VanillaPlus Magazine Feb-March 2012 Edition

This edition of VanillaPlus is brought to you courtesy of

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Orga Systems’ convergent real-time charging and billing portfolio enables profitable business for Telecommunication Companies, Mobile Finance Institutions, Energy and Telematic Suppliers.

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TALKING HEADS ▼

Subex sees CSPs turning to managed services for business optimisation

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE CSPs aim to reset customer expectations for a 4G World

BILLING & CHARGING How to create the perfect blend

INTEGRATING INTELLIGENCE Redefine customer, content & network intelligence

- Policy, Charging & Personalisation - Billing & Customer Care - MWC Barcelona: Devil is in the Data ▼

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MOBILE PAYMENT IN THE NEWS … But it’s still not quite time to throw away your wallet

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3 SPECIAL SUPPLEMENTS INSIDE!

Contracts, Products, People & Market News • InfoVista, Tekelec acquisitions top US$800m Agents still core of customer care - Research • Sao Paolo to Singapore: BSS & OSS Events Europe: Get ready for American message • Latest BSS & OSS News: www.vanillaplus.com

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Fine-tune the mobile comms value chain for outstanding CEM, says Astellia

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE CSPs aim to reset customer expectations for a 4G World

BILLING & CHARGING How to create the perfect blend

INTEGRATING INTELLIGENCE

3 SPECIAL SUPPLEMENTS INSIDE! - Policy, Charging & Personalisation - Billing & Customer Care - MWC Barcelona: The Devil is in the Data ▼

PLUS!

Redefine customer, content & network intelligence

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MOBILE PAYMENT IN THE NEWS … But it’s still not time to throw away your wallet

Contracts, Products, People & Market News • InfoVista, Tekelec acquisitions top US$800m Agents still core of customer care - Research • Sao Paolo to Singapore: BSS & OSS Events Europe: Get ready for American message • Latest BSS & OSS News: www.vanillaplus.com

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How to fine-tune the mobile communications value chain for outstanding CEM Rajesh Sharma, executive vice president of sales and customer operations at Astellia, explains to George Malim that CSPs need greater monitoring sensitivity to fine-tune the whole mobile communications value chain and deliver outstanding customer experience. In order to do so, CSPs need to approach CEM across three main dimensions: the network, the handset and the subscriber usage.

VanillaPlus: What are the key challenges that CSPs are facing at present?

Rajesh Sharma, Astellia: CSPs need greater monitoring sensitivity

Rajesh Sharma: Mobile communication is experiencing tremendous development and CSPs are seeing the convergence of five key trends: growth in mobile broadband networks, VoIP, video, social networking and the increased usage of smartphones and tablets.

Convergence of these trends is having a major impact on CSPs’ business models as they face requirements to increase ARPU by further monetising data traffic, to ensure network capacity is optimal to meet the diverse needs of subscribers and to enhance the user experience for all types of services anytime, anywhere.

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VP: CEM is moving to the top of CxO's busy agendas. How can Astellia help them?

RS: Customers expect to have a multitude of services available anytime, anywhere and on any device. This is creating multiple touch points between CSPs and their end customers across customer care, handset performance,

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This requires CSPs to capitalise the

relationship along three key dimensions – network performance, handset performance, and subscriber usage. Traditional tools have generally been good at providing individual aspects of these three key elements. However, for CSPs to succeed it is key that tools can identify, analyse and correlate the impact of these three key dimensions and further troubleshoot problems to proactively deliver the best customer experience.

network performance and the types of services and applications supported by CSPs. To provide the best CEM offering, it is key that CSPs have tools that provide cross-dimensional, 360° visibility into customers’ usage behaviour, the network – both core and RAN, and the handset. Astellia’s end-to-end solution provides the most comprehensive visibility to correlate these three dimensions. In addition, Astellia has a unique set of troubleshooting tools which proactively resolve issues even before customers begin to experience them and also ensure customer data privacy.

In addition, Astellia’s products are backed by a range of consulting services delivered by highly skilled industry experts. Astellia has completed more than 4,000 audits at 180 mobile operators globally and has created a unique benchmark database in QoE and QoS metrics. This helps Astellia to share best practices through its comprehensive portfolio of audit services and on-the-job training programs.

VP: How does Astellia help CSPs grow their revenues?

RS: Earlier, the monitoring and measurement solutions used to represent a cost that CSPs had to bear in order to keep their networks running smoothly but, in the new digital value chain, it is being seen as a means by which CSPs can increase ARPU. Today, Astellia is the only provider of a multitechnology and multi-vendor monitoring solution that converges OSS and probe-based data translating user experience. This unique feature brings CSPs a 360° vision of their network, both from a network equipment (QoS) and end-user (QoE) point of view.

The marketing department can perform multidimensional data service usage analysis to identify which data volume consumption and applications any particular customer segment is using. They can, for instance, identify the most popular handset models generating the most traffic and tailor their data plans and service offerings accordingly. We will be demonstrating our Usage Analytics application during the Mobile World Congress at our stand B08 in Hall 1.

Astellia’s Consulting Team can, for instance, carry out churn prediction audits to identify subscribers experiencing repetitive quality degradation and who are on the verge of switching to another CSP. For CxOs needing instant visibility into their network performance and QoS experienced by their subscribers, Astellia has developed C-Sight, a decision-making tool that can be used on smartphones and tablets. It shows KPI values compared to industry reference benchmarks.

“It is key that CSPs have tools that provide crossdimensional, 360° visibility into customers’ usage behaviour, the network – both core and RAN, and the handset.”

- Rajesh Sharma, Astellia

Customer care can efficiently handle customer complaints by pinpointing subscribers impacted by network issues, and by taking preventive action to avoid service downtime.

Finally, optimisation teams can detect service quality degradations that their customers are experiencing. Examples include intrusive latency encountered by gamers playing online, or the time taken to download a web page being unacceptably long. With Astellia’s solution they can investigate problem root causes, fine tune radio access responsible for bottlenecks in 80% of cases, and identify low-performing equipment in the core network.

Table 1 (below).

Subscribers aged 20-25 owning an iPhone 4.

Traffic usage per application.

We also enable CSPs to focus on their most profitable subscribers and bring them deep insight into revenue-generating traffic.

By helping CSPs to better understand usage patterns and their impact on the network, CSPs can optimise network performance to improve service quality delivery, create new data plans, avoid churn and hence, increase ARPU. VP: Can you give some concrete examples?

RS: Astellia’s CEM solution and consulting services address different departments within a CSP’s organisation, which are all contributing to better management of the entire customer experience.

Visit Astellia at Mobile World Congress, Stand B08 in Hall 1 Astellia is a global leader, providing E2E mobile network monitoring and optimisation solutions, presenting telecom operators with a clear, independent insight into their network performance and a near real-time visibility of the QoE of their subscribers.

Astellia’s probe-based monitoring solution covers 2G, 3G and 4G technologies from radio access to the core network. Astellia delivers real business value by providing intelligence through a powerful product and expert service portfolio. Astellia partners with more than 180 worldwide telecom operators. Headquartered in France, Astellia has offices in Paris, New York, Singapore, Beirut, Rio de Janeiro, Prague, Saint Petersburg, Johannesburg and New Delhi. www.astellia.com

• 180 + mobile operators • 4,000 + QoS performance audits • QoS and QoE reporting and troubleshooting • 360° vision on CSPs’ networks • Listed on NYSE, Euronext Paris • Global presence

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IN THIS ISSUE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE INSIDE COVER Fine-tune mobile comms value chain for the best CEM, says Astellia.

TALKING HEADS SUBASH MENON SEES CSPS TURNING TO MANAGED SERVICES FOR BUSINESS OPTIMISATION

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EDITOR’S COMMENT Europe, get ready for American message at MWC, says George Malim.

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COMPANY NEWS Thoma Bravo controls InfoVista; Legal challenge to Tekelec Board?

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PRODUCT NEWS Humbug and OpenVox partner; Accanto enables LTE differentiation; Technicolor’s scalable SBC platform; VSS launches packet de-duplication.

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CONTRACT NEWS DigitalRoute delivers 4G mediation; Costa Rican MVNO uses Tweakker.

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CONTRACT NEWS & HOT LIST VanillaPlus’s round-up of recent major BSS & OSS contract wins worldwide.

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TALKING HEADS 11 Subash Menon sees CSPs turning to managed services for business optimisation.

EXPERT OPINION: CHURN PREVENTION 14 Social network integration is a ‘must’ for churn prevention, writes Bogdan Danila.

C-LEVEL VIEW 15 The ‘Art of Data Mining’ gives operators end-to-end assurance for LTE migration.

36 CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS FOR LTE

Cover Photo: Subash Menon, founder chairman, MD and CEO of Subex Ltd. Subex Ltd is a global provider of business support systems that empowers communications service providers to achieve competitive advantage through business optimisation – enabling them to improve their operational efficiency to deliver enhanced service experience to subscribers. The company pioneered the concept of a Revenue Operations Center (ROC®) – a centralised approach that sustains profitable growth and financial health through co-ordinated operational control. Subex's product portfolio powers the ROC and its systems enable revenue assurance, fraud management, data integrity management, cost management and interconnect / inter-party settlement. Subex also offers a scalable managed services program. Subex's customers include 16 of top 20 wireless operators worldwide and 26 of the world's 50 biggest telecoms service providers. www.subexworld.com

POLICY, CHARGING & PERSONALISATION SUPPLEMENT 14-page Review of systems to match customer demands and business needs.

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C-LEVEL VIEW Juhani Hintikka says Policy brings flexibility, personalisation and profit.

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POLICY MANAGEMENT: EXPERT OPINIONS Nick Booth urges CSPs to up-sell subscribers with package benefits.

Policy can create dynamic business strategies, reports John Lenns.

According to Anat Ben-Yaacov, this is the era of ‘omni-convergence’.

Policy is not the key to pricing or personalisation. Ask Dave Labuda.

Bill Diotte describes ‘grown-up’ policy systems for all kinds of users.

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PEOPLE NEWS & JOBS TMF appoints FMG chair; MDS’s new COO; Integralis promotes Rigby.

PLUS: Jason Bandy emphasises the value of social media in recruiting.

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EXPERT OPINION: SELF-ORGANISING NETWORKS Cyril Doussau de Bazignan shows how SONs can help reduce RAN complexity.

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CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS FOR LTE CSPs are on a mission to reset 4G expectations, says George Malim.

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2012 PREDICTIONS BSS/OSS luminaries are brave enough to predict the business year ahead.

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EVENT DIARY Upcoming Events worldwide in business and operations support systems.

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CLOCKING OFF! Consumers are playing Pac-Man with mobile network capacity.

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+ 2 SPECIAL SUPPLEMENTS, FREE WITH THIS ISSUE OF VANILLAPLUS: • 16-PAGE CUSTOMER CARE & BILLING SUPPLEMENT • 20-PAGE CEO GUIDE TO MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012, BARCELONA

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Europeans get ready to receive a message from America at MWC Five years ago, on landing in Barcelona for MWC it was abundantly clear that mobile was a European thing. Nokia advertising on the baggage reclaim, Ericsson on the taxis and a whiff of a Chinese network equipment vendor here and there was the marketing composition of the event.

George Malim, Editor: VanillaPlus

EDITORIAL ADVISORS

John Aalbers, chief executive, Volubill

Dan Baker, Research Director, Technology Research Institute

Martin Creaner, president, TM Forum

Andreas Freund, VP Marketing, Orga Systems GmbH

Louis Hall, chief executive, Cerillion Technologies

Gaby Matsliach, general manager, BSS Product Line, Comverse

Pat McCarthy, VP of Global Marketing, Service Delivery Solutions, Telcordia

Simon Muderack, COO, Tribold

John Rainger, vice president, EMEA, CSG International

Olivier Suard, Marketing Director, Comptel

Mac Taylor, CEO, The Moriana Group

Chris Yeadon, director of Product Marketing, Ericsson

The European CSPs were also riding high, outwardly smug about their 3G deployments even though the customers hadn’t quite arrived to justify the investments made. There was an easy temptation to snigger at the visitors from the US looking goggle-eyed at the concepts of mobile content on display, and horrified at the adult zone of the mobile content hall. Their narrowband CDMA environment was a cartwheel compared to our pneumatic racing slick tyres.

I remember standing in front of two Americans at the check-in desk at Barcelona airport after the show who were declaiming loudly on their Nokias (that’s pronounced Noe-kee-aah) how big the mobile opportunity was to their colleagues back home. I hated to think what roaming costs they were incurring, but the message they were relaying was important and now we are seeing the fruits of those calls home.

New World leaders The US, along with some markets in the Asia-Pacific region, now leads the world in cutting edge wireless deployment. The device-to-have now comes from Cupertino, California rather than Helsinki, Finland and the operators leading the charge into LTE are Verizon Wireless and AT&T rather than Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone.

In technology nobody remains king of the hill for long. While such cycles will only accelerate, it would have taken a brave and prescient commentator to predict in 2007 that five years later the US would be the early adopter wireless market, or that many European former technology-leading markets would be waiting as long as another three years before they get LTE capacity.

Nevertheless, that’s what has happened and this year Europeans will be looking west and east in order to derive second or third mover advantage. For the providers of back office systems to the telecoms industry the tilting of the geographical axis may not have a great impact. This is a global industry and the US and individual Asian markets are simpler to address, being less fragmented in national regulations and spectrum availability. However, they are now the markets that provide a fascinating insight into likely consumer demand and behaviour. CSPs across the world and their software suppliers will be making the same enthusiastic calls back home this year that the Americans made in 2007.

Enjoy the magazine and the show.

George Malim EDITOR George Malim Tel: +44 (0) 0208 292 4036 george@vanillaplus.com ASSOCIATE EDITOR Mark Dye Tel: +44 (0) 0208 251 8908 md@vanillaplus.com DIGITAL EDITOR Nathalie Bisnar Tel: +44 (0) 1732 808690 nathalie@vanillaplus.com

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BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR Cherisse Draper Tel: +44 (0) 1732 897646 cherisse@vanillaplus.com BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER Mark Bridges Tel: +44 (0) 1732 897645 mark@vanillaplus.com

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OPERATIONS DIRECTOR Charlie Bisnar Tel: +44 (0) 1732 844017 charlie@vanillaplus.com PUBLISHER Jeremy Cowan Tel: +44 (0) 1420 588638 jc@vanillaplus.com

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Thoma Bravo takes control of InfoVista at a cost of €54.6m San Francisco-based Thoma Bravo, LLC, a US private equity (PE) investment firm, announced on December 20, that shareholders in InfoVista, a global Robert Sayle, provider of service Thoma Bravo: performance assurance Position for software, have sold it further growth more than 10.8 million InfoVista shares. These represent 67.2% of InfoVista’s share capital and voting rights, passing control of the company to the hitherto minority investor. The share sale price totals €54.6 million, valuing InfoVista at over €81 million.

"Thoma Bravo is excited to become a strategic partner with InfoVista's management team as we collaborate to strengthen the company's global leadership, position it for further growth, and continue focusing on customer

satisfaction," said Robert Sayle, vice president at Thoma Bravo.

The new majority shareholders describe their strategy in the software industry as being, "centered on the Thoma Bravo 'buy and build' approach. We look to partner with management teams that have the vision to be leading consolidators in their industries and with companies that have the size and scale to be strong platform companies.”

