Social Networks: By deploying hosted versions of social networking services, operators can help enterprises engage employees at a minimal cost of ownership. On-premise solutions, meanwhile, force enterprises to buy, configure and test servers.

Davies acknowledges that certain barriers do exist that are impeding the progress of teleworking, including employee fear, company culture, security and the lack of interpersonal communication.

However, the technology provided by operators and software vendors can help mitigate these barriers as they push to create a telework-friendly environment.

"Service providers can’t overcome all of the obstacles facing enterprises and remote workers. But with cloud services that encourage connectivity, flexibility and employee interaction, service providers can play an active role in encouraging the telework movement," says Davies.

Cloud-Based Video Provides New Immersive Communications Capabilities

2012-03-13T16:38:29Z

By Erin Harrison

Today’s end user is looking for a richer conversation experience when using a variety of network-connected devices.

For example, new technologies are emerging that allow people to use any video-enabled device to enter a shared virtual space, and discuss and share information in a way that is almost like being together in the same physical space. As a result, these advances in video communications have provided a new opportunity for service providers to bring interactive video conversations to any device, from anywhere.

According to an article in Alcatel-Lucent’s Enriching Communications, Immersive Communications: A New Video Conversation Experience, with these new technologies users will no longer be limited to the confines of telepresence rooms to experience an immersive conversation at long distance. They will be able to experience this at work, at home and on the move – holding video meetings and sharing documents over PCs, tablets and smartphones.

Immersive communications includes both verbal and non-verbal communication such as gestures, body language, posture, facial expression and eye contact, which are necessary for remote participants to engage in honest, genuine and emotional conversations.

While videoconferencing has brought communications to another level, it hasn’t lived up to expectations since current video collaboration systems are often expensive, restrictive, complex and non-intuitive. The experience isn’t as rich or engaging as it is in related media, such as TV, movies and video games.

With immersive group video enterprises can adopt more flexible work models and distributed teams can engage in more creative and truly interactive video conversations, both scheduled and ad hoc.

Because immersive communications rely so heavily on the network, service providers are in the ideal position to take advantage of the new revenue opportunities it brings. SPs can leverage their networks, using the IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) architectural framework to deliver real-time immersive group video services with consistently high Quality of Service (QoS).

They can also offer immersive communications as a hosted cloud service. In fact, many are already moving to distributed cloud architectures that are ideal for hosted and virtualized video services.

Those service providers that get involved early in the game will set themselves apart from the competition, giving them the greatest opportunity to capture and develop a large and loyal customer base for the immersive communications experience.

Mathematical Processing Explores the Benefits of Georedundancy

2012-02-27T15:45:48Z

By Susan J. Campbell

Businesses throughout the world rely on their networks to support business processes, run applications and drive revenue for long-term sustainability. As a result, the importance of the network is amplified. The network and the data it maintains must be redundant to ensure optimization in the event of a failure. For this, Alcatel-Lucent recommends the benefits of georedundancy.

A recent article in Alcatel-Lucent’s TechZine by Randee Adams, Consulting Member of Technical Staff, Eric Bauer, Reliability Engineering Manager, and Daniel Eustace, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff entitled, “Availability Benefits of Georedundancy,” explores the enhanced service availability and client-initiated recovery possible with geographically redundant systems. With breakthrough mathematical modeling, a deeper understanding of the availability boost provided by such systems is enabled, while also identifying opportunities for optimization. And, lest we forget, the business continuity assurance it provides in the wake of a major disaster event.

Alcatel-Lucent developed the mathematical modeling that demonstrates how businesses have an opportunity to leverage the existing georedundancy within their systems to enhance overall service availability. This approach also identified potential methods to use for optimization, including retry parameters, faster time out, rapid context restoration and client-initiated recovery.

Beyond the benefits of georedundancy lies its primary purpose – to ensure the continuity of a business following a disaster such as a fire, flood, human error or other impactful event that can render the entire data center or multiple systems useless within one location. While safety of the people is the primary concern, the close second is the recovery of critical services to sustain the business. With georedundancy in combination with methodical disaster recovery plans and manual procedures, service can be recovered in days or even hours.

When the benefits of georedundancy are combined with high-availability mechanisms and systems, service is automatically detected and recovered with a single failure event occurs. High-availability systems must be recovered within seconds, with a benchmark of no more than 315 seconds often set per system per year.

