Bringing together developers and service providers together to support the rapid creation and secure testing of new services is the crux of Alcatel-Lucent's integrated application enablement innovation suite.
I recently had the opportunity to speak with Alcatel-Lucent's Jeff Cortley, who explained that the fundamental dilemma today for networks is the magnitude and breadth of applications, video, etc., which are making more demands on the network, and subsequently requiring operators to continue to invest in more capacity and bandwidth.
"The current model for how revenue is partitioned doesn't really incent and motivate the carrier to keep making that investment," said Cortley, president of Alcatel-Lucent's Subscriber Data Management business. "One aspect of high leverage networks is, how do you drive down the cost per bid of the network and, therefore for the same investment that you're making today, you have the same capacity to support this growth, but then also put more capability in the network to allow it to be more responsive and provide more control for applications that are running across the network."
According to Cortley there is willingness by the developers who are in fact very anxious to take advantage of some of these capabilities, but at the same time, they are also apprehensive in what it will take for them to become partners with large entities and setting up commercial agreements. They must also address logistical issues in order to ultimately take advantage of the opportunities brought on by this evolution of application enablement.
"The answer here is there needs to be a paradigm shift where there's a more equitable distribution of revenue across the value chain, and the way that we can get there is by having the network be more open to the application and content providers and have them leverage the value that the carriers can offer and therefore have them share some of that revenue rather than just ride over the top and consumer bandwidth without the carrier fully participating in that value chain," Cortley said.
With the Alcatel-Lucent Open API Service, network providers do not need to make additional investments or incur large capital and operational expenses dealing with multiple developers accessing their networks. Alcatel-Lucent provides an open, secure environment on a carrier-grade, scalable and open software platform that allows multiple network providers to offer access to key service enablers.
Last month, Alcatel-Lucent unveiled a host of capabilities to help service providers open their networks to application developers and content providers in a secure and controlled way to speed the creation of innovative Web 2.0 services for consumers and enterprises.
Alcatel-Lucent's Open API Service supports the company's application enablement vision, which is focused on combining the trusted capabilities of service providers with the speed and innovation of the Web to provide both consumers and business users with richer experiences.
Alcatel-Lucent's new Open API Service is being sold primarily to application developers, which can use the service's Web-based portal at http://developer.openapiservice.comto access network enablers such as SMS, location and more. Alcatel-Lucent is working to make these network enablers available by partnering with various service providers, according to company officials.
The company expects to partner with multiple service providers over time on this service, but it has launched the Open API Service in partnership with Sprint, which initially is exposing location and geofencing capabilities, according to company officials. The benefit to service provider partners, according to Alcatel-Lucent, is that the Open API Service eliminates the expense of registering, provisioning and supporting multiple developers.
For service providers, the Open API Service eliminates the expense of registering, provisioning and supporting developers. At the same time it helps foster new business models to increase and monetize network traffic.