Examples include Prophet 21, Inc., Consona Corporation, and Vision Solutions, Inc. Thoma Bravo reportedly boosted revenues by 300-500% in each of these companies over periods of one to three years.

Prophet 21 is a provider of ERP solutions, Consona offers ERP and CRM systems and servies, while Vision Solutions specialises in enterprise level disaster recovery and data management.

Legal challenge may follow Tekelec Board's deal to sell for US$780m Tekelec has agreed to be acquired by a consortium led by Siris Capital Group, but Ron de Lange, uncertainty surrounds Tekelec: The same innovation the US$11.00 per share and quality valuation placed on its stock. This values the transaction at approximately $780 million, a price that has been accepted

by Tekelec's Board but is expected to be the subject of a legal inquiry. The offer may not, say some observers, be accepted by shareholders.

Tekelec reported orders in Q3 of $67.9 million, down 16% from 2010. The decline was across both the Global Signalling Solutions and Broadband Network Solutions business units.

Tekelec did, however, receive a Diameter Signaling Router (DSR)-related order for approximately $20 million in early October which was previously expected in the third quarter, and a second DSRrelated order for $13 million in late October. DSR helps telcos manage services and applications on 3G and all-IP LTE networks, and the market is

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Your Hosts will be: VanillaPlus -The leading brand driving profits for communication service providers worldwide Identify Networks - A specialist international telecommunications recruitment business *The Post-it note on the Front Cover allows entry for 2, please bring it with you!

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said to be growing fast.

Ron de Lange, president and CEO of Tekelec said, “The acquisition will provide us even greater flexibility to deliver best-in-class solutions for the mobile data and video market.”

However, Northland Capital Markets analyst, Catharine Trebnick told Reuters: "The valuation (of the deal) is slightly skewed and there isn't enough accounting for the growth of the newer products. It has been addressed, but not addressed enough."

Tripp Levy PLLC, a New York-based securities law firm, has announced an investigation into the proposed acquisition. The investigation concerns whether the amount payable to Tekelec shareholders is "unfair, inadequate, and substantially below the fair or inherent value of Tekelec". Some analysts estimate the true value of the stock to be at least $16 per share. The investigation also concerns whether Tekelec's board of directors may not have acted in shareholders' best interests.

N E W S U P D AT E Excalibur acquires IT service and support firm, Emnico Managed services provider, Excalibur, has acquired Emnico Enterprises Ltd James Phipps, Technical Services, a private managing IT network management director, company. Excalibur has also Excalibur agreed a strategic alliance with sister company, Emnico Technologies Ltd, to deliver software and end-to-end customer solutions.

“The Emnico Enterprises acquisition reflects Excalibur’s continued focus on repositioning the company as a complete unified communications and IT solutions provider to the SME market,” said James Phipps, managing director, Excalibur (pictured). “The invaluable addition of a very talented Emnico Enterprises Ltd team will help us to accelerate our IT services and support solutions for meeting customers’ evolving needs within these environments.”

Sponsored by:

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Humbug and OpenVox partner to detect and prevent telecommunications fraud N E W S U P D AT E

Juniper unveils cloud-based Junosphere test laboratory Juniper Networks has launched its Junosphere™ Lab, a virtual environment designed to revolutionise the way service providers and enterprises design, test and operate networks.

Junosphere is a cloud offering that allows network operators to create and run networks on-demand, enabling network modelling, testing and planning at a scale that is near impossible with physical equipment.

Using Junosphere Lab, companies can ‘rent’ networks for as little as US$50 per day, enabling them to speed modelling projects by over 30% and to lower total cost of ownership by as much as 90% compared to building a physical lab.

It reportedly overcomes traditional network modelling and design challenges by using virtualisation to reduce reliance on overburdened physical network labs. Junosphere Lab is designed to speed service introduction, plan more effectively and reduce the risk of network changes.

A Chinese and an Israeli company have teamed up to detect and prevent telecom fraud for purchasers of OpenVox’s PCI Cards. Israel’s Humbug Telecom Labs is to provide carrier-class Yaniv Rofé, fraud prevention, Humbug detection and telecom Telecom Labs: Protecting the analytics for customers of company that OpenVox Communication owns the PBX Co. Ltd using the company’s advanced open source asterisk® telephony hardware and software products.

Humbug Telecom Labs aims to make it affordable for any sized business to access carrier-class fraud prevention and detection tools, and simultaneously gain powerful business intelligence. Humbug offers free telecom analytics to view telecom traffic in a real-time, concise, readable format. Real-time alerts can be configured by the user to track telecom traffic behaviour and spending.

Humbug is designed for call centres, ITSPs (internet telephony service

The focus was on redundancy, high available solutions and WAN acceleration.

All relevant functions of BOSS Link Manager®, such as graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and back-end processes, were tuned under real conditions. With a minimum of adaptation effort the OSS was integrated and demonstrated to key customers.

Founded in 2002, OpenVox is a provider of open source telephony hardware and software, serving small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and the open source market with products that lower communication costs, increase system flexibility and enhance productivity in building PBX, call centre, IVR and firewall applications. “The co-operation with Humbug allows OpenVox to bring additional cloud service to our customers,” said Lin Miao, CEO of OpenVox.

Accanto enables LTE and mobile data service providers to differentiate service qualities

Successful interoperability test of HP hardware and BOSS platform A three-month lab test has recently been completed successfully in Dimetis’ test environment in Dietzenbach, Germany.

The company’s operation support system (OSS) BOSS Link Manager®, in combination with Oracle 11.2g database and Java 1.6 application server, was tested on an HP Integrity RX 2800 i2 carrier-grade hardware platform, and HP-UX 11.3 operating system. The database was populated with data from an existing customer to simulate a real application environment.

providers), organisations that sell by phone, businesses with significant telecom expenditures and any business aware of what the company describes as “the global fraud Lin Miao, epidemic”. Yaniv Rofé, OpenVox : CEO at Humbug Telecom Additional cloud services to our Labs, said, “The customers partnership with OpenVox enables Humbug to prevent telecom fraud the day that the card is installed – mitigating the risk substantially and protecting the company that owns the PBX.”

Michele Campriani, Accanto Systems: More married to their mobile device than their operator

By some estimates, mobile data traffic grew by 260% over the past two years, and video traffic is expected to have grown by more than 50% in 2011 alone. Coupled with the massive increase in over-the-top applications like Skype and YouTube, this has put incredible pressures on mobile operators.

Different classes of customers, or even different services provided to the same customer, require differing quality levels.

The result is that customers can no longer be treated equally by mobile network operators, which is forcing many MNOs to move from flat-rate pricing to tiered / quality-based pricing. To meet this need, Accanto Systems has announced the availability of new LTE and mobile data service analysis capabilities in Release 5.0 of its Customer Service Assurance (CSA)

network management system.

Michele Campriani, CEO of Accanto Systems said, "Multimedia, push and interactive services are creating an unprecedented volume of traffic, as well as incredible value for the end user. They are now more married to their mobile device than they are to their operator. This evolution is forcing operators to re-think their approach to service assurance. They must now be closer to the customer and the services/applications they are accessing, and have deeper visibility into how the network, services, devices and subscribers affect one another."

CSA 5.0 introduces features to enable operators to deal with high data flows, while transitioning to a customer service perspective, incuding: Advanced Correlation and Mobile Data Analysis; New Grouping Engine for 'Adaptive' Analysis; and Enhanced support for 3G and LTE (3GPP release 9). The release is also said to seamlessly integrate LTE on top of existing legacy technologies.

Sponsored by:

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Technicolor Cirpack’s SBC offers telcos a new flexible, scalable platform Through its Cirpack brand Technicolor (Euronext Paris: TCH) now offers its Session Border Controller (SBC) as a modular and scalable platform to provide the flexibility that meets the needs of today’s customers.

The Cirpack SBC is available in three variants that help manage increasing signalling traffic and the high performance demand of media traffic. The variants are as follows: • The Compact SBC is an all-in-one solution, hosting both media and signalling controllers on a single platform • As a network grows, the Compact SBC can be upgraded to a dedicated media controller, supervised by the Integrated SBC which is a combination of access and interconnect signalling controller modules, and finally • When more power or dedicated modules are required, the Integrated SBC can become a Specialised SBC, focused on access control or border management.

The open-ended scalability enables network SBCs to grow easily through the smart re-allocation of existing equipment, which means that extra platforms are only installed when traffic grows.

The ease of integration and performance of the Cirpack SBC’s inherent security mechanisms are claimed to make it

the perfect, scalable solution for telcos. Its features enable operators to define clear demarcation points at specific boundaries; to create borders to strengthen security and control – both in the access and interconnect limits; and to secure the core network as well as controlling all network flows, safeguarding against potential intrusion.

The scalable platform meets international standards by ensuring interconnections with any other network. It delivers multimedia and interactive communication services, such as media traffic control, media transcoding, identity management, roaming control IP bouncer (to control who has access, for example from third party local loops) and a SIP limiter.

VSS Monitoring offers packet de-duplication to enhance network performance and accuracy

Martin Breslin, VSS Monitoring: Improve network visibility, reduce redundancies and illuminate blind spots

Network intelligence optimisation specialist, VSS Monitoring, has announced the availability of its packet de-duplication feature for greater utilisation and dependability of analytic tools. This feature aims to enable enterprises and service providers to realise the full value of their existing investments, while improving performance and accuracy from network analytic and security monitoring tools.

“To achieve unprecedented results in times when resources are constrained and business growth is imperative, enterprises and service providers must correct network inefficiencies and gather greater intelligence to optimise their growth potential,” said Martin Breslin, CEO of VSS Monitoring. “Our goal is to offer new solutions that help our customers achieve a greater return on existing investments by enabling them to improve network visibility, reduce redundancies, and illuminate blind spots to heighten performance.”

VSS Monitoring’s packet de-duplication feature improves the efficiency and effectiveness of existing monitoring

solutions by eliminating redundant data packets, which reduces the processing load on the tools and false event alarming. The San Mateo, California-headquartered company’s latest offering is compatible with both IPv4 and IPv6, and by prioritising bandwidth with premium data, network QoS can be assured.

Jim Frey, EMA: Tools need to be focused on analysing actual traffic

“The ability to remove duplicate network packets from traffic bound for analytics tools will improve overall network operations productivity,” said Jim Frey, managing research director at Enterprise Management Associates. “To ensure optimal performance, and improve the life of legacy investments, tools need to be focused on analysing actual traffic and not be distracted by duplicate data sets.”

VSS Monitoring focuses on network intelligence optimisation, providing a systems-oriented approach for optimising and scaling connectivity between network switching and the intelligence ecosystem of network analytical, inline security and WAN acceleration tools. Its intelligence optimisation systems aim to improve tool usage, simplify operations, increase efficiencies and enhance RoI.

Sponsored by:

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DigitalRoute delivers 4G mediation to BTC

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ezetop in top-up deal with China Unicom Guangxi for subscribers abroad ezetop has signed a top-up business agreement with China Unicom’s Guangxi Branch. This is claimed by the company to make it the first top-up company to officially provide services for all China Unicom’s subscribers.

More than 40 million Chinese live outside China and there is a huge demand to top up relatives and friends back home in China. This new top-up service aims to satisfy that need. In addition, China Unicom’s subscribers will enjoy instant top-up services while roaming internationally. With this agreement, China Unicom mobile phone top-up services will be available in 400,000 retail stores in 20 countries, from www.ezetop.com or through mobile devices.

Today ezetop offers direct connections to more than 188 international mobile operators across Asia Pacific, Africa, the Caribbean, Central / Latin America and Eastern Europe, though operators such as Vodafone, Orange, and Telefonica.

EastLink chooses Scorecard Systems analysis tools for deeper customer insight EastLink, Canada’s largest independent telco, has chosen reporting and analysis solutions from Scorecard Systems of Toronto. Effective immediately, EastLink is deploying Scorecard’s flagship analysis and commission calculation products.

Scorecard will provide ‘one version of the truth’ across all departments, enabling a deeper level of understanding around customer behaviour patterns, while automating the commission process.

According to Deborah Shaffner, president and COO of EastLink, “Our data quality, integrity and speed of reporting will be greatly enhanced, providing us with significantly more insight into our customer base, products and bundle performance.”

BTC, the Bahamas Telecommunications Company, has selected DigitalRoute of Stockholm, Sweden, to Stephen support its ongoing 4th Rickaby, Generation mobile DigitalRoute Americas: communications (4G) Growing and next generation presence in networks (NGN) the region projects. BTC, the country’s sole wireless provider, aims to roll out its 4G network this year, thereby enabling data download speeds 20-30 times faster than are available today.

DigitalRoute® is an independent software vendor delivering mediation and integration solutions to the global telecoms and data communications industries. Massive volumes of usage records are processed every day by the world's leading communication service providers (CSPs), to run mission-critical applications. Mediation reduces the number of point integrations involved and provides the functions to manage usage data efficiently before it reaches the business support systems (BSS).

With the rapid uptake of mobile data services driven by new network technologies, mediation is an essential component in the service providers’ business operations.

As the incumbent mobile operator in The Bahamas, as well as a provider of fixed line and broadband services, BTC currently has approximately 123,000 fixed line customers, 388,000 mobile customers and 19,000 broadband customers. “The planned introduction of 4G, enabling high speed mobile broadband for all our subscriber and visitors makes a flexible and high performance mediation solution such as MediationZone a necessity,” said Marlon Johnson, VP of marketing at BTC. Over the past two years DigitalRoute has been selected by some of the leading CSPs in North America to replace legacy mediation and data integration systems. “We value the opportunity to work with BTC and it fits perfectly with our plans for continued strengthening of our presence in the region,” said Stephen Rickaby, general manager at DigitalRoute Americas.

DigitalRoute’s systems are deployed by 240 customers worldwide, now including the Bahamas

Costa Rican MVNO fullmóvil uses Tweakker’s self-care, on-device internet connectivity Costa Rica’s fullmóvil has become the first Latin American pure MVNO to adopt Tweakker’s self-care, on-device internet connectivity service for its growing numbers of ‘mobile warriors’.

In the service’s first week of operation the MVNO saved itself an estimated US$200,000 in customer care costs.

Tweakker’s mobile device connectivity service supports more than 3,000 mobile models and 165 brands and its over-the-air configuration service is now used by MVNOs, internet content and service providers. fullmóvil uses the state-owned operator ICE’s 3G network and, since September 2011, has been providing mobile users

with its SIM-only service. The firm has 900 points-of-sale (PoS) nationwide and is owned by the VIrtualis Group, which includes Grupo Monge and Casa Blanca retail stores and other shareholders.

“Teaming with Tweakker is win-win as far as our customers and business model is concerned,” says Roberto Palla, representative of fullmóvil.

“Mobile users have access to a world class connectivity service every minute of the day from anywhere, (and) we as a full MVNO slashed our business costs from the start by an estimated 95%, compared with costs that would have arisen if we had gone down the call centre route and set up our subscribers manually.”

Sponsored by:

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Econet pays Astellia €1m to accelerate Zimbabwe’s mobile broadband adoption Econet Wireless, a mobile network operator in Zimbabwe, has signed a €1 million contract with France-based provider of monitoring solutions for optimising mobile network quality of service, Astellia. Econet will deploy Astellia’s vendor-independent solution on its 2G and 3G networks and receive support from the vendor’s consulting team.

Harare, Zimbabwe

and voice communications service quality.