Georedundant systems speed up the time to detect a failure and recover. To enable the benefits of georedundancy, Alcatel-Lucent relies on the continuous time Markov availability models for the quantitative comparison of service availability. Client-initiated recovery is the only proven scheme to address uncovered failures and ensure a fix before the failure is felt by the client’s customers.

One of the main benefits of georedundancy is the ability to improve service availability in the wake of any interruption in service performance. Alcatel-Lucent offers a few recommendations to ensure standard high-availability mechanisms are augmented through georedunant systems:

Client-initiated recovery – use return codes and expiration of time outs to detect critical failures and support recovery to redundant system instances.

Time out and retry parameter optimization – shorten failure detection latency and eliminate false positives.

Enable rigid reestablishment – keep the process to identify, authenticate and authorize a session to another server instance as brief as possible to add only minimal latency.

Rapid context restoration – this must be enabled to retain user data in a common and replicated data store accessible to redundant system instances.

Overload control – when this is implemented, floods of primary and retired client-initiated recovery requests are prevented.

With innovative mathematical modeling provided by Alcatel-Lucent, we now have a deeper view and understanding of the availability benefits of georedundant systems to support a cost-effective, methodical approach to optimization. Reality is that the mathematics as well as historical evidence show that it is always “better to be safe than sorry,” and that when it comes to the protection of a network physical redundancy based on geographic diversification is the best way to ensure network resiliency and very short meantime-to-restoration periods in the face of network outages resulting from disasters.

How Service Providers Can Capitalize on the Enterprise Cloud Market

2012-01-24T14:53:51Z

By Beecher Tuttle

With the demand for cloud services expanding rapidly, service providers are in a unique position to exploit new markets and generate new revenue, in addition to benefiting from the significant capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operating expenditure (OPEX) savings associated with a cloud infrastructure.

However, to fully capitalize on this market opportunity, service providers need to develop an accurate sense of current and future market conditions as well as enterprise attitudes and perceptions of the cloud.

In an effort to provide a more granular look at these conditions and attitudes Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) recently conducted a global study, “Soaring into the Cloud,” involving nearly 4,000 IT decision makers (ITDMs) from medium, large and multi-national companies.

ALU researchers found that 78 percent of companies are currently employing at least one cloud-based application, with organizations in tech, professional services and manufacturing/defense leading the way. Healthcare, government and education enterprises rely less on the cloud, but not by any significant margin.

Looking forward, nearly 45 percent of ITDMs said that they anticipate leveraging more cloud services within the next three years. Finance and insurance companies are expected to be largest adopters.

However, the perception of inferior security still seems to exist with just 34 percent of companies entrusting their mission-critical applications to the cloud.

When looking regionally, India and the U.S. are the biggest adopters of the cloud. France and the U.K., meanwhile, are the two most reluctant nations included in the study.

Areas for Improvement

Although the overall response to the cloud was positive, respondents noted a few areas of concern where improvements are necessary. As the chart below shows, the chief demand is for solutions that offer a higher level of performance, including greater security, response time and end-to-end availability. ITDMs are also looking for solutions that provide improved data security.

Implications for Service Providers

Researchers discovered that service providers are well positioned to take advantage of the booming enterprise cloud market. Respondents noted that they don't necessarily need to partner with a current leader in cloud technologies, but rather are looking for a trusted provider that can offer secure solutions for mission-critical applications.

More importantly, enterprises acknowledged that they are willing to pay for quality. Carrier-grade solutions were found to be four times more attractive of less robust solutions and capable of producing ten times the revenue.

"To fully capitalize on this opportunity, service providers must provide a cloud solution that can support complex network topologies, offers a bandwidth and latency guarantee, as well as encrypted storage options," says Alcatel-Lucent. "The ideal solution should also enable user-configured redundancy options, and rapid virtual machine instantiation."

Alcatel-Lucent-Lucent’s CloudBand portfolio is comprised of two key elements:

The CloudBand Management System, which delivers orchestration and optimization of services between the communications network and the cloud.
The CloudBand Node, which provides the computing, storage and networking hardware and associated software to host a wide range of cloud services.

The entire portfolio enables service providers to capitalize on enterprises growing move to cloud-based solutions.

