Managing the new conversation experience

As LTE is commercialised in an increasing number of markets across the globe, Laura Merling, Alcatel-Lucent’s senior VP of Application Development Platform and Strategy, details how service providers, enterprises and developers can work intelligently to ensure they remain an integral part of the rapidly evolving wireless data ecosystem

Laura Merling is Alcatel-Lucent’s senior VP of Application Development Platform and Strategy

Laura Merling leads strategy and execution for Alcatel-Lucent’s company-wide push to transform the network into a powerful platform for service providers, enterprises and developers to reap benefits from through the delivery of high-quality applications. In July 2012, the GSA (Global mobile Suppliers Association) said 338 telecom operators in 101 countries had committed to commercial LTE network deployments or were engaged in trials, technology testing or studies.

The report went on to say 280 operators have made firm commitments to deploy commercial LTE networks in 90 countries. A further 58 operators in 11 more countries are in a pre-commitment stage and are engaged in LTE technology trials, tests or studies.

The GSA stated that 89 LTE operators have now launched commercial services in 45 countries, with this number forecast to rise to 150 by the end of 2012. Given this level of investment in high-speed mobile broadband networks, much of it driven by demand for video content, Merling suggests carriers should start regarding themselves as an integral part of the application delivery ecosystem rather than merely as sellers of data, or providers of just transport.

The telecom environment today is characterised by SMS and voice revenues being on the decline, accelerating the need for operators to identify new revenue streams. There is also a requirement for service providers to consider business models beyond access.

Merling describes application providers as having seized the consumer experience; driven by consumer demand, with service providers now needing to redefine and reinvigorate their role in the value chain. In order to participate in the ecosystem, Merling advises carriers shorten time-to-market and lower costs for delivering new services.

With mobile data users forecast to consume as much as 100 times more data by 2016 than they do today, posing both an opportunity with respect to the generation of increased revenues, and a challenge with respect to managing the network’s ability to cope with such a significant increase in data traffic, operators need to make savvy choices.

An evolution of web and mobile is underway as Merling describes the new conversation experience as comprising connectivity, cloud, communications, data and ecosystems.

“Carriers need to think beyond transportation,” Merling says. “They need to view LTE as a services-enabled environment in which they can charge differently. They can do this by partnering with a platform provider such as Microsoft to offer an Evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS), which is tailored for LTE and allows multimedia content to be sent once and received by many end users.”

Service providers can also form content partnerships and offer the option for application updates to be pushed during off-peak times for additional credit to the end-user.

Connectivity in the evolving conversation experience requires service providers to think beyond transport and initiate new technologies and business models such as eMBMS and Smartpush for the efficient delivery of content; or the auctioning of spare network capacity as a new business model.

Merling says service providers also have to consider bringing the power of the services of the network to the cloud, ensuring three fundamental building blocks – transformation, enterprise, and building – are in place. With respect to transformation, service provider infrastructure, operations and business models need to aligned; while enterprises appear to be ready for carrier cloud, which has a far greater revenue potential for service providers (10x) and is more attractive (4x) to enterprises than existing public cloud services.

Carriers should also be busying themselves with the building of an agile service delivery platform for a new class of cloud services.

“There are three main ecosystem categories in the evolving data-centric conversation experience and these are the OS platform providers; the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers such as cloud providers; and the content players,” Merling says. “Deployment of metrocells can optimise any downloading of data, and what LTE offers is the opportunity for service providers to gain a better understanding of their customers’ contexts and to provide services and applications specifically tailored to those contexts.”

According to Merling, the new conversation experience is being reinvented in part by faster, higher capacity networks, smartphone proliferation, and changing consumer habits. Thus the requirement for management tools for converged applications to bring personal, social media, and business contacts, and conversations together in one place, and the development of high quality video conferencing applications, unified inboxes, and device transfer services.

The management of consumers’ data, with respect to their value and identity is another required progression in the evolutionary path of conversations, with cross-telco Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) being developed for opt-in subscriber data. The benefit of such for subscribers includes the ease of log-in, personal data being stored in a single, trusted place, a reduction of forms to be filled in from a mobile, and an ultimate enhancement to customer experience.

The benefits of cross-telco APIs to service providers include the improvement of identified visitors and personalised services, to be able to feed databases with qualified operator data, and to increase the account creation success rate – more sales; more information requests; more subscriptions.

Alcatel-Lucent is heavily involved in helping customers around the world to transform their businesses to take advantage of the changing landscape where APIs have emerged as the language of the information economy.

Alcatel-Lucent developed Open API Platform (OAP) is an end-to-end API monetisation and optimisation software solution, essential for service providers to turn their data and telecommunication infrastructure into a commercial transaction platform. OAP provides the expertise, tools and services for API management, API design and creation, reporting and analytics for optimisation of API programmes, business model design for maximising revenue and service integration for time to market.

Using OAP, service providers are able to create and securely expose new services, either directly or via composite APIs, so they can be made available internally and/or to third parties, allowing for the creation and delivery of new offers to market, faster, at lower cost and at scale.

Alcatel-Lucent also recently introduced its API Lifecycle Methodology, which looks to help carriers create an effective end-to-end API strategy, while simultaneously establishing a repeatable process that maximises efficiency, cost savings and revenue.

The Alcatel-Lucent API Lifecycle Methodology has three main areas of specialisation:

· Definition – Knowing who you would want to use your API and what you would want them to do with it will help you define an initial business goal.

· Design – Determine which pieces of your existing functionality, services, and data can be tapped with APIs. The protocols you use, the complexity of the APIs and their inputs and outputs will have tremendous bearing on whether and how third-party developers use them.

· Deployment – An API platform does not get built once; it is continuously monitored and improved on the basis of developer response, application usage, and evolving business strategy. The right analytics tools can not only help you maintain control of API use, they can help you understand how you are meeting your business objectives.