Astellia’s monitoring solution features Packet Service Monitoring to evaluate the perceived quality of experience from an end-user perspective for MMS, emails, video streaming and internet services. It will help Econet investigate problems such as slow web browsing due, for instance, to congestion, inefficient transaction procedures or faulty handsets.

“Following our network expansion and upgrade phase, our focus now is on making sure the equipment we installed is optimised and able to provide an efficient, reliable service to our subscribers,” said Douglas Mboweni, CEO at Econet Wireless.

Econet has more than 5.6 million subscribers (69% market share) and is enjoying rapid subscriber and revenue growth. But it needs to monitor network performance to improve broadband

Russian tier-1 mobile carrier selects Dynamic SIM Allocation customer’s handset, DSA will offer a range of personalisation options including number selection, call plans, promotions and service upgrades.

Evolving Systems, Inc., a provider of software solutions and services to the wireless, wireline and IP carrier market, reports that a tier-1 wireless carrier in Russia is implementing the company’s Dynamic SIM Allocation™ (DSA) solution in its largest ever DSA order. The carrier will be using it for personalisation of subscriber services and to deliver an enhanced and differentiated user experience.

The system enables the carrier to introduce a universal SIM card that can be used across the full product range and the whole of Russia. By avoiding the constraints of pre-provisioning for specific products and with regional numbers, DSA will make significant cost savings, simplify logistics and stock management, and allow the carrier to distribute SIM cards more efficiently and quickly.

DSA will change the way that subscribers are activated for the carrier’s predominantly pre-paid subscriber base, as it operates across multiple time zones. At the point of first use, via the

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VanillaPlus Hot List: February/March 2012 The Hot List below shows the companies informing us of recent contract wins or product deployments.

If your contract is not listed here email the details to us now marked "Hot List" <editorial@vanillaplus.com> Vendor(s)

Client, Country

Acision Agama Technologies Astellia Astellia Calix Comviva DigitalRoute eGain Evolving Systems ezetop Gemalto INSIDE Secure Interactive Intelligence MasterCard, Network International, Oberthur and RIM MDS Lavastorm Nokia Siemens Networks Sandvine Scorecard Systems Subex Syniverse Telepin Software Tweakker Key:

FETS GPS LTE

Product / Service (Duration & Value)

Awarded

Various clients, International A1 Telekom Austria TELUS, Canada Econet Wireless, Zimbabwe Hawaiian Telcom, USA Banglalink, Bangladesh BTC, Bahamas FETS Nigeria Ltd Unnamed carrier, Russia China Unicom Isis, USA BlackBerry(R) & other devices EMS, Inc, USA

Opens cloud-based data centre network to offer on-demand messaging services Embedded Monitoring system extended to end-to-end service distribution Supplies unified service assurance system for 3G UTRAN and core data networks €1 million contract for optimisation system to accelerate mobile brodband adoption Selects Unified Access portfolio for broadband network transformation initiatives Insurance premium collection over mobiquity™ mobile financial services platform MediationZone selected to support BTC's ongoing 4G and NGN projects Selects eGain to support innovative mobile money services for 'unbanked' population Implementing Dynamic SIM Allocation (DSA) solution Deal claimed to make ezetop first top up provider to serve all Unicom subscribers Secures m-commerce platform in JV for AT&T Mobility, T-Mobile USA, Verizon Wireless SecuRead(R) NFC system powering HID Global iCLASS(R) mobile secure identity Outsourced contact centre selects Cloud-based system to boost management control

1.2012 12.2011 10.2011 11.2011 1.2012 1.2012 12.2011 10.2011 10.2012 12.2011 12.2011 11.2011 12.2011

Etisalat, UAE Belize Telemedia Ltd Vodafone Egypt Xplornet Communications, Canada EastLink, Canada Telekom Slovenije, Slovenia KT Corporation, South Korea Digicel Group, Papua New Guinea fullmóvil, Costa Rica

Announces cashless mobile payments system using NFC wireless technology Business Performance Analytics to optimise key VAS delivery and billing processes Operator upgrades its One-NDS platform to better manage subscriber data Buys Network Analytics product, featuring Real-Time Entertainment Dashboard To deploy flagship analysis and commission calculation products Selects Subex ROC® Fraud Management system for entire group Data & financial clearing services, fraud detection, roaming agreement management Launches cellmoni, a mobile money service offering a range of financial services MVNO adopts OTA device management services to cut customer care costs

10.2011 12.2011 12.2011 1.2012 10.2011 10.2011 12.2011 10.2011 11.2011

= = =

Funds & Electronic Transfer Solutions Nigeria Ltd Global Positioning System Long-Term Evolution to 4th Generation Networks

MNP = NFC = UTRAN =

Mobile Number Portability Near Field Communications UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network

Sponsored by:

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CSPs turn to managed services to address the everyday challenges of business optimisation CSPs all over the world are turning to the vendor community for back office solutions that are delivered as managed services. They want to tap into vendors’ experiences with existing customers and accelerate time to market, while reaping the rewards of rapid return on investment and lowered CapEx. Here Subash Menon, founder chairman, managing director and chief executive officer of Subex, explains how the company is focusing on managed services and its ROC suite of products. And his colleague John Brooks, vice president, Analytics Solutions, explains the ROCware concept in greater detail and also discusses CSPs’ need for greater analytics capabilities.

VanillaPlus: Subex has recently transformed its business with the disposal of some product lines. What were the reasons behind the change in strategy?

Subash Menon: We recently sold our activation business to NetCracker because we believe our future really lies in our Revenue Operations Centre (ROC) and managed services portfolio. The activation business consisted of a service fulfilment solution composed of the NetProvisioning, NetOptimizer and Vector products. We had acquired this business as part of the Syndesis acquisition in 2007 but we made the strategic decision to dispose of the business in order to increase our focus on our core strengths and hence increase profitability.

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We are well positioned to take advantage of market dynamics through our Revenue Operations Centre (ROC®) and managed services portfolio, and hence help communication service providers (CSPs) remain competitive. We’ve always been a

Subash Menon, founder chairman, managing director and chief executive officer of Subex, global leader in Business Optimisation that enable CSPs to achieve competitive advantage

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specialist in those areas and activation had become a small part of our business, so it makes sense to come back to our core portfolio.

The situation is exactly as we stated at the time of the disposal. Global market dynamics are constantly changing and we have to evolve in order to address our customers’ needs. We expect this renewed focus to enable us to increase our revenue by more than 20% annually with a positive EBITDA growth.

VP: How is the new Subex positioned to meet the needs of CSPs more closely?

“With reducing voice revenues, market saturation and increased competition, a CSP’s greatest challenge is to constantly improve average revenues and margins per user.”

- Subash Menon, Subex

SM: The continuing focus on efficiency improvements and cost reduction means that business optimisation is an everyday challenge for the world’s best CSPs. With renewed focus on growing our core products such as our ROC Solutions, which encompass revenue assurance, fraud management, partner settlement, and data integrity management, and our managed services portfolio, we are now concentrating on managing our business optimisation offering which over time has made us market leaders in this space.

We will continue to invest in improving our solutions to meet the dynamic needs of the telecoms industry. This can only mean good news for our customers; both potential and existing. This is because as a CSP, you require a vendor who can manage to optimise your business operations and maximise profitability with the least amount of investment, especially with the changing market dynamics. And this is exactly what our ROC platform focuses on.

VP: To what extent are CSPs increasingly turning to managed services? How are you addressing this demand?

SM: CSPs have an increased focus on managed services as that is a method to bring down the risks in the business and hence the cost. CSPs now want to have assured outcomes in the business and managed services help them to achieve that. Such approaches provide great alignment between the objectives of the vendor-partner and the CSP. In addition, managed services also help the CSPs to change CapEx to OpEx and this eases cashflow. In essence, managed services allow an operator to focus on its core business areas while domain experts manage their BSS/OSS, technology and networks. This helps increase business efficiency while lowering costs.

We were the first company in our market to offer managed services. We have multi-year managed services contracts with several leading global operators.

Operationally, managed services revenues are predictable and that helps us in our business forecast. Our share of revenue from managed services has also been steadily increasing which underlines the strength of CSP demand.

VP: Are there enough qualified experts in the market to support vendor-managed services initiatives?

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SM: We have been consciously employing people with

the right skills for the last few years and training people depending on the requirements we see emerging, so I don’t see it as a big problem. The bigger issue is in convincing CSPs, because of their internal pressures, that a managed services approach is right for them.

VP: What's your view of the outlook for Subex with the ROC and managed services propositions? How do you see the company widening its reach?

SM: The business landscape is in our favour.

With reducing voice revenues, market saturation and increased competition, a CSP’s greatest challenge today is to constantly improve average revenues and margins per user. With the ROC, we provide them enterprise-wide and subscribercentric revenue, cost and margin visibility, thereby helping them increase efficiency and reduce costs. With the managed services offering, we help them manage these very critical functions enabling them to focus on their core business operations.

Today, Subex's customers include 16 of the top 20 wireless operators worldwide and 26 of the world's 50 biggest telecommunications service providers. We have more than 300 installations across 70 countries. We are well entrenched in some of the biggest telecoms markets in the US, in Europe and we have unparalleled reach in emerging markets such as Africa.

The future for us involves doing more of what we’re already doing at this point. We have to keep understanding the needs of CSPs and their expectations of our suite of solutions and services. The future for us is really good – there’s a great opportunity for steady, sustained growth as we progress.

VP: John, Subash has described the company’s strategy and how he sees the industry developing, can you describe the advantages Subex' ROCware platform brings to the market?

John Brooks: ROCware brings several different advantages to the market. If you’re already a Subex customer, ROCware facilitates an environment in which operators can build a Revenue Operations Centre (ROC) and provides the ability to blend analytics across applications that simply hasn’t been seen before. The first element of ROCware is to provide the glue between Subex applications. The second area that ROCware enables CSPs is by enabling them to pull information from silos across their businesses, not just from the Subex products.

From an analytics perspective ROCware is extremely powerful and, while most analytics is script-based and extremely IT heavy, with ROCware anybody can have access to the data and do anything they want with it.

In addition, because ROCware has a series of

preconfigured business solutions in areas such as product performance management, to name one example, we can monitor how individual products are performing across the business in near real-time. Other preconfigured solutions include capacity management, order accuracy and payment channel assurance.

VP: Intelligence both about customer behaviour and KPIs in the CSP's own business processes are now being demanded. How is the role of and appetite for analytics in CSPs changing as a consequence of that?

John Brooks, vice president of Analytics, Subex

JB: Analytics is a big word in the business at the moment. Everyone is calling everything analytics these days but analytics has got far more complex than before, so the ability for the CSP to generate information has been challenged. Where once being able to access a report showing sales volume over a week used to be regarded as heavy analytics, now the CSP can analyse data relating to cost, business plan, time and behaviour in great granularity. That enables CSPs to offer the right product mix at the right time to the right demographic and ROCware is the only tool I’ve seen that is able to easily manage that level of complexity, without an IT dependency.

VP: What levels of analytical granularity are CSPs looking for and how is Subex addressing those requirements?

JB: A lot of CSPs don’t realise what the possibilities are. They have ideas of where they would like to go but it falls back to us as the vendor to educate to them as to what can be done. The granularity required is different from person to person. For example, at a CSP with a ROC (Revenue Operations Center) with multiple displays can be seen by several analysts. Those displays show headline analytics and the individual analysts can drill down on their own terminals. We provide granularity at the desktop down to the individual incident level. ROCware enables the automation that this requires. When you want to encompass this type of granularity you need the business rules and process flows to be handed off to the technology so it does the heavy lifting.

VanillaPlus

VP: How important is it that CSPs can draw Jargon Buster on the experience that Subex has BSS/OSS = Business / assembled through its worldwide Operations Support engagements? What differentiates Subex?

Systems

JB: We didn’t create ROCware in a vacuum, we responded to customer demands to solve their problems. With more than 300 customers, we bring our experience to bear to help them maximise their deployments. We’re well suited to do this from both technology and service perspectives. We bring a lot of sophistication to the table with our technology, by engaging our managed services, our customers can quickly realise the full benefit of that sophistication.

CapEx & OpEx = Capital & Operational Expenditure CSP = Communication Service Provider EBITDA = Earnings Before Interest, Depreciation & Amortisation ROC® = Revenue Operations Centre

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EXPERT OPINION:

Social network integration for churn prevention is a ‘must’ for next generation mobile operators Operators have to protect their subscriber base more than ever in the current competitive markets. They have to identify the subscribers behavioural and usage patterns, compare these with the competitors’ price plans, and then consider and act on any other relevant information about their users that may help them identify the most appropriate offer to keep their customers loyal. As Bogdan Danila writes, all this needs to be automated and in real time and this can be a challenge.

Churn prevention There are plenty of business intelligence tools that provide information regarding the propensity of subscribers to churn by analysing historical records. Identifying customers with smaller consumption, smaller top-ups or delayed bill payments may give an indication about who is at risk of churn.

The author is Bogdan Danila, CTO of Computaris

“Social networks such as Facebook … double up as a convenient communication channel to the subscriber.”

Bogdan Danila, Computaris

Computaris has been active in pre- and postpaid rating and charging, broadband data policy management, subscriber data management, loyalty and churn management for many years. Visit them in Barcelona at MWC 2012, Hall 2, booth 2A60.

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In practice this is not sufficient. The ‘trend per customer’ of these parameters becomes an even more important indicator for a more accurate estimation of the future behaviour. Also some parameters can be more important than others and this can change in time. Therefore, automatic self-learning from past experience can improve the accuracy of detecting the real churners.

For most business intelligence applications this is far too complicated and requires the consultancy of well-trained analysts to analyse, maintain and tweak the business logic. To overcome this challenge, mobile and telecommunication players should adopt a selflearning business model, as the core of their system.

Competitor’s tariffs simulation Pricing is very important in our increasingly competitive and saturated market. It is strategically important for each operator to understand their competitive position for each subscriber, by being able to fit and analyse subscriber’s usage patterns with the best offers available on the market. It is also important for the operator to be able to simulate the impact of any changes of existing price plans on the potential revenues increase or decrease across the subscriber base.

Pricing is important but not the most important factor for everyone. Proposal of a new price plan should go to the right customer at the right time.

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And this decision has to automatically take all the other parameters and trends into consideration.

Social network integration Knowing the subscriber’s specific phone behaviour and the position related to the competition’s pricing is helpful. Knowing the customer preferences beyond their phone habits can only help provide a more targeted proposition. Social networks such as Facebook provide the operators with open access to these preferences, and they also double up as a convenient communication channel to the subscriber.

Suppose the operator was able to identify possible churners and correlate this with subscribers’ taste in music and offer music downloads or concert tickets in exchange for a commitment or extension of the plan. Or, suppose the operator was able to offer teenagers a small top-up, allowing them a bundle of extra free minutes or SMSs, or to give adults more loyalty points or bill time discounts for earlier bill payment. These might all be examples of effective offers to entice subscribers to stay.

End-to-end campaign management There is plenty of data easily available to provide an indication of the likelihood that a subscriber will churn. It is, therefore, important that the subscriber lifecycle loop is closed and the actions taken by each individual are captured and processed.

This should be part of the automatic campaigns management process, starting with setting the initial parameters and rules offline, executing the campaign and communicating with the user via SMS or Facebook and also analysing and measuring the results by applying self learning technology and end-to-end reporting. This is the only way to accurately measure the effectiveness of the campaigns whilst using one user interface.