A New Conversation Experience Demands New Go-To-Market Strategies

2011-12-27T14:43:56Z

By Susan Campbell

The time is right for service providers to recognize new opportunities in converged services strategies as we consistently move toward an all-IP world. With convergence in place, the flexibility to deliver new services and business models is enabled. At the same time, a holistic, go-to-market strategy is essential to support new opportunities in this space.

A recent Alcatel-Lucent article, Converged Services Go To Market stresses that service development is key to staying competitive in today’s market. With constantly changing dynamics, it’s critical that service providers participate the right way in the right markets. The traditional methods for doing business have to evolve to include multi-sided business models that support more sophisticated settlement models, partner ecosystems, new delivery channels and new ways to measure success.

The go-to-market strategies in place today fail to support the all IP-world as they were developed in an effort to support subscription-based postpaid and prepaid models for text, voice and Internet data access services. New areas such as pay-per-use and digital media delivery demand new approaches as advertisers are playing a significant role and areas such as mobile money and M2M are gaining significant ground.

In a new market where converged services are in high demand, new go-to-strategies must require that service providers experiment in the market to correctly identify the next model that ensures a win not just for themselves, but also for their customers and partners. These strategies must also act as a catalyst for innovation, effectively opening the door to new opportunities.

Enabling converged services in an all IP-world requires a converging of networks to a single IP access and service layer. It entails moving more and more capabilities to the converged services network edge to enable what Alcatel-Lucent calls the High Leverage Network. This approach allows service providers access to the operational efficiency and cost savings necessary to deliver traditional and next-generation messaging, voice, data access and content services. This convergence also ensures service providers have the necessary flexibility to deliver new services and business models.

Service providers can leverage converged, all-IP networks to open their network APIs for third party developers and aggregators seeking to create new retail and wholesale services, combining their own assets with Web innovations; combine disparate data sources with IT systems to offer a new level of subscriber intelligence for monetization; enable optimal content experiences on any screen through new content delivery networks; deliver HD voice, video calling, Rich Communications Suite and Unified Communications; provide platforms to enable new cloud services; create an environment to support M2M applications in key industries; and use network and IT assets to leverage growing opportunities in new areas.

To develop the right strategies to leverage these new opportunities, service providers need to explore new go-to-market strategies, incorporating accelerated convergence where possible, experimenting with new models enabled by converged networks, align the organization with new opportunities, change their approach to evaluation and measurement, share the risk, keep customers at the center, and find and protect the right partners.

The market has changed and will continue to evolve in a new direction, creating new opportunities for service providers at every turn. Those unable to develop new go-to-market strategies will be quickly left behind.

The Monetization of Mobile Apps

2011-12-05T15:23:16Z

By: Nora Maene, Digital Media Solutions Marketing Director, Alcatel-Lucent

Global mobile traffic has increased with a factor of 30 in 5 years time; 6 billion mobile apps have been downloaded in 2010. Besides being a challenge, this explosive growth also presents an opportunity for communication service providers (CSPs) to engage in new ecosystems and business models – embracing cloud services and working with over-the-top players to transform application and content value chains.

Today, a large portion of the return for mobile applications comes from the mobile data revenues that they drive (growing from $260 billion in 2010 to $500 billion in 2015). Given that mobile data revenue is more than a 100-fold the revenues from mobile apps purchases, it is clear that stimulating mobile data consumption is the primary monetization vehicle for service providers.

With a need to increase mobile data usage - and changing market dynamics – it is clear that CSPs have to launch new application services in their markets as soon as possible to monetize the mobile application opportunity.

In order to shorten time-to-market, however, they need to do things differently - opening up their network assets for internal and third-party app developers so that the innovation demanded by the market can occur in a very flexible way.

In order to scale, CSPs also need to build a new ecosystem for apps, whether it is for their internal developers, their strategic partners or the large crowd of external app developers.

As a matter of fact, each of these three groups can be linked to a different zone in the hyperbolic “Value – Volume” graph of long tail apps and content services, in which we distinguish between three apps types: “head”, “shoulder” and “tail”. Each of these three types of apps demands a different go-to-market strategy by the CSP.