C-LEVEL VIEW

As LTE comes to market, CSPs face a new set of challenges to deliver the experiences customers demand across 2G, 3G and 4G technologies, across the access and core network, and derive business value from the data they collect from across their networks. Lyn Cantor, (pictured) president of Tektronix Communications, speaks to George Malim about how the company has transformed to enable CSPs for the LTE era.

The ‘Art of Data Mining’ used

by Tektronix Communications to give operators end-to-end assurance for migration to LTE Rising expectations While 10 years ago, users would accept a dropped call, today would be unacceptable.

Users’ expectations of what they can do on their mobile devices have risen and as a consequence the customer satisfaction stakes have become higher.

Now, says Cantor, the game has changed with LTE and knowing the network is working as expected has become decoupled from the user experience. Although the network still underpins the experience, what’s carried over it and how effectively that is delivered to the customer is now the key.

A bad experience with a new service such as video calling, or bandwidth availability being throttled back at a peak time, can negatively impact the relationship with the user and – even in an LTE environment – users will simply switch CSP if they are not receiving what they want. That raises the stakes for

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In the past, serving the monitoring needs of mobile operators was relatively simple.

Probes placed throughout the network provided data on the performance of the network and from that CSPs could extrapolate the quality of service being delivered to customers.

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C-LEVEL VIEW

CSPs but simply throwing more probes at the problem isn’t an option because of the associated costs, both in terms of the probes themselves but also in terms of storing and analysing the data they gather so business intelligence can be derived in real-time.

Network interoperability The other challenge CSPs face is network interoperability. LTE has been deployed alongside many legacy 2G/3G technologies and managing QoS and customer expectations across common applications will be a challenge given the network and bandwidth limitations of legacy systems.

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In addition, effective utilisation of customer experience management (CEM) systems will also play an important role, with multiple departments within the operator’s organisation having access to both real-time and historical data that will allow them to gain greater insight into subscribers’ behaviour and even pre-empt what subscribers’ future needs may likely be.

Ultimately, through the greater levels of analysis made possible by employing accurate, real-time information taken directly from the network, CSPs will be better positioned to make more timely and welljudged decisions that ultimately impact their bottom line. This may be through better network utilisation and optimisation, or by bringing new services to market faster and cheaper than the competition.

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Given that no two LTE network topologies will be exactly the same, and each operator will have a different set of service and customer criteria that it wants to fulfill, operators will need to engage with technology partners that can provide a customised offering that allows them to deliver their business model at the lowest possible cost. Given the complexities

and risks involved, this will involve real-time network and service performance monitoring and troubleshooting activities.

“We’re … helping our customers make more money by better leveraging the data in their network for making better business decisions.”

Lyn Cantor, Tektronix Communications

Aligning the right assets From the need to have access to critical LTE network data, to the need for applications that help CSPs better manage the customer experience and other applications focused on maximising profitability, Tektronix Communications has aligned its internal assets and resources to better serve the needs of next generation network operators.

Integrating the Arantech assets the company acquired in 2009, along with strengthening its professional services operation, will help CSPs overcome the majority of monitoring and assurance challenges posed by LTE. “We have done a lot of work since April 2011 maturing the transformation of the organisation from being a product-oriented company to a product and service-oriented business,” says Cantor.

Lyn Cantor, Tektronix Communications: Deliver the experiences customers demand

The portfolio includes probes with the capability to perform high-bandwidth IP testing and collection of data and deep packet inspection that enables real-time troubleshooting and optimisation. In addition, the core test business remains critical, according to Cantor.

“We continue to do a lot of work with network equipment manufacturers that are involved with deploying new technologies early on in the LTE lifecycle,” Cantor explains, “which is very important in terms of getting us access to emerging protocols that allows us to provide more value to our customers in being able to

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Leveraging the LTE life-cycle The areas of network monitoring and assurance are the traditional, core business of

Tektronix Communications and they are fundamentally important to CSPs. Its solutions are designed to collect real-time, signalling and user-plane data from the network core to the edge, interfacing with all the multi-vendor elements in a typical CSP network as well as applications to manage and make use of that data.

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C-LEVEL VIEW

“Early monitor their networks end-to-end, across deployments are

and the additional capabilities that the

solutions deployed, tapping into the data and experience that Tektronix Communications has garnered through deployments across the world is expected by Cantor to be one of its strongest attributes, particularly as CSPs seek benchmarks and access to prior experience when it comes to their own LTE roll-outs.

selling high performance instruments. As Cantor explains, “Our integrated business provides our customers with an end-to-end value proposition that extends from initial network deployment through on-going maintenance and optimisation. We’ve created individual groups focused on access and core technologies, and we’ve taken all the application assets and brought them together into one apps business to address issues such as QoS and QoE.

Artful data mining The transformation of Tektronix Communications has left the company well placed to enable its customers to maximise their LTE investment, says Cantor. He explained: “We artfully mine the data collected from across the network to provide CSPs with the end-to-end view of their business. Network technologies have become so much more complex as carrier networks continue to flatten, yet deliver mobile broadband and data services with high quality.

multiple networks and technologies.”

most significantly Extending delivered value

However, with the applications and services

looking for that Tektronix Communications already had benchmarks for Arantech acquisition brought it, the company’s QoS and QoE for offering now extends far beyond simply customers.”

Lyn Cantor, Tektronix Communications

“We’re expanding our propositions from the approach of just being about saving money to helping our customers make more money by better leveraging the data in their network for making better business decisions,” he adds.

Those application assets encompass more traditional CSP activity such as troubleshooting and optimisation but also address performance intelligence, customer experience management, marketing analytics and personalised services. The applications on top of the instruments layer enable the data collected to be correlated and analysed so CSP teams can react to it in real-time and enable new revenue opportunities to be accessed.

VanillaPlus Jargon Buster CEM = Customer Experience Management CSP = Communication Service Provider LTE = Long Term Evolution (to 4th Generation networks) QoE / QoS = Quality of Experience / Service

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Professional services Cantor has also re-oriented the company to make better use of the experience it has assembled and to enable customers to make better use of the data that they can collect.

Tektronix Communications has made substantial investments in its professional services capability that will drive the platform around delivering value from its sold solutions.

As a leader in 3G and LTE monitoring

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“Nowadays, the network environment is made up of countless elements, systems and interfaces, it is important that the operator has the ability to harness all of that fragmented data and turn it into actionable information.”

Cantor continues, “We provide operators with the tools that are required to access, collect and analyse all of the data held within the network.”

No doubt, many of the challenges associated with LTE roll-out can be addressed by providing the visibility that CSPs need.

“Getting the business risks sorted out on Day One is really about gaining visibility,” he says.

“Ensuring reliability from the lab test to the first office applications and getting service roll-outs and interoperability issues addressed have been areas that have been critical.”

But does all this really matter to CSPs? Absolutely, says Cantor: “What does the customer see in terms of value from our solution? They see faster time-to-value, and higher overall quality. The early deployments are most significantly looking for benchmarks for QoS and QoE for customers.”

POLICY, CHARGING & PERSONALISATION FEBRUARY / MARCH 2012

SUPPLEMENT D R I V I N G

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TALKING HEADS ▼

Policy functions bring CSPs flexibility, personalisation and profit, says Comptel

POLICY & CHARGING Where customer demands meet business needs! + Policy is NOT just Pricing

NEW PARTNERSHIPS An ‘intelligent online charging system’ for mobile broadband

POLICY MANAGEMENT How Policy helps to create dynamic business strategies

▼

FROM NETWORK TO BUSINESS

▼

The era of ‘OmniConvergence’

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Up-sell Subscribers with the benefits of their package

PLUS!

Policy & Charging News • ‘Grown-up’ Policy Systems for all Users Editor’s Comment • Breaking Policy News: www.vanillaplus.com

POLICY

&

CHARGING

NEWS

Customer demands and business needs Communications service providers (CSPs) need to balance continuous demands to improve the customer experience with rapid growth in data traffic, and the inevitable congestion that follows. As if that wasn’t enough, the constant pressure on profit margins means that this traffic must be monetised.

This is just the latest in a series of Policy and Charging Supplements from VanillaPlus, looking at the issues surrounding service optimisation, real-time charging, policy management, and personalised subscriber marketing. As one policy system vendor put it recently, “The right product will enable operators to set policies which assist them to manage network traffic in real-time, while … additional personalisation can be achieved.”

There are a couple of noticeable trends emerging. Firstly, as evidenced by Sandvine’s recent Global Internet Phenomena report entitled The Post-PC Era, the majority of realtime entertainment traffic is destined for game consoles, set-top boxes, smart TVs and mobile devices being used in the home. Sandvine shows that counting bytes is no longer sufficient for network planning.

Secondly, strong competition in this sector is encouraging many companies into cooperative ventures to maintain their independence while broadening their offering and enhancing their marketing and sales efficiency. There is news of two such joint ventures on this page.

Jeremy Cowan, Editorial Director, VanillaPlus

Allot and Openet provide intelligent online charging system for mobile broadband Allot Communications, a global supplier of service optimisation and revenue generation solutions for fixed and mobile broadband services, and Openet, a provider of service optimisation software to tier one communications and media service providers, have successfully tested the interoperability of two of their systems. The Allot Service Gateway and Openet’s Online Charging System are designed to enable mobile operators to evolve their pre-paid charging environments into real-time revenue engines.

Following their existing integration

between Openet’s Policy and Allot Service Gateway, which has already been deployed by a number of operators, the joint solution is now said to offer comprehensive intelligent policy and charging enforcement.

The joint solution enables service providers to introduce new, personalised mobile charging models, such as service tiering, over-the-top application-based charging, on-demand bandwidth (turbo boost) for applications such as streaming video, and per application time-based charging, used to implement use cases such as ‘off-peak happy hour’.

CONTENTS 19

Policy & Charging Comment and News

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C-LEVEL VIEW Juhani Hintikka says Policy functions bring CSPs flexibility, personalisation and profit.

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Nick Booth urges CSPs to up-sell subscribers with package benefits.

POLICY MANAGEMENT: EXPERT OPINIONS

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Policy can create dynamic business strategies, reports John Lenns.

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According to Anat Ben-Yaacov, this is the era of ‘omni-convergence’.

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Policy is not the key to pricing or personalisation. Ask Dave Labuda.

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Bill Diotte describes ‘grown-up’ policy systems for all kinds of users.

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Tech Mahindra and FTS agree a global policy control partnership System integrator and developer, Tech Mahindra and FTS, a provider of billing, customer care and policy Pritam Parvatkar, control products, have Tech announced a new policy Mahindra: control and LTE partnership.

Traffic FTS' Leap Policy Control will magnetisation be incorporated into Tech Mahindra's LTE Packet Core Lab for both internal and partner solutions. FTS’s dynamic business control engine enables operators to adapt service and network behaviour in real-time, in response to customer interaction.

Tech Mahindra can now offer an end-toend policy control solution to network operators as part of its new Mobile Packet Core (LTE) Lab. "Addressing the evolving need of broadband traffic magnetisation is key to fulfilling customer expectations," said Pritam Parvatkar, Director - Global Alliances, Tech Mahindra. "With its advanced policy control and online charging solutions, FTS allows us to accomplish this goal.”

Xplornet deploys real-time entertainment dashboard Sandvine, an intelligent broadband network systems provider, reports that its Network Analytics product – Tom Donnelly featuring the Real-Time Entertainment Dashboard – has been selected by Xplornet Communications, a rural broadband provider in Canada. Xplornet is deploying Canada’s first national 4G network – a fixed-wireless network on the ground and two 4G satellites in space.

“When you watch a video online, you know whether or not the quality is acceptable – but your service provider has little or no insight into your quality of experience,” said Tom Donnelly, COO, Sales and Global Services, Sandvine. “Xplornet are using Sandvine’s Real-Time Entertainment Dashboard to quantify the online quality and implement measures to help ensure a positive subscriber experience.”

Sponsored by:

www.orga-systems.com

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C-LEVEL

VIEW

Policy functions bring flexibility, personalisation and profit to operators Over the last 18 months the industry’s attention has turned to policy management as a means to both protect and conserve bandwidth and to enable new propositions, bundles and upsell opportunities. Here Juhani Hintikka, CEO at Comptel, explains how policy concepts are maturing and describes the raft of opportunities that enable communications service providers (CSPs).

Juhani Hintikka is the CEO of Comptel

VanillaPlus: How do you see the Policy Charging Rules Function (PCRF) developing as networks continue to be put under strain from the growth in data consumption? Is PCRF an integral part of the network or the OSS? Juhani Hintikka: The boom in data consumption certainly provides just as many management headaches as opportunities for CSPs. PCRF plays an increasingly important role in allowing operators to control service supply, encourage customer demand and create profitable new business. This is especially true with LTE, where virtually every end-user transaction travels through the policy control engine, and every subscriber effectively needs to be treated as pre-paid.

“(It) is clear today Clearly then, PCRF will need to be able to scale that a real-time, up to handle all of these transactions. This will mean that PCRF needs to combine OSS-like

JH: Comptel sees policy control taking a more active role in the user experience and really centering around content prioritisation.

Prioritisation allows CSPs to allocate bandwidth where it is most needed. For example, a high value or enterprise customer might be determined to have a greater priority to download email than a lower value consumer attempting to download YouTube clips over LTE. It’s about making the best use of the capacity available, managing users’ expectations and moving towards a greater correlation between revenue generated and bandwidth consumed.

This will become even more important as the industry continues to shift further away from unlimited, all-you-can-eat data plans and as more CSPs begin to tailor packages to fit the specific needs of their individual customers or segments of their customer bases.

end-to-end OSS flexibility and support for CSPs’ business models, but on the other hand, also provide

that controls all of network-level transaction processing and high availability capabilities. That is complex to

the LTE service achieve and requires systems and platforms architecture layers that are simple to integrate and can be

deployed rapidly to allow CSPs to meet their

… is critical for time-to-market goals and cement their CSPs.” - Juhani Hintikka,

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position in the digital value chain.

VP: What are currently the most attractive and practical policy control use cases, and what do you see happening next?

POLICY SUPPLEMENT VANILLAPLUS FEB/MARCH 2012

VP: LTE is now active in several markets and coming to many more this year, but the extra bandwidth it brings doesn't mean the issue is solved, so what impact do you see LTE having on policy control?

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Comptel

As such, policy control will be the enabler when it comes to adjusting quality of service (QoS) and bandwidth for various types of use cases and scenarios. This can be enhanced with real-time monitoring to detect customer events, analyse those events and take action in the moment.

JH: Many operators see LTE as having a major impact on their approach to policy control; however, they are not fully aware as to how it will affect them. The evolution to LTE is not a simple path from 3G/HSPA. While it will deliver more bandwidth, that bandwidth will still be a limited resource that has to be maximised, and it is still early days in terms of understanding the cost implications of LTE roll-out and the business models that will surround the availability of the increased capacity.

What is abundantly clear today is that a real-time, end-to-end OSS that controls all of the LTE service architecture layers – from CRM and billing to subscription management to service and configuration management – is critical for CSPs. As the intelligent network (IN) disappears with LTE, every transaction must be policed – or controlled and charged. From a business level perspective, this can be done to ensure a better customer experience, for example, when it comes to fair usage, and to offer and deliver measurable quality.

Operators can also use policy control for the charging of thirdparty products and for upselling new bundles, services and top-ups to existing capacity-based plans. The possibilities really are that wide and that is why the industry is on such a steep learning curve as it gets to grips with all that can be achieved using policy, not just to conserve bandwidth and protect the network but also as an engine for new revenue growth.

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VP: How do you see policy control and customer experience management coming together?

Can one operate in isolation from the other without damaging the user experience?

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C-LEVEL

VIEW

“…using policy, JH: CSPs understand that their policy control not just to conserve bandwidth and protect the network but also as an engine for new revenue

strategies must ensure an engaging customer experience is delivered. Instead of waiting for customer service calls, CSPs are proactively reacting to customer needs. For example, if a user makes a series of international calls, the operator could identify this and immediately make a relevant offer of an international calling bundle. The important thing is to do that in the moment while the offer is relevant, rather than analyse the user’s behaviour retrospectively and make the offer a few weeks later when its relevance may have become diluted.

growth.”

as the digital value chain becomes more convoluted and as CSPs seek to demonstrate the value that the network delivers to thirdparty applications, content and service providers. It’s certainly true that an increasing proportion of CSP revenue will be coming from their partners as content ecosystems continue to develop and user demands become more complex and detailed.

VP: What impact is policy control having on existing billing and prepaid systems?

Will the impact, assuming there is one, become greater in the future, and will current systems be able to cope?

Achieving this means monitoring the user

- Juhani experience and analysing the details of Hintikka, Comptel

VanillaPlus Jargon Buster 3G = 3rd Generation (mobile communications) HSPA = High Speed Packet Access LTE = Long-Term Evolution (to 4th Generation networks) OSS = Operations Support System OTT = Over-The-Top PCRF = Policy & Charging Rules Function QoS = Quality of Service RAN = Radio Access Network

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customers’ behaviour, so CSPs can react in real time to user needs. Policy control will then be the element that allows operators to directly adjust the customer experience, for example, by temporarily increasing the QoS or bandwidth to enable video content or a multiparty conference to be delivered.

Monitoring customer behaviour also allows operators to personalise packages and improve their ability to charge customers for service features. Doing this in a way that is transparent to the customer will strengthen the relationship between the CSP and customer and provide a means to generate greater revenues by delivering relevant, personalised services.

VP: What role do you see policy control having in Telco 2.0 environments?

JH: Policy control will be one of the key enablers of Telco 2.0, as it will allow CSPs to provide ‘smart pipes’ that support ‘sponsored connectivity’ and other two-sided business models that involve third parties or over-thetop (OTT) players. Application-specific data bearers and dynamic policies, even in the radio access network (RAN), will provide the necessary tools to enable an optimal customer experience, not only for CSPs’ own services but also for third-party services. That’s critical

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JH: Until quite recently, the main tools at the disposal of CSPs were simply billing or charging. These formed the core of customer communication and provided the only means by which to differentiate CSP offerings in the market. Pricing for services was used to optimise revenue and customer satisfaction, as well as limit access to resources, as opposed to enabling premium pricing for premium services.

Now, with the deployment of 3G/HSPA networks and mobile broadband offerings, policy control is proving to be a formidable component within the armoury of CSPs – particularly when the capabilities are tightly coupled with charging. Put simply, it enables CSPs to make relevant personalised propositions based on user behaviour in the moment rather than retrospectively. In addition, some of the functionality that’s been traditionally covered by charging and billing systems – such as monitoring of data consumption caps – is now being moved to policy control systems, which provides the required real-time responsiveness and flexibility.

Policy enables both CSPs’ urge to protect valuable network resources and, more critically, the business models and services of the future that will enable CSPs to avoid being relegated to the role of a ‘dumb pipe’ in the digital value chain.

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Up-sell subscribers with package benefits, not technical features It’s difficult to change consumers’ behaviour when they’re happy with the current model, argues Nick Booth. So they need to be convinced that pay-per-use is actually working out better for them. Woo them with the benefits of their new package.

Nobody accepts a new contract unless they can see an improvement in their terms and conditions. So the use of policy control will be crucial in helping consumers accept new deals from communications service providers.

Free unlimited bandwidth isn’t feasible, and most people would understand that, argues Joonas Ojala, solution manager for policy control at Comptel. You still have to create a customised data plan that convinces them they have advantages. “It’s about giving customers a package that fits their needs. Communications service providers (CSPs) should focus on customer needs and use cases when they explain the differences between packages. Not the technical attributes,” says Ojala.

The author, Nick Booth, is a freelance telecoms journalist

The policy manager needs to be reactive, which in turn means the underlying BSS / OSS disciplines need to be highly granulated, versatile and powerful.

While it’s standard practice to sell tiered data packages that include varying bandwidth and data caps for consumers, giving traffic priority to different consumer segments might be difficult to market and justify for consumers. “It may cause legislative problems too. It may be easier to create QoS by segregation based on consumer and corporate markets,” says Ojala.

Policy control for M2M Meanwhile machine-to-machine comms (M2M) is a separate entity when it comes to differentiating classes of service. Potentially, QoS could be also used for rewarding selected

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CSPs might give different options for random web surfers (who’d be at medium speed), corporate customers (high priority for certain business apps) and mobile TV enthusiasts (who’d be promised good speeds and priority for mobile TV), for example.

“Content prioritisation, or service packages tailored to customers’ needs, can engage people and create upsell opportunities,” he insists. To do this CSPs need to use policy management to anticipate customer needs.

analysis by sending relevant offers. A customer streaming video late at night, for example, could be offered increased bandwidth at a discounted rate.

“CSPs should focus on customer needs and use cases when they explain the differences between packages.

Not the technical attributes.”

-- Joonas Ojala, Comptel

Detect and analyse events This is possible if they detect events within the network – like customer activity – then analyse their context in real time. The CSP acts on this

Sponsored by:

www.orga-systems.com

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POLICY

“(With LTE) the BSS / OSS will need to support around 100,000 transactions per second.”

-- Bill Diotte, BroadHop

Bill Diotte, BroadHop: React to changing market

Drew Rockwell, MDS: Justified investment in policy management

VanillaPlus Jargon Buster BSS / OSS = Business / Operations Support Systems QoS = Quality of Service

MANAGEMENT

customers, such as VIP customers or complainers about bad user experiences.

Alternatively, it could be used to penalise those who violate fair usage clauses.

Being upfront could be counter-productive.

Application-based classes of service might be a hard sell to consumers who are making their initial package selection. But, analysing usage behaviour and proactively suggesting upgrades is a more viable option.

There are two sides to policy control. On the supply side the game is to dynamically adjust QoS and bandwidth based on various conditions – who is the user, what services are used and where. But there needs to be a demand consideration too.

new, better offerings for users whose current needs are not optimally fulfilled with the current offering.

A well-engineered system will have as few joints as possible, so the goal for CSPS will be to eliminate the complexities and unify functions.

This means that policy, billing and other components need to be integrated in order for the back office to function as one unit, argues Drew Rockwell, CEO at management platform vendor, MDS. “This is essential from a back office perspective so that data pulled from one system can feed and enhance another, enabling customers to have a seamless and problem-free experience,” says Rockwell.

The policy management system must give insight into the actual user experience and provide real-time monitoring and analysis. It should also automate actions – such as the aforementioned bandwidth upgrades. Achieving these automated upgrades is another tricky challenge.

Eventually, claims Rockwell, this will help cut customer churn and boost profits and justify the investment in policy management systems.

“We’re already seeing an increase in this unification, as billing and operating systems are integrated alongside analytics systems to provide a complete and enhanced customer experience,” he says.

CSPs must have the platforms that can adapt to these commands in real time, says Bill Diotte, CEO at system provider, BroadHop. Self-service will make it even harder for the operators. “The systems have to be sophisticated enough to react to the changing market, as subscribers constantly reconfigure their requirements,” says Diotte.

This will support the wider move to increased numbers of service classes for end users. “It’s essential that there is a complete and unified flow of information throughout the back office, to improve service quality and increase accuracy and efficiency for the end users,” says Comptel’s Ojala.

Service scalability and velocity Scalability and service velocity are going to be vital assets and CSPs will need flexible, next-gen policy management platforms to keep up. Today, the BSS needs to support 2,000 transactions per second in most CSPs. “When LTE is in general use, that will invite a much greater sophistication in supply from CSPs and in demand from subscribers, so the BSS / OSS will need to support around 100,000 transactions per second,” says Diotte.

In the first steps to integration the business and network must be linked. The OSS layer plays a vital role in this as it’s the first to receive the information about service usage and is accustomed to processing it in real time.

Measurement and analysis of user experience is complex because it’s subjective. It involves realtime network monitoring, device-based monitoring and customer feedback. So the system for measurement and analysis must be flexible enough to plug into various data sources.

It must also support various user experiencerelated use cases – from recognising the incorrect device configurations to longer-term bandwidth monitoring.

A policy management sytem should also be intelligent enough to automatically recommend

The OSS layer can store or access subscriber and service information, and make immediate adjustments as it is directly connected to network.

Often it’s not a single system that can improve the customer experience, but several systems that must work together. So the integration capabilities that traditional mediation and provisioning systems can conduct become vital.

Improving customer experience is a long process that involves making the OSS / BSS architecture more dynamic and real-time. So payback may be some time away. “But in some use cases there can be still quite quick wins and (systems) can be implemented immediately with relatively modest investments,” insists Ojala.

Perhaps policy management systems could adopt the pay-as-you-go model too!

Sponsored by:

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POLICY SUPPLEMENT VANILLAPLUS FEB/MARCH 2012

www.orga-systems.com

POLICY

MANAGEMENT

EXPERT OPINION:

Creating dynamic business strategies with policy management The days of lengthy, rigid contracts and one-size-fits-all plans are gone. So are the times when operators could compete solely on price and product in a closed field of competitors. It’s a new world out there, says John Lenns.

Device makers and content and application providers are shaking up the competitive mix, threatening operator revenues as well as their place in the value chain. Consumers are marching to the new mantra of “more, better, faster” – more applications; better, more personalised service; and faster rates.

Skyrocketing traffic loads on the networks are squeezing operator margins.

To implement the controls, the policy and charging rules function (PCRF) gets a policy request from a system or application, processes the policy rules for that particular type of request according to the conditions at the time, and then, if needed, instructs one or more other network systems to change the behaviour of the service. In this way, the network performance, charge and consumption allowed for each user can be personalised.

Success in this dynamic, data-driven market requires a new business model – one that enables operators to personalise their subscribers’ experience based on how they use the network, and align revenues with each customer’s network usage.

For example, operators can offer service plans that guarantee bandwidth for certain high-value customers like corporate accounts, create flexible pricing plans based on time of day, day of week, or location or allow subscribers to share one quota across multiple devices. Equipped with a standards-based, policy management solution, operators can respond to subscriber behaviour in real time. For instance, they can provide a temporary boost in content delivery quality to a customer watching a video or block a particular application when a subscriber exceeds a specified usage threshold to prevent the bill shock caused by overage fees.

Customers aren’t created equal In today’s market, there are few mechanisms in place – either in billing practices or network traffic management – to account for the fact that no two mobile broadband users are exactly alike.

A teenager watching videos on a wirelessly connected PC consumes significantly more bandwidth than an attorney accessing email on a smartphone. Yet, the irony is that both are likely to pay the same, even though one routinely demands more from the network and has a larger impact on its performance.

Personalising service with policy Policy management gives operators the flexibility to dynamically control how and under what conditions they allocate broadband network resources to subscribers and applications. The controls are applied based on operator-defined business rules, which take into account subscriber, network and application conditions as well as other factors such as time of day or day of week.

And, operators can leverage policy management to securely expose policies, subscriber data and analytics to Cloud and over-the-top services to create revenue-generating opportunities with third-party application and content providers.

The author is John Lenns, AVP Business Development, Tekelec

“Operators must develop business models that reflect the way subscribers interact with content.”

Conclusion To succeed in today’s data-driven market, operators have to develop new business models that focus on creating a service experience that reflects the way subscribers interact with and consume content. With advanced policy management, service providers can personalise pricing, service plans and applications to capture customer mindshare while aligning revenues with each subscriber’s impact on network resources.

About Tekelec Tekelec connects people and devices to the mobile internet. Its portfolio’s unique layer of network intelligence allows service providers to both manage and monetise the exponential growth in mobile web, video and applications traffic. Tekelec has more than 25 offices around the world serving customers in more than 100 countries. Visit www.tekelec.com

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POLICY MANAGEMENT

EXPERT OPINION:

The era of ‘omni-convergence’ – from network to business The blurring line between business solutions and network solutions allows service providers to support the requirements of the era of ‘omni-convergence’. Here Anat Ben-Yaacov, manager of product marketing for revenue management at Amdocs, explains how communication service providers (CSPs) can navigate the complexities of omni-convergence.

Pre-paid to post-paid convergence sounds like a basic requirement, wireline to wireless convergence is no longer news, and a new era of convergence is emerging – the era of everything converging, or Omni-Convergence.

Anat BenYaacov, Amdocs: CSPs’ solutions must be tightly integrated from the network to the business

VanillaPlus Jargon Buster CRM = Customer Relationship Management OTTs = Over-The-Top players SCP = Service Control Point SDP = Service Delivery Platform 26

The definition of convergence is becoming more and more complex, it’s about the new and varied dimensions that are emerging and must be taken into account. These different dimensions span from devices, payment channels, user experience and customer segments to services, lines of business, experience players (OTTs) and networks.

play – employees purchase and maintain their own smartphone and the company subsidises part of the usage, keeping its employees happy while controlling its communication costs. But it’s not just about cost, it’s also about the IT alignment involved in giving employees access to internal networks.

These new dimensions are where the integration between the CSP networks and business becomes crucial to support the convergence strategy of a service provider.

Service providers must help their business customers manage different profiles, policies and support different contracts with employees to reflect both the company’s policy and communication budget. This means that the pricing flexibility and the service management that are required to support employee-owned devices is more complicated than ever before; it involves policies, event and charge distribution, and multiple identities per subscriber.

There’s an overall understanding that convergence is becoming more and more complex, the fact that service providers can support service convergence today across voice and data, or payment convergence such as pre-paid and post-paid on a single charging platform, is just not enough.

From Network to Business CSPs must rise to this challenge and make sure that their solution is tightly integrated from the network to the business. This is to make sure that they can monetise their investments and roll out new services like LTE in an efficient way.

New opportunities for CSPs The era of omni-convergence creates new opportunities for service providers; the main opportunities are driven by the combination of various dimensions that creates a new business domain with new processes and pricing models.

This influences the way the services are consumed in terms of customer experience, service quality and the different charging models assigned to it.

To support this, vendors should offer three main elements or the holy trinity of Real-time Charging, Service Platform and Policy Management.

For example, enterprises have to address the concept of mobile IT. The impact of smartphones and new devices is huge and more employees would like to use the device of their choice for both business and personal needs. Consumers do not want to carry around separate devices for work and personal use – they want a single device that allows access to business and private services.

This is where multiple persona on a device, and bring your own device (BYOD) plans come into

POLICY SUPPLEMENT VANILLAPLUS FEB/MARCH 2012

The solution relies on a tight integration between the Network and the BSS elements to provide an holistic view of the service, the network, the customer and the event. Such an approach will allow service providers to define an end-to-end service from the first steps of defining the parameters of the value added network services, create policy management rules, implement the charging offers, define the consumption experience and payment channel for each and every service.