The head of the curve - with a small number of high value apps – represents internally-developed apps and services that either address mass or niche markets. Examples include innovative communications services, mobile commerce services, or multiscreen video solutions that bring TV and video-on-demand to tablets and smartphones. Besides building brand equity, these apps typically help to increase customer loyalty and retention. Monetization of the “head” can happen in three ways: through the classic bundle of value added services with data access, through subscription services offered on top of the data plan for niche services, or through a co-branded offer (with a partner) for a short term highly targeted promotion.

The shoulder of the Value-Volume apps curve is the middle zone - where both existing and new partners can help to address new vertical industry opportunities, such as healthcare, travel, finance, etc. For these apps, platform exposure and a high-touch collaboration is needed between the strategic partners and the CSP. A SaaS (software-as-a-service) model works well here, with a focus on simplified integration, easier on-boarding of external partners and reduced development time and cost. CSPs need to create an ecosystem where value is created for these partners as well, e.g. through co-branding. Monetization results from offering these more differentiated and personalized services, and through the use of multiple, flexible business models: from a simple pay-per-use model, a tiered user volume, or flat monthly fees.

The long tail of apps only requires a low-touch strategy: the CSP “just” makes his network easily accessible for independent web, mobile and widget developers. This is more of a self-service model where simplicity is the key word, where the CSP offers capabilities in a wholesale model, and where new distribution channels can be created. Making it simple for developers to start using the network APIs is key to achieve mass adoption (by well documenting them, for instance). Usage-based pricing models work best here.

Although engaging long tail developers can enable innovation at the speed of ideas, this type of apps is also the most difficult one to get a grip on and should not be the main priority for the CSP when kicking off their apps strategy. The community of long tail app developers is very fragmented and scattered all over the world. Moreover, CSPs usually need to build the skills for exposing and documenting APIs in a simple way. As long tail apps are not generating large revenues in the short term, they should be part of a longer-term strategy – with the support from top management.

Alcatel-Lucent helps CSPs understand the challenges and opportunities associated with the rapid transformation of application and content value chains. It has a content-rich resource library where you can learn more about capitalizing on evolving ecosystems.

Service Providers' Digital Media Opportunity: Retailing Applications, e-Books, Games, Music, etc. to Any Connected Device

2011-11-28T18:42:35Z

By: Wim Van Daele, Director, Communications – Mobile Commerce, Video & Immersive Communications - Alcatel-Lucent

In 2010, almost 11 billion applications were downloaded through app stores worldwide; by 2013, this number is expected to mount to 60 billion downloads (a five-fold increase in three years)¹. At a time when many operators are experiencing declining voice average revenue per user (ARPU) and subscriber growth rates, they are embracing the digital media opportunity to help drive additional data/media revenues and new device sales by leveraging evolving application and content value chains.

But very often, solutions addressing this opportunity are implemented in a way that has not been very well considered: they foresee “stovepipe” infrastructures for every content type and screen – resulting in increased complexity/cost, and a mediocre user experience with little room for cross-selling and bundled service offerings.

Alcatel-Lucent proposes a different way of working, enabling service providers to display, retail and deliver a rich blend of music, applications, games, e-books and more – across all consumer touch points from a single, cloud-based “entertainment hub”. It is a one-stop shop we call the Alcatel-Lucent Digital Media Store. It is a capability that allows consumers to easily discover, acquire and use any content, across all their connected devices and wherever they are.

This approach – combined with personalized discovery and retailing – contributes to differentiation and brand equity, and puts service providers in a strategic position to rapidly launch advanced multi-content services and achieve higher content revenues by offering more content, with greater relevance, across more user touch points.

Interested in learning more about this service provider opportunity, Alcatel-Lucent’s proposed way forward – and some preliminary results from our approach? The ALU application and content value chain resource library is a great place to start. In addition, our experts look forward to talking to you!

¹ Source: Worldwide and U.S. Mobile Applications, Storefronts, and Developer 2010-2014 Forecasts and Year-End 2010 Vendor Market Shares: The ‘Appification’ of Everything. IDC, December, 2010.

Transforming M2M Communications via the Cloud

2011-11-15T16:56:54Z

By Erin Harrison

In a hyper-connected world and the growth of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, the opportunity for service providers is significant. By leveraging their network assets, service providers are in a position to transform M2M communications via the cloud into a value-added services business.

With the forecasted growth in connected devices predicted to exceed 15 billion by 2015, communication service providers are looking to capitalize on the revenue potential associated with that growth. They are:

Investing in new business groups, centers of excellence, joint ventures and developer programs
Expanding existing business-to-business (B2B) service groups
Creating in-house M2M service platforms, including partial cloud implementation
Offering enterprise customers with data center solutions for cloud-based M2M applications

In order to make M2M communications a reality, CSPs need to address several market demands including:

Application-specific quality of service (QoS)
High reliability
Simplified application development and operations
Easy-to-use device management

According to Alcatel-Lucent, service providers can use lower-cost M2M devices, widespread connectivity and applications market growth to monetize their assets and strengthen their position in the M2M value chain. Alcatel-Lucent’s application enablement strategy can help service providers extend their application-based business models to M2M by giving developers access to device-centric services.

“By leveraging their network, cloud data centers, applications enablement, and experience with customers, CSPs can address the challenges and deliver innovative M2M solutions,” according to an excerpt from the recent Alcatel-Lucent article, “M2M Communications Meets the Cloud.”

Because the M2M market is comprised of multiple vertical markets, such as transportation, utilities, healthcare, public safety and retail, CSPs can exploit these opportunities by deploying platforms that support vertical market solutions created by third-party application providers and their own teams. In doing so, service providers can improve their position in the M2M value chain. But there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach. Understanding how to address different vertical markets with their unique will be important for CSPs.

Application-specific QoS will also be necessary for market uptake. Alcatel-Lucent’s High Leverage Network provides not only the basic transport for all M2M applications and other critical functionality. It does ensure that each application is delivered with the QoS requisite for optimal performance. For example, business-critical video surveillance or healthcare monitoring may require higher priority than other applications in order to provide system administrations the quality of experience (QoE) they require and demand. In addition, various network elements within the HLN can prioritize packet forwarding to ensure QoS for specific data.

While CSPs can choose to implement device management capabilities either through a cloud environment, or through a hosted solution from vendors such as Alcatel-Lucent, increasingly customers are looking to the cloud to give them the reach, security and QoE that is right for them. The bottom line as Alcatel-Lucent officials point out is that a cloud-based M2M strategy can be an agile and efficient solution for CSPs seeking to pursue a more active role in M2M communications.

Why Cloud Services are in Most Enterprises' Future

2011-11-04T19:29:41Z

By Beecher Tuttle

The cost-effective, scalable and flexible nature of cloud services have made them exceedingly popular with enterprises of all sizes. As such, the cloud – along with the parallel convergence of information technology, telecom and media – has given communication service providers (CSPs) substantial opportunities to increase revenues and profits. These manifest themselves in a number of different market segments that leverage cloud computing capabilities and include Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

The benefits cloud services provide enterprises – and the associated revenue generating opportunities for CSPs – were recently documented in an article entitled, “Enterprise Cloud Services Come of Age,” which was authored by Alcatel-Lucent's Xavier Martin and Annie Ohayon-Dekel. In it they explain how and why SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS market segments are expected to enjoy 15 percent, 61 percent and 27 percent CAGR growth over the next ten years.

These strong growth projections stem from the numerous business and technical benefits of the cloud, including its elastic, virtualized and on-demand nature and ability to enhance immersive communications experiences for end users. The authors elaborate as to how and why the cloud also offers several strategic benefits, including the ability develop and deploy new platforms, technologies, services and applications with minimal time-to-market. They also point out that from an enterprise perspective, cloud services require negligible or even no upfront costs, making them highly desirable for expanding organizations who can pay as they grow.

Martin and Ohayon-Dekel also see mobility as a driver of the rising adoption rates of cloud services as today's enterprise workforce becomes both more dispersed geographically, more mobile and literaaly driven by necessity to give the appearance of being always on, all ways accessible and always available for business. This proliferation of connected devices and the demand for constant access to business-critical applications has made cloud services not just something of interest but in a growing number of cases a necessity for most enterprises.

Although some barriers to cloud adoption do exist – including concerns over security, reliability and maturity – the benefits can outweigh the drawbacks. In addition, these concerns can be mitigated by choosing alternative models to cloud adoption, such as private and hybrid clouds, which restrict user access and network usage to keep private data secure.

Martin and Ohayon-Dekel also note that the role of the CIO has dramatically changed in today's enterprise. Information officers are no longer seen as technical experts, but rather generators of ideas for services that will enhance productivity, increase customer satisfaction and enable the mobile workforce.