A network to business convergence is the only way to support the era of omni-convergence. The network to business solution should include the following elements: SCP, SDP, policy management, real-time charging, invoicing, financials and tight integration with CRM.

POLICY MANAGEMENT

EXPERT OPINION:

Policy is not pricing Dave Labuda explains why policy solutions do not provide the key to personalisation and pricing strategies.

The author, Dave Labuda, is CEO and cofounder of MATRIXX Software

“Using charging, an operator can discount the consumption of Facebook and Twitter bandwidth, and yet put a different, premium price on webbrowsing or email.”

Dave Labuda, MATRIXX Software

Is policy management important to growing a better subscriber experience? Sure. It’s a good way of tracking bandwidth usage and offering mobile operators an overview of service consumption in bits and bytes. The problem with it is that it’s divorced from the act of packaging and pricing services and, therefore, can’t play a lead role in helping them maximise the profitability and subscriber experience of mobile broadband.

able to properly segment subscribers and then create a profitable pricing strategy for each segment. There were a lot of headlines in 2011 claiming that policy was the key to driving pricing strategies and personalisation for mobile data. While policy vendors are understandably keen to show their value, these systems are in fact completely separate and unlinked from an operator’s product and pricing catalogue.

Policy alone is a blunt instrument Policy is good for enforcing some of the underlying rules that govern bandwidth consumption, and then throttling or cutting off consumption once a threshold is reached. But, unlike the charging system, it isn’t ‘aware’ and does not track the price of that bandwidth. That makes it a blunt instrument for proactively putting together new mobile data packages for specific subscriber segments.

The result is that stand alone policy management implementations have failed to live up to industry promises and service provider expectations. Successful pricing and personalisation strategies start with the product catalogue and rating systems, and then use policy as an underlying tool to implement specific non-financial options – and this requires a tightly integrated charging and policy environment.

Take for example a hypothetical package tailored for subscriber segments that use a lot of social media. Using charging, an operator can discount the consumption of Facebook and Twitter bandwidth, and yet put a different, premium price on web-browsing or email. However, to the policy system, the data consumption all looks the same, and therefore the only way to price it is using an all-you-can-eat model. In effect, the policy system is just a byte counter and can’t be used to proactively differentiate and therefore individualise the pricing of specific apps or types of data consumption.

In turn, this seriously limits the creativity of the operator. While there’s plenty of talk out there about personalising services and individualising the pricing and subscriber experience, many vendors are glossing over the fact that this is driven by the charging function and product catalogue, not policy.

For example, policy can’t provide advice-ofcharge before an additional service is purchased, it can’t distinguish between on- and off-portal traffic and the different charges that apply to the way services are accessed by the subscriber.

Also, it can’t track bandwidth consumption down to the application level, and so has no way of building future offers for subscribers based on specific application usage.

Subscriber segmentation And yet, these are all vital attributes of being

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With stand-alone policy, subscribers that are willing to pay extra for a premium quality of service, for example, are out of luck. If they want to help their kids out by transferring part of their balance to a heavy user so that they avoid an overage charge, again, out of luck. Any chance of just offering a view of how much they have left in their account or adjusting application usage based on which ones are hogging bandwidth? Nope.

QoE a priority in 2012 These are all examples of personalisation and are the best ways of optimising the subscriber experience – an area everyone agrees is a priority in 2012. We’ve already seen a lot of network policy implementations fail from both a technical and business perspective because they over-promise, and operators cannot make business decisions based on understanding bandwidth consumption alone. It’s time to break this endless down-cycle of negative subscriber experiences and begin building real-time financial relationships with subscribers that offer them what they really want.

In reality, integrated charging and policy is the only way forward. Operators are working to create the ultimate consumer experience based on value-based or tiered pricing strategies, and uncovering opportunities to expand their businesses through knowledge of what the subscriber might be willing to spend. As this year unfolds, the vital role of charging in optimising the subscriber experience will become clear.

POLICY MANAGEMENT

EXPERT OPINION:

Grown-up policy systems for all kind of users Like many vulnerable people learning about a new world, subscribers need boundaries, says Bill Diotte. But rather than brutally enforcing them, service providers need to guide their family of users and actually help them to grow.

The problem with the communications industry is that it initially spoilt its first generation. We gave them unlimited, unregulated access to everything. Maybe the Baby Boomer/Me Generation thought everything should be free and unlimited.

Carriers must give value Carriers need to develop services around your lifestyle. The idea would be to deliver value to you, not usage meters. Let’s exemplify this with three real-world examples out of the multiple possible variations.

But attitudes are changing, especially since kids around the world as young as 10 are getting iPhones now. Unlimited access to everything is just not sustainable any more.

Not from a business or a technical perspective. Neither is it particularly sociable, given the type of content that is available on the web and the vulnerability of this new generation of subscribers.

Social media users are a pretty significant generic group now. Instead of making people pay for each individual transaction, operators can offer a bundle of services around a certain activity. For example, you might get a bundle of tweets that works out cheaper than normal data rates, which coincides with the screening of a particular TV show or media event.

We all need boundaries It’s not just children that need boundaries either. Many of us, given an all-you-can-eat option for a fixed price, will over indulge. So something needed to be done for the long term health of the suppliers and the consumers.

The marketing industry’s first attempts to instill discipline and set boundaries were a bit harsh and could have been counterproductive. Protecting the network, by limiting the amount of data that subscribers could consume, came across as rather unfriendly and proscriptive. The logic didn’t always work anyway, because there are times – in the early hours of the morning – when a network could happily let a user consume more than their share of data, because there wouldn’t be too much competition for bandwidth. Why dampen your subscriber’s enthusiasm?

Still, a multi-tiered service cap was a good first attempt. Now we’re building on that foundation with more sophistication. We need to offer controls, but at the same time offer increase options for unique and personalised service, as we seek to entice users from monthly flat rates to pay-per-use services.

Fans of premiership football, another significant demographic, might get another activity-related bundle, so they’re offered a better deal on downloads, tweets and SMS activity on a Saturday afternoon.

There are already new bundles of services and subscriptions being developed that are aimed at families. The parent of the 10 year-old iPhone user will want the power to limit their purchasing of apps. There are some ‘free apps’ that entice kids to buy extra add-ons, oblivious to the fact that these additions are being added to Dad’s iTunes bill. Parental controls extend to blocking inappropriate content and warning parents of any such activity. They can even block all texting and downloading from 9am until 3pm, which helps teachers too.

The author is Bill Diotte, CEO of BroadHop

“Fans of premiership football might get … a better deal on downloads, tweets and SMSs on a Saturday afternoon.”

Now that is a grown-up, sophisticated system.

But, performance-wise, some boundaries will never be set in stone. So we must keep improving the service.

For further details of how BroadHop can help achieve this, see the Policy Management feature (pages 23-24).

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Welcome to our regular Jobs column, brought to you by Identify Networks, Sponsors of People News I have no doubt that during 2012 the telecoms sector will continue to see significant M&A activity; businesses will continue to reorganise, outsource, in-source and juggle the workforce, as they struggle to keep pace with Jason Bandy technology, battle with economic headwinds and manage customer demands.

The impact of social media in recruiting will grow at pace. Not only does it provide a userfriendly and practical way to engage with recruiters and hiring managers, but its fluid, active, evolving nature is smarter and more effective than old-fashioned job boards.

New functionality on LinkedIn and the emergence of Google+ and Facebook’s Talent.me will occur. I see no sign of the social recruiting juggernaut slowing down. Specific talent networks will evolve and, for individuals with specialist skills, this will become a helpful and quick way to get spotted and engage with those who hire. I envisage an improvement in the number and usability of mobile apps to aid your job search and new ways to keep you connected to talent brokers.

I expect our clients will also progress their use of social recruiting and the proactive creation of talent networks. Interview and selection processes will be more stringent and lengthy, as the cost of hiring mistakes is scrutinised and the number of accessible candidates increases. There will be an increase in the number of contract vacancies as projects materialise and headcount restrictions remain.

I always look forward to talking with anyone in the telecoms space looking for a career move or who requires talent. Please do not hesitate to contact me.

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TM Forum appoints WeDo’s Azevedo as chair of Fraud Management Group WeDo Technologies’ director of Product Development, Raul Azevedo, has been appointed chair of the Fraud Management Group at the TM Forum.

The forum is a global, non-profit industry association focused on simplifying the running of service providers’ businesses.

Raul will be responsible for delivering the Fraud Management Group’s scope of work with regards to Fraud Operations Management, Detection and Resolution Management. He will oversee enhancements and revisions to the TM Forum’s Frameworx suite of standards in the Fraud Management area of the Business Process Framework, the Information Framework and Application Framework.

Gary Haynes is MDS’ new COO MDS of Warrington, UK, a provider of enterprise customer experience management solutions and data analytics, has appointed Gary Haynes as Chief Operating Officer. Haynes will be Drew Gary Haynes, Rockwell, responsible for MDS’ Professional MDS's new MDS: COO Services and Engineering business units.

Haynes Haynes brings over 20 years of brings wealth of IT commercial IT experience to MDS. He was experience previously European director of Delivery for the Outsourced Product Development group of Hitachi Consulting and has also worked for IBM and its business partners on enterprise service-oriented architectures.

Drew Rockwell, CEO of MDS said, “Gary’s wealth of IT experience will support our goals of driving new business implementations, improving time-to-market for new products, and providing a more streamlined software approach.”

Integralis UK promotes Rigby to Sales Director The UK’s largest provider of IT Security and Information Risk Management solutions, Integralis, has promoted Ian Rigby to Sales Director from Business Unit Director. Ian joined Integralis in 2007 and will be responsible for continuing to grow market share in the UK’s managed security, consulting and technology integration services.

Ian Rigby said, “As businesses focus on managing costs, they are faced with numerous security challenges, such as protecting the mobile workforce, managing evolving online threats and the need for compliance, to name but a few. I’ll be working with our experienced teams internally to present our trusted solutions to the organisations that are tackling these issues.”

Jason Bandy, Director identify Group Ltd jason.bandy@identifynetworks.com Mobile: +44 (0) 750 001 3084 Tel: +44 (0) 845 370 2900 www.identifynetworks.com

Markovich goes to VSS Monitoring VSS Monitoring, of San Mateo, California, a provider of network intelligence optimisation systems, has appointed Rob Markovich to be senior vice president, Worldwide Sales and Marketing.

Rob Markovich made an SVP at VSS Monitoring

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Markovich has expertise across network, applications and security management for enterprises, service providers and government segments. He was co-founder of network service assurance pioneer, Visual Networks, helping it grow to US$100 million turnover in four years and leading it in a successful IPO, then acquisition by Fluke Networks.

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SELF-ORGANISING

NETWORKS

EXPERT OPINION:

Remaining competitive with Self-Organising Networks Radio Access Networks (RANs) are becoming increasingly complex and costly to manage as the technical platforms proliferate and 4G technologies come to market. Here, Cyril Doussau de Bazignan explains how self-organising networks can simplify RAN management and help mobile operators become more competitive.

The author is Cyril Doussau de Bazignan, worldwide product marketing director, InfoVista

VanillaPlus Jargon Buster ARPU = Average Revenue Per User CapEx = Capital Expenditure LTE = Long-Term Evolution (to 4G) MNO = Mobile Network Operator NGMN = Next Generation Mobile Network Alliance NOC = Network Operations Centre OpEx = Operational Expenditure QoE = Quality of Experience QoS = Quality of Service RAN = Radio Access Network SON = Self-Organising Network

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Currently, in order to solve bandwidth constraints, MNOs are migrating to an all-IP infrastructure such as LTE – resulting in a dramatic increase in CapEx and network complexity. The new complexity is illustrated by the growing number of parameters to configure as, according to Nokia Siemens Networks*, more than 64 million parameters must be taken into account to operate a 3G network. And the number of parameters required to configure per base station increased from 500 in GSM, to 1,000 in 3G and to at least 1,500 in an LTE network. In addition, MNOs’ strategy, in all regions, is increasingly focused on customer retention as the level of mobile market saturation, even in emerging regions such as Latin America, surpasses 100%.

Such market dynamics are placing a growing amount of pressure on MNOs to deliver a high quality of experience (QoE) and manage network complexity while remaining profitable. To reconcile these challenges, mobile operators are in need of an easier and more cost-effective strategy to ensure customer satisfaction without dramatically increasing OpEx. The concept of a self-organising network (SON), which is steadily growing in recognition and popularity, suggests an optimisation in the management of all radio

VANILLAPLUS FEB/MARCH 2012

access network (RAN) operational phases.

Despite initial push back, SON is a natural – if not, necessary – solution to solve RAN complexity; it automatically configures network systems, allows capacity gains, maximises performance and remediates network glitches and degradation without the requirement of human intervention.

How SON works While network performance has historically been optimised by engineers in the network operations center (NOC), the concept of allowing a network to organise and optimise itself was first introduced in the RAN a few years ago. SON technology, at the most basic level, automates the maintenance and management of MNOs’ networks, including the configuration of cells and network parameters; reducing operating costs by alleviating the need for constant attention from RAN engineers.

This innovation was initially met with trepidation, a fear that engineers would be replaced by computers. However, SON is now becoming more widely accepted as it minimises the complexity of networks through automation, while maintaining low OpEx by increasing the efficiency of the workforce and mobile services they support. Today, it is clear that SON will be a mandatory tool for mobile network operators who want to maintain a competitive edge in the market.

Paving the road to a self-optimised RAN SON is not just one solution, but incorporates multiple use cases in the areas of configuration, optimisation and maintenance.

Because there are many aspects to a complete

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* Ovum: SON, A Critical Enabler for Future Wireless Networks

According to research analyst firm Ovum’s latest market trend report: Mobile Voice and Data Forecast: 2011-2016, during this five-year term mobile network operators (MNOs) will see a 2% growth in revenues while their ARPU (average revenue per user) will decrease by 4%.

self-optimisation solution, MNOs must aim to implement their optimisation framework based on best-of-breed technology solutions for precise use cases – likely from a variety of vendors.

In addition, as product managers must achieve short time-to-market to maintain a competitive edge, industry standards, such as those defined by the Next Generation Mobile Network Alliance (NGMN), have become increasingly important and are now a key requirement for every SON solution entering the market.

More specifically, MNOs would benefit from the use of SON technology in the following ways: • Maintaining or increasing customer experience – By increasing the usage and reach of cell towers currently in place, MNOs are able to implement higher data throughput rates for subscribers and therefore offer a more consistent, high quality user experience.

• Containing OpEx and managing network complexity – Eliminating unnecessary work through automated network configuration and disaster recovery, reducing the amount of time required for staff to efficiently manage multiple networks.

• Maximising service usage – Dynamic load balancing and hotspot mitigation help identify recurring network congestion, and suggest configuration templates that can be automatically applied in a proactive and recurring manner to help limit performance degradation. This improves quality of service (QoS) and prevents problems from recurring within the same network.

Realising these benefits requires a comprehensive approach to fine-tuning existing processes. It is therefore critical that MNOs’ SON framework offers four key principles: the ability to detect where optimisation will have the widest impact within a given network; algorithms that can be leveraged to successfully suggest the optimum configuration of the network; capabilities to work in an open or closed loop system; and access to ‘before and after’ dashboards to demonstrate and confirm benefits and fine-tune the optimisation process.