"The cloud can offer some significant benefits in these areas," they wrote. "The role of the CIO will increasingly be to decide which services can be made available from the cloud, and which cloud model to use."

The authors are quick to point out that the cloud can be similarly beneficial to CSPs, as enterprises will be looking to service providers to help manage their cloud infrastructures and services.

CSPs "can intelligently blend platforms for immersive communications with network-based services (such as prioritization and caching of applications), based on their business criticality. They can build Virtual Private Clouds for enterprise customers, or simply become pure cloud providers, by syndicating resources to serve many organizations from the same infrastructure."

The bottom line for the authors was that in a rapidly changing world where accommodation of change is increasingly the path to sustainability and profitability, both service providers and enterprise customers can look to the cloud for answers to their challenges and silver linings that represent opportunities. The cloud is not just in most company futures it is ready for prime time now.

The Challenges of Evaluating Services as Individual or Collective Customer Experiences

2011-10-26T14:56:32Z

By Oliver Krahn, Guest Contributor, Customer Experience Transformation Lead, Alcatel-Lucent

Customer experience management (CEM) focuses on the relationship between service providers and their subscribers, and has become a critical priority in the industry. However, the management solution chosen by service providers to meet the needs of their diverse customer bases can differ widely.

There are two ways of looking at the options:

Considering the subscribers as a collective group and evaluating a statistical average of experience.
Accepting and appreciating each individual as (s)he uses the services provided.

The place to start is with “touch points” —specific interfaces where interactions between subscribers and service providers can be measured and analyzed. At these touch points, performance depends on a combination of immediate experiences at the time of interaction and a memory effect around repeated experiences. There are many touch points along the customer journey. They are linked to different phases of the journey as the user interacts with various capabilities of the service provider. There might be retail shopping experiences as people wait to talk with a representative. Or while consuming the service, the touch points become interactions on the devices using the service defined by network capabilities and quantified in areas such as download speed, availability and coverage or the accuracy and payment method of service bills. A broad variety of interactions are handled through contact centers and the ability of agents to access the right information at the right time can play a major role in the experience of the user.

The challenge then becomes managing for touch point performance improvement. This will entail the definition of target performance levels and the indicators required might differ by perspective.

In evaluating organizational performance, for instance, key performance indicators (KPIs) are typically formulated as performance windows allowing for a statistical distribution. However, this does not address the opportunity to manage individual experiences of every single subscriber to increase loyalty and satisfaction at any time, even facing and mitigating performance shortfall.

Beyond the analysis and management of individual touch points, an overall experience view must take into account a mix of experiences across different touch points along the customer journey. The reason is that a specific subscriber might value a certain touch point very highly, yet the service provider might rate it at a lower “experience level”, due to the need to balance effort across all touch points or allow for expectations of different subscriber segments and other operational issues.

What should service providers do?

Alcatel-Lucent has worked with service providers on the challenges caused by the complexities of managing the customer experience for optimal performance from the individual subscriber and service provider perspectives. All the dependencies can be covered in a customer experience hierarchy of KPIs defined across the entire organization. This way consistent experience can be driven and controlled, still leaving dedicated responsibilities in different parts of the organization.

Here are suggested steps in the process:

Get the basics right. Defining and managing statistical KPIs for each function as part of a QMS is the foundation of a great experience. And the standard ways of working need to be adopted to meet these SLAs consistently.
Create a weighted list of touch points. This will help decide on priorities driving optimization across systems and processes to ensure the overall impression in the market is right. This effort could be taken on by a cross functional CEM entity that drives and controls improvement plans between different process participants.
Recognize, evaluate and transform individual performance failures. This allows for the ability to deliver on the promises towards a single subscriber as a positive experience. There will be specific procedures in customer care that might extend into special investigations or benefits dependent on the involvement and value of the subscriber.

It should also be noted that customer experience is impacted by any change to the systems and platforms used by the service provider to deliver the service, or obviously any changes in the way the interactions between subscriber and service provider staff are being performed.

With service provider marketing efforts intensely focused on creating differentiated value, brand awareness and loyalty based on the quality of customer experiences, knowing what is the most cost effective combination of statistical evaluations across device and network intelligence and individual treatment at the customer management level is key to achieving the best customer experience.

Explore specific guidelines and tactics in the “Customer Experience Transformation via Analytics” with the paper in the Customer Experience Transformation Resource Library.

Network Operators Need to Prepare for Booming M2M Traffic

2011-10-25T18:48:16Z

By Erin Harrison

The so-called “Internet of Things” is expected to connect 15 billion devices by 2015, demanding a new approach to communications business models, operations and technologies. As a result, driven in no small measure by the dramatic projected increase in machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, wireless network operators are in a position where they need to prepare for an explosion of signaling traffic, according to a recent Alcatel-Lucent TechZine item, "Getting Ready for M2M Traffic Growth."

Internet of Things applications will create new demands and challenges, according to Alcatel-Lucent. Some will require high bandwidth, real-time communications or reliability in remote locations. Others will encourage human interaction by combining personal value with enhanced privacy and safety. Together, these applications will generate traffic and transactions that compete for bandwidth and priority.

In fact, service providers are already building and supporting M2M applications for vertical industries. Several key factors are driving development:

Widespread use of wireless networks;
Reduced communications costs;
IP networks and cloud-based applications that ease solution development; and
Industry regulations that demand automated remote monitoring.

Signaling traffic will be the main bottleneck as M2M transactions increase, but application-level management can enhance traffic control and efficiency. Also, a new network element, the M2M server, could enforce policies for network usage, according to Alcatel-Lucent.

An effective approach is to combine three levels of traffic management:

Application-level management allows network operators to take diverse application requirements into consideration.
RAN signaling overload control focuses on communication between a device and the access network.
Core network overload control provides another level of overload control. If the first access network node is not a bottleneck but the core network is, then the access network can be instructed to block further accesses for M2M service requests.

As Alcatel-Lucent explained, in an ideal application of level management solutions, network operators are able to prioritize traffic from different M2M applications.

“Access and network level of traffic management can be addressed with mechanisms in the RAN and the core network respectively, while application-level management provides the optimal point for preventing network congestion,” the blog post said. “In an ideal application-level management solution, a new network element or gateway that lies on the boundary between the applications and the network would help network operators prioritize traffic from different M2M applications and enforce network usage policies ensuring customer satisfaction.”

For network operators, success can be achieved through sharing information, ideas and resources across ecosystems, markets and value chains. By securely exposing valued assets to trusted partners, service providers can take steps toward realizing the potential of a connected world.

A New Approach to Operational Excellence for MSPs

2011-10-24T01:18:22Z

By Erin Harrison

In today’s ever-changing telecom market, operational excellence is more important than ever for managed service providers.

In a recent whitepaper, "On The Road To Operational Excellence," Alcatel-Lucent describes a model that managed service providers can use to improve operations in support of customers’ needs for enhancing quality of experience (QoE).

In the past, creating a high QoE for end users has been focused on deploying and maintaining a state-of-the-art network infrastructure to provide connectivity and advanced communication services. However, today these efforts also include new business processes that improve customer service, such as the introduction of detailed billing and self-care portals.

Based on key principles articulated in an earlier white paper featured on TMCnet, "Increasing Competitiveness through Ongoing Operational Excellence," employing Alcatel-Lucent’s operational excellence model managed service providers have demonstrated they can improve operations in support of their service provider customers’ efforts to enhance end user QoE. They have also shown how this can be achieved through proactive planning across the entire organization, including network, marketing and customer care.

“But while service providers strive to improve network quality, they must also reduce costs and extract the maximum value from their existing investments,” the recent white paper points out.

According to Alcatel-Lucent, operational excellence needs to be a structured approach to business management if it is to steer the organization to world class performance by the apt amalgamation and implementation of the foundation and cultural levers in the “Operational Excellence” model.

When a managed service provider sets out to maintain a high level of network quality for service provider customers, they must deliver a combination of quality, price, ease of purchase, and service that no other organization can match. According to Alcatel-Lucent, this can be achieved by implementation of an operational excellence model that:

Aligns management systems with the needs of service providers;
Runs operations that are standardized, optimized, simplified and controlled; and
Fosters a culture that centers on excellence and accountability.

“By carefully managing and manipulating the internal foundation and cultural levers, managed service providers can achieve higher levels of operational efficiencies for their customers’ networks,” the whitepaper concludes.