PROCESS 1 Identifying SON Priorities

2 Automating current manual processes and workflows

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Semi Self-Automation

Full Self-Automation

(Open loop SON)

(Closed loop SON)

Amount of human Involvement required

What this means for the future Optimising RAN processes around the concepts of SON is necessary for MNOs looking to manage multiple networks in a cost-effective manner. With the ability to automatically plan, configure, operate and optimise multiple networks, SON augments capacity and reduces the amount of human involvement required to cope with an increasing RAN complexity.

"SON augments capacity and reduces the human involvement required to cope with increasing

Though the number of networks currently being managed by MNOs may seem daunting, SON simplifies RAN management and can help operators become more competitive in the communications market by containing OpEx while offering high QoE. www.infovista.com

RAN complexity."

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C U S T O M E R E X P E C T A T I O N S F O R LT E

CSPs start mission to reset customer expectations for a 4G world Users are now used to receiving more for less from their communications service provider, but that can’t continue. CSPs face renewed CapEx upon CapEx in an effort to address users’ needs with LTE. George Malim explores how service providers can shift user expectations and monetise their networks more effectively.

With new network technologies and LTE (LongTerm Evolution to 4th generation networks) in particular now in operation in many markets across the world, it’s important to recognise that CSPs still face a huge challenge in monetising their network investments.

Gordon Rawling, Oracle: Difficult journey starts with a single step

LTE and other 4G technologies will not provide enough bandwidth at a low enough cost for CSPs to continue to allow their users to consume that capacity on a flat-rate, all-you-can-eat model.

Therefore, they have to use policy management to control capacity consumption (see Policy supplement, pages 19-30).

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No overnight transformation That’s frightening and there’s a tendency to be alarmist about CSPs’ need to radically alter the structures by which they monetise their network investments. However, as Gordon Rawling,

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However, policy is only part of the picture. It needs to integrate with other strategies to enable delivery of differentiated, personalised and monetisable services.

That’s a challenge for CSPs because the user experience in mature markets is one of everincreasing functionality at ever-decreasing cost.

Many western European subscribers today pay less for a smartphone bundled with a data package, a messaging bundle, mobile email and a voice package than they did for a simple voice and SMS device with metered usage 15 years ago. The last two years have seen the picture change with longer contracts and devices that are not 100% subsidised coming to market, but the dynamic and expectation is to continue to get more for less.

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senior marketing director EMEA at Oracle Communications, points out, this doesn’t have to be an overnight, sudden transformation. “You start a difficult journey like this with one step,” he says. “It’s about managing expectations over time, this isn’t suddenly going to change but as an industry we need to start now.”

Scott McKenzie, director of Coleago Consulting, sees a variety of ways in which CSPs can begin that journey and urges them to manage their customers’ expectations by communicating with them clearly. “The current model of an all-you-can-eat data plan simply cannot be sustained in the changing telecoms environment, and we will begin to see CSPs investing more in their networks and market themselves very cleverly to gain market share and manage customer expectations,” he says.

“A transparent, tiered pricing model should offer the consumer exactly what they need, whilst giving them more choice and freedom in their usage. Through analysing the data already available to them, CSPs can ensure that the right offerings are packaged appropriately for the right audience to provide the best experience possible whilst still generating a profit – meaning both operators and customers will benefit in the long run,” says McKenzie.

That means making relevant, personalised offers in a language users understand. Gigabits and megabits are meaningless, UMTS and LTE are unheard of terms, so granular offers must be made. A CSP could, for example, state that a package comprises six off-peak film downloads or three peak-time high definition downloads.

Critically such a package opens the door to an upsell opportunity.

Not locking customers in The approach shouldn’t be one of locking the customer in but of providing flexibility and choice. “CSPs need to use policy not only to control costs but also to boost revenues,” says Marcos Malzone, converged billing business line manager, Redknee. “This will create the opportunity for marketing teams to be innovative and tailor new products that go beyond volume and speed, leveraging other aspects where users see value and ultimately unlocking new revenues.”

Martin Morgan, marketing manager at Openet, agrees: “To keep subscribers happy, operators must regularly analyse their usage and behaviour and promote the plan that best meets their needs,” he says. “Understanding the

subscriber involves looking at the subscribers’ volume of usage, type of device, what they are primarily using 4G for, the context in which it is being used and their overall network experience.

“This drives a progression towards subscriberoptimised charging,” Morgan continues. “This means delivering personalised, dynamic plans that subscribers will value and requires the capability to dynamically allocate bandwidth, to use real-time charging for any payment mechanism and have a single view of the subscriber.”

Deliver what you promise That capability to deliver is only now starting to emerge and Rawling at Oracle urges caution. “A scenario in which CSPs over-promise and underdeliver won’t work,” he says. “As CSPs contemplate a world in which they can differentiate based on service levels and value that they have sold to their customers, they then have to reliably deliver that to users on-demand.

Gigabits and megabits are meaningless, UMTS and LTE are unheard of terms, so granular offers must be made.

“They’re not going to be able to fulfill a radically different customer experience at the moment unless the user is in a virtuous location at a virtuous time,” he says.

Shubh Agarwal, vice president of marketing at Mavenir, thinks that some CSPs are already seeing the fruits of these types of approach to the customer experience. “CSPs like the fact that there are all these free services because they’ve fundamentally made the users recognise there is more they can do with their phones and enabled the sale of data plans,” he explains.

“The proof of that is that ARPU is going up again in the US with the emergence of LTE. However, CSPs are now examining how much they give out and what they get from doing so.

“People are now using too much of the free services and the balance has not been found.

Marketeers are saying to users they can have an all-you-can-eat model but the network professionals are warning that doing that is costing CSPs too much,” says Agarwal.

Agarwal sees two options open to CSPs. The first is to optimise traffic to manage the cost and the second is to control users’ behaviour. “We’re starting to see that in the US,” he adds.

“Unlimited data plans are starting to disappear and CSPs are starting to educate users that consumption is expensive, however a lot more education is required.”

VanillaPlus Jargon Buster ARPU = Average Revenue Per User UMTS = Universal Mobile Telecommunication System

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P R E D I C T I O N S

What lies ahead in BSS & OSS? VanillaPlus has put some of the industry’s luminaries on the spot and asked them for their forecasts for 2012. Here are their brave predictions.

William Dudley, Group Director, Operator Services Product Management, Sybase 365 Sybase 365 is a global provider of mobile messaging and mobile commerce services.

Dudley says, “The new Apple iPhone 5 will support mobile purchases and NFC technology, creating a catalyst for jump-starting NFCtriggered Point of Sale purchases in developed markets. Apple will provide POS capabilities for merchants wishing to support this capability. Meanwhile, Google / Android will accelerate their mobile payment / purchase / mCRM capabilities to more devices, operators and partner payment networks (e.g.

Visa, American Express and others). However, overall, new mobile payment services will mainly be focused on emerging markets utilising SMS and USSD. William Dudley, Group Director, Operator Services Product Management, Sybase 365

The operators will fight back. Rich Communications Environments around RCS / RCSe will become more prevalent as alternatives to the myriad of OTT communications that are becoming prevalent in the marketplace today, further leveraging new LTE networks. These will be interoperable with legacy technologies for messaging (SMS/MMS) and voice, but add integrated, rich communications options for users of advanced smartphones.

Pat Carroll, CEO, ValidSoft ValidSoft provides both cardbased and electronic fraud prevention solutions.

“Following a flurry of developments in mobile payments, NFC and mobile banking in 2011, already 2012 is heading to be the year of Pat Carroll, the mobile attack. Trojans CEO, ValidSoft such as Zitmo and Spitmo – versions of Zeus and SpyEye which attack mobile devices – are already well known.

Jonathan Bell, VP of Product Marketing at OpenCloud OpenCloud expects that data will overtake voice as the core network tariff.

“Operators continue to successfully use monthly fixed-price bundling Jonathan Bell, (comprising minutes, text VP of Product message and data) to retain Marketing at revenue and service usage OpenCloud against over-the-top (OTT) players. However,” says Jonathan Bell, “operators will start rebalancing tariffs in 2012 so that ‘access and data’ is the core tariff, with voice and messaging services bundled on top. This is opposed to the current model of voice being the core tariff with messaging and data sold as add-ons.”

“Charging for data will become more of an issue for operators.”

Jonathan Bell, OpenCloud

Bell adds, “Charging for data will become more of an issue for operators. This is because there is going to be much more data use that requires monitoring, but is still included ‘in the free bucket’. In 2012, operators will increasingly adopt strategies to off-load the ‘simple’ charging interactions that account for the bulk of the load on their Online Charging System (OCS).”

Marcus Jewell, UK Country Manager, Brocade Brocade foresees the consumerisation of IT, driving networking evolution in unexpected ways.

“The past year has seen organisations moving slowly towards the cloud and this Marcus Jewell, pragmatic adoption will UK Country continue in 2012, but will also Manager, see the rise of a new form of Brocade revenue generation as enterprises from outside the technology sector move towards ‘Cloud Service Provision’. In the current economy, businesses look to sweat every asset at their disposal and more and more will look to leverage their data

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“Consumer awareness of threats is increasing, so security is going to be key to the success of any major project in this area. But to get it right, security needs to be considered from the outset (by design) so that it doesn’t affect usability.

There is no silver bullet solution here – what’s needed is a layered approach, combining visible and invisible security checks, and using out-ofband, real-time, voice-based authentication and transaction verification processes to combat all types of Pseudo Device Theft, such as SIM Swap and Call Forward Unconditional,” Carroll concludes.

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centre environments to offer cloud services as an additional revenue stream,” says Marcus Jewell.

“Those companies wishing to address this burgeoning market will need to have the right data centre architecture in place – a highly virtualised, fabric-based network topology, delivering reliability and performance to meet strict SLAs – to respond to customer demands, and I predict,” adds Jewell, “that we will see some high profile casualties as a result of providers trying to make a fast buck.

Mark Seager, VP of Technology EMEA, Informatica Informatica believes that this will be the year that data privacy hits home in the connected world.

“The connected world has infiltrated our lives, both at home and at work. The consumerisation of IT is causing a blurring between the worlds of what’s personal and what’s business – and rising numbers of online tools and social networks are making it increasingly easy to share and exchange information,” says Mark Seager. “It presents a big opportunity for businesses to utilise big data to understand their customers better.

However, ‘how much is too much information?’”

expensive server solutions but their pricedabove-average handsets, too, for the privilege of controlling your users’ devices – there are now a number of players offering comparable if not better MDM solutions,” insists Ben Mendoza.

“However, an MDM solution in isolation from a comprehensive system for managing and controlling all your telecom expenses is only part of the story. 2012 will see providers start to offer integrated TEM-MDM solutions that will not only manage the business’ entire telecom estate seamlessly and from a single console, but will … (also) integrate with the business’ other internal systems (SAP, ERP, etc) to fully control all of the telecom lifecycle.

Kevin Mahaffey, co-founder and CTO, Lookout Mobile Lookout is a mobile security company offering protection from the growing threats facing mobile users today, including malware, phishing, privacy violations, and data loss.

Mark Seager, VP of Technology EMEA, Informatica

“Although the older generation is generally more cautious about how much information they reveal, today’s youth are sharing everything they do, at every moment of the day via social networks. As thousands of consumers are sharing more of their identity online, for businesses in 2012 the matter of data privacy will continue to shake up process and protocol. With increasing volumes of intelligence on consumers now available, brands must tread a very fine line when it comes to what data they gather and how they manage it, to avoid overstepping the mark or making critical errors. And,” warns Seager, “over time, consumers must begin to consider the extent of the information that they are truly prepared to share with organisations. It’s still a very grey area, which in the coming 12 months will require some extensive exploration.

Ben Mendoza, CEO of MDSL MDSL is a provider of international telecom expense management (TEM) solutions.

Here’s Ben’s view of the next 12 months.

“Greater integration takes place (in 2012) between the Ben Mendoza, TEM and mobile device CEO of MDSL management (MDM) propositions, as smartphone penetration in the enterprise market continues.

MDM is one of the hottest topics around at the moment. Once the province of BlackBerry® alone – who insisted you not only purchased their

Kevin Mahaffey, co-founder and CTO, Lookout Mobile

Kevin Mahaffey says, “2011 has seen the emergence of a credible field of Android malware, with a 4% yearly likelihood of an Android user encountering malware, which was a significant increase compared to the beginning of the year.

In the beginning of 2011 we measured a 1% yearly likelihood. In total, we have identified more than 1,000 instances of infected applications, which is a doubling since the beginning of July 2011.”

“Because web-based threats, such as phishing, can carry over from the PC, the likelihood is higher than that of malware, which needs to be redeveloped for mobile devices. The global yearly likelihood of an Android user clicking on an unsafe link is 36% (6% higher than July 2011).

In the US, the likelihood is higher than the global average at 40%.”

Doug Suriano, chief technology officer of Tekelec Tekelec is a provider of mobile broadband systems. Here Doug predicts the demise of ARPU "ARPU will become a less meaningful statistic in light of Doug Suriano, two emerging trends: M2M chief technology officer of Tekelec and shared data plans. ARPU will lose some of its true meaning – after all, an M2M device isn’t a “user” and shared data plans distort the user-to-device ratio. Shared data plans will also give leading operators greater market share and higher profitability as they bundle families and devices into fewer bills. Operators will prioritise adding more mobile broadband devices and winning large M2M deals to achieve a more stable customer base," says Suriano.

“ARPU will lose some of its true meaning - after all, an M2M device isn’t a ‘user’.”

Doug Suriano, Tekelec

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CLOCKING OFF!

“A rise in charges may stymie some users, (but) it’s unlikely to buck a trend for realtime demand.”

Consumers are playing Pac-Man with mobile network capacity That CSPs are under pressure to deliver the goods to their ever-demanding, adoring (well, maybe not) subscribers is nothing new to those at the coalface of network operations. Neither is the fact that as subscribers we are all getting ‘data hungrier’.

The author Mark Dye, is associate editor of VanillaPlus.

Dr Michael Flanagan, Arieso: Networks under ‘unrelenting pressure’

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Still, we all tend to get into a bit of a strop when that web page or video we’re downloading stalls, having grown accustomed to almost real-time streaming and downloading in recent years. But are we really being fair to operators or are we acting like the spoilt child who’s had his hand in the sweet jar for too long?

An Android-powered device maintains last year’s position at the top of the table for uplink data volumes, with HTC Desire S users typically uploading 3.23 times as much data as iPhone 3G users. While the iPhone 4S falls just behind in this category, with a typical 3.20 times as much data uploaded.

Well, according to a study from Arieso, consumer demand for mobile data is accelerating beyond expectations with 1% of subscribers, known as ‘extreme’ users, now consuming half of all downloaded data. Of course, these flames have been rapidly fuelled by the plethora of new smartphones and the data hungry apps and services we now all take for granted.

Keeping the toys in the pram

Breaking this down further, the report, ‘Recent Smartphone Trends & the Extreme Data User’, (see VanillaPlus News online at http://bit.ly/A4QIFs) then compares data usage across a variety of smartphones and connected devices. Interestingly, users of the new iPhone 4S are already demanding nearly three times as much data as iPhone 3G users and twice as much as iPhone 4 users, who had been the most demanding just a year ago. Next in the firing line were users of the Google Nexus One who make twice as many data calls as iPhone 3G users.

The latest figures were compiled by using the iPhone 3G as a ‘normalised benchmark’ against which to compare the data consumption of users of the latest smartphones.

VANILLAPLUS FEB/MARCH 2012

What can CSPs do to rein in costs, though, and to keep a check on customer demands? Users are already throwing tantrums about the removal of all-you-can-eat data packages and switching networks in an attempt to get the best deals. And while a rise in charges may stymie some users, it’s unlikely to buck a trend for real-time demand that’s already been set. That ship has already sailed.

As Michael Flanagan, CTO, Arieso and author of the report, reminds us, networks are under “unrelenting pressure” from a consumer base that will only continue to grow. “The capacity crunch is still a very real threat for mobile operators, and it looks set to only get harder in 2012,” he says.

Given how attached we’ve all become to our mobile phones which never seem to leave our sides, perhaps it’s time we all did operators a favour, relaxed and had a bit of downtime of our own. After all, everyone needs a break from time to time.

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CUSTOMER CARE AND BILLING FEBRUARY / MARCH 2012

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TALKING HEADS Redknee and Microsoft help operators to break up the ‘data whale’ into bite-sized sushi

IN-APP PAYMENTS Ericsson joins the fray with launch of its own In-App payment service

PERSONALISATION CSP profits will depend on delivering optimum customer experiences

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Agents are still the focus of good customer care, US research shows ▼

BILLING NEW SERVICES Don’t be a ‘Dumb Pipe’, get an Ecosystem together

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Cloud-based Contact Centre replacing hosted offering • Breaking News in Global Billing, Payment and Customer Care: www.vanillaplus.com

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Ericsson joins the fray with launch of its own In-Application payment service Ericsson has launched a payment application based on the IPX service platform.

While not a new trend, Ericsson is providing a range of payment solutions for better end-user consumer Jean-Noel Georges experience across is a Global several countries.

Program Director According to the for ICT - Smart company, rental Cards Group at the consultancy, Frost subscription, try& Sullivan. before-you-buy, embedded application, in-game economies and other business models are supported. With this platform, service providers can also enable merchants to update their prices in real time.

Global Programme Director for ICT at consultants Frost & Sullivan, Jean-Noel Georges, comments, “This is not the first

time that an In-Application Payment service has been released: Google revealed such solutions for the game and entertainment market in January 2011 during the Inside Mobile Conference in San Francisco. Also, from October 2009 In-App purchases have been available via Apple's App, and from September 2010 for BlackBerry’s Application World.

“Physical shops are also promoting physical goods across the digital world. As a reverse process, virtual goods as a weapon for access to the next game level could be purchased by using ‘real’ money across this platform. And to be able to capture all kind of possible revenues, virtual money is also available for really small amounts such as cents transactions.

Direct sales generated during application experience are another real source of revenue, and Ericsson did not forget this promising mobile payment market,” concludes Georges.

EMS opts for cloud-based contact centre EMS Inc., an outsourced contact centre service provider, has selected Interactive Intelligence Group Inc.’s (Nasdaq: ININ) cloud-based communications-as-a-service (CaaS) offering. The cloud-based system, CaaS Contact Center, will replace an existing hosted offering.

“Our existing hosted solution made administration and agent monitoring difficult,” said EMS director of operations, Paul Staehlin. “After an extensive review process of both premise-based and hosted

solutions, we chose the CaaS Contact Center for its broad functionality, competitive price, maximum control, and ease of administration and integration.”

EMS will use the CaaS Contact Center for multichannel routing and queuing, interactive voice response, unified messaging, call recording, reporting, and a statistics delivery engine for wallboard displays. It also plans to integrate CaaS Contact Center with its RightNow and salesforce.com applications for screen-pop.

CONTENTS B4 B5 B8 B10 B12 B14

Customer Care Agents still the go-to resource, research shows Face-to-face with Lucas Skoczkowski, Redknee’s CEO Billing & Charging: Creating the perfect blend Expert Opinion: CSPs embrace personalisation Expert Opinion: Cycle30 on billing for new service types Mobile Payments: Not yet time to throw out your wallet

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Jeremy Cowan Tel: +44 (0) 1420 588638 EDITOR George Malim Tel: +44 (0) 208 292 4036 george@vanillaplus.com DIGITAL EDITOR Nathalie Bisnar Tel: +44 (0) 1732 808690 nathalie@vanillaplus.com BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR Cherisse Draper Tel: +44 (0) 1634 243869 cherisse@vanillaplus.com

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER Mark Bridges Tel: +44 (0) 1732 897645 mark@vanillaplus.com EVENTS & OPERATIONS DIRECTOR Charlie Bisnar Tel: +44 (0) 1732 844017 charlie@vanillaplus.com DISTRIBUTION UK Postings Ltd Tel: +44 (0) 8456 444137

DESIGN Jason Appleby The Ark Design Consultancy Ltd Tel: +44 (0) 1787 881623 PUBLISHED BY Prestige Media Ltd. Suite 28, 30 Churchill Square, Kings Hill, West Malling, Kent ME19 4YU, UK Tel: +44 (0) 1732 897645

CIRCULATION Circdata Tel: +44 (0) 1635 869868

N E W S U P D AT E More than 80 operators adopt GLDS’s WinCable in the Cloud to save time and money The billing, subscriber management and provisioning systems supplier for small-tomedium sized broadband providers, Great Lakes Data Systems (GLDS) of Carlsbad, California, reports Garrick that its WinCable® in the Russell: CSPs Cloud solution has now can focus on been adopted by more than subscribers 80 operators worldwide.

WinCable is GLDS' standalone subscriber management and billing system used by operators with 300 to 300,000 subscribers.

WinCable in the Cloud lets service providers use WinCable virtually via the internet, without the need for any hardware or infrastructure investment. It only requires a thin client installed on each operator's workstation and an internet connection, allowing service providers instant access to the WinCable featurerich, end-to-end billing and subscriber management system, anytime, anywhere.

Remote workers can access WinCable from a simple browser.

"WinCable in the Cloud offers a low startup cost, it's easy to use and gives (operators) full anytime access to WinCable from the convenience of a virtual cloud-based session," said GLDS' President Garrick Russell. "GLDS provides and maintains all related hardware, all system maintenance, back-ups, restores, PPV loads, and all system upgrades, allowing service providers to focus on meeting the needs of their subscribers."

The cloud-based platform gives broadband service providers anytimeaccess to GLDS' end-to-end WinCable billing and subscriber management system and SuperControllerTM provisioning solution, with all needed modules; redundant power supplies, backed up by natural gas generators that ensure zero downtime; nightly backups replicated to an off-site location ensuring no lost data; and fully redundant fibre optic connections with automatic cut-over for maximum uptime.

© Prestige Media Ltd 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be copied, stored, published or in any way reproduced without the prior written consent of the Publisher

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Agents are still the focal point of customer care, says US research New research in North America by the Cincinnati, Ohio-based customer relationship management specialist, Convergys Corporation (NYSE: CVG) reveals that US consumers still call agents their “go to” resource for customer service. However, the development of live web chat, email, text messaging, self-service web sites, social media and other new care options is fuelling demand for a multichannel service experience.

Igor Sarenac, Convergys: “Companies face a changing and increasingly complex multichannel care environment.”

According to findings from more than 3,500 people taking part in Convergys’ 2011 US Customer Scorecard Research, the majority of US consumers still rank interacting with companies via agents over the phone among their top two preferred channel options for customer service. The next most popular channel is web chat. The research reveals, though, that customer channel usage is changing, and US consumers are using alternate channels to get customer service, especially on their initial contact with a company. Yet, when a US consumer feels they can’t get what they need quickly via an alternate channel, they turn to an agent for help.

“Companies face a changing and increasingly complex multichannel care environment,” said Igor Sarenac, Convergys vice president.

“Although US consumers prefer to speak with an agent, particularly when a follow-up contact is needed, alternative channels are experiencing increased popularity. US companies now have an opportunity to shape the customer experience for a multichannel world where automated selfservice, web-based care and social media play an important part in the service experience.”

The Convergys research found that 73% of US consumers have already used new interaction technologies such as smartphones, tablets and social media accounts. Social media is particularly pervasive — 61% of those surveyed have their own Facebook or Twitter account, or

their own blog. Respondents to the Convergys research survey indicated that one in eight US consumers had used mobile applications or text messaging for customer care in the last six months; and 11% had used social media.

Convergys expects these numbers to grow, with the younger Millennial generation initially fuelling the rise.

To thrive in this environment, companies will need to deploy social media strategies that keep track of content across platforms, monitoring social networks, blogs, forums and traditional media. By using comprehensive analytics to sift through masses of data, companies will be able to discern critical trends and make betterinformed decisions on which problems need proactive outreach.

“Because the use of alternate channels will inevitably grow, companies need to do more than shift their attention from one new channel to another,” said Sarenac. “It is essential to excel at managing the customer experience across all channels.”

Convergys is a global provider of customer management systems, including proactive service, self-service, and agent-assisted services designed to optimise the customer experience.

The company serves over half of the Fortune 50, is listed in the Fortune 1000, and handles more than 2 billion customer interactions per year.

Methodology for 2011 Convergys US Customer Scorecard Research • This is the third year in a row that Convergys has conducted its US Customer Scorecard Research. The research focuses on individuals who have had some type of customer experience in the past six months with two or more of the following industries: banking, credit cards, healthcare insurance, internet service provider, mobile phone, retail, satellite/cable, technology and telephone.

• Individuals aged 18 to 74 were eligible for this study, and women and men were nearly evenly represented. In all, 3,514 people responded to the survey.

• Convergys also conducted a survey of employees to explore their perceptions of customers, the customer experience, and the employees’ readiness to provide excellent customer service.

• Employees who fulfilled some type of direct customer service function in one of the nine industries listed above were eligible for the study.

• Both the customer and employee research were conducted via the internet using an online panel.

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Big billing transformations replaced by flexible, segmented, hybrid solutions

Lucas Skoczkowski, chief executive officer of Redknee

The industry has been trying to swallow a whale in attempts to radically transform its billing and customer care systems to address the demands of new networks and services.

Such projects are enormous, costly and lengthy and some CSPs don’t have either the time or the money to complete them. Here, Lucas Skoczkowski, chief executive officer of Redknee and Johan Norvik, managing director of telecommunications industry at Microsoft, tell VanillaPlus how their partnership has resulted in equipping operators to break up the whale into easily digestible chunks of sushi in the form of agile, hybrid, easily integratable billing and customer care solutions.

VanillaPlus: To what extent are CSPs being led by their customers in the 4G world rather than trying to lead their customers as they did with 2.5 and 3G roll outs?

Lucas Skoczkowski: I think customers have always asked for more but now that they’ve been given the opportunity with Android, Windows Mobile and iPhones to have more control over the whole experience than operators have traditionally given them, consumers are insisting that their demands be heeded. Consumers want to be more in charge of their experiences and at the same time they are asking for advice. The challenge then becomes about how you can learn more about them so you can educate, segment and serve them in the best way possible.

Johan Norvik: In 2.5G and 3G roll-outs CSPs were pushing out devices that worked on those networks so they could serve more customers on their available spectrum, but offered little in terms of new services. The advent of smartphones and all the options they bring has given customers a lot more power. CSPs have to bring offers to the market that help them remain relevant.

JN: They are still required to make very large capital investments, which places tremendous pressure on what they can spend so they not only need agility but solutions they can implement in a very cost-efficient way. Our strategy of building partnerships with ISVs to have solutions that integrate with each other easily is critical to achieve that.

LS: The approach of having bespoke software that has dominated the last 30 or 40 years of telecoms is being eliminated, not by the technologies available but by the business requirements of CSPs. However, the idea that we need to have one big billing system and one big transformation is unnecessary. The reality is there will be a hybrid of on-premise and cloudbased billing that creates that agility and interacts in the cloud with networks that are not on-premise. Also, the market is being driven by the benefits of transaction rather than batchbased billing.

Johan Norvik, managing director of telecommunications industry at Microsoft

VP: How critical is customer care in cementing CSPs' role at the heart of the digital value chain? Is it your view that capacity isn't a differentiator and that the customer care and billing capabilities are?

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VP: What pressures does that place on CSPs? How can they achieve the agility necessary given the constraints they are under in terms of revenue, integration of multiple technologies and

the need to integrate profitably with third parties?

LS: For Starbucks, providing coffee doesn’t

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differentiate itself from the competition. The selfimage generated by a provider of any service is an important differentiator, along with providing an experience people want to be part of.

Customer care, therefore, becomes essential. It was traditionally seen as a burden or a necessary evil but now some of the sub-segments and brand challengers, such as MVNOs, have created differentiation based purely on customer care. In the UK, for example, Virgin Mobile is an MVNO that uses the Everything Everywhere network.

The network is the same but Virgin customers’ claim a better perceived experience and that’s because of Virgin’s formula to put more customer care individuals in place. For me, it’s a combination of not only more people in the customer care department but also having easyto-use self-care mechanisms.

JN: Customer care is critical but more importantly it must be done correctly. CSPs have to think hard about the requirements and customer expectations to get the right partnerships in place, along with the right staffing levels. Our partners and Microsoft ourselves, are bringing solutions to market that address this.

VP: Given the rise of apps, OTT providers and the development of an increasingly convoluted value chain, to what extent is converged billing the core enabler of charging both upstream and downstream of the CSP?

VanillaPlus Jargon Buster CSP = Communication Service Provider ISV = Independent Software Vendor OTT = ‘Over-The-Top’ players

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Again, if we look at the case of iTunes, did its business model develop because it was needed or because existing systems couldn’t adapt to its

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Over time, subscribers will want operatorenabled transactions and converged billing will be a fundamental building block of that. Today this isn’t addressed by the majority of OTTs so this is a big opportunity for CSPs. VP: How can CSPs ensure their customer care and self-care activities are relevant to the consumer? We live in a world that is becoming dominated by smartphones and users will want to run their relationship with their CSP over such devices. What do CSPs need to do to support this demand?

LS: We want to make sure as much functionality that can be integrated and can evolve with optimal interfaces is available. Historically, that has involved IVR, web, on-device applets and other platforms. The key aspect to success in the future is to have the core customer care platform that reflects all the services you want to launch.

The least-agile part of your process of taking new services to the market will define your responsiveness to your market needs. One of the worst things CSPs can do today is to launch and promote a new service that can’t be integrated with your self-care. It affects your brand promise.

VP: We've talked about the need for CSPs to become more agile. Do they still have enough time to overhaul their systems and processes to deliver this agility?

JN: They will be pressured for time. There’s no question about that. They are large organisations and in order to have agility they have to start applying what they have thought about for a long time and move to service-oriented architectures (SOA) and solutions that can be easily integrated between the partners involved.

No service provider can meet its business needs by buying just one point-solution, they need a set of partners to support their business.

Going to SOA takes discipline but, once implemented, agility increases and enables them to achieve speed to launch services and monetise them where appropriate.

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SOA = Service-Oriented Architecture

LS: CSPs have been performing settlement between operators to deliver roaming and other services for many years, so they are more familiar than you’d expect with handling billing with third parties. If I look at real-time, converged billing, the ability to go north and south of the CSP’s own business is there. We see Amazon and iTunes being very successful, leading OTT providers and being transparent to CSPs. That said, a large portion of the population that now has access to smarter phones don’t have credit cards and won’t in the near future. This is a key opportunity for operators to play an important role in enabling monetisation and to support those subscribers who would not otherwise have access to services.

charging model? The lack of agility that has traditionally plagued the industry didn’t support the consumption of apps and content and, therefore, forced some OTTs to develop their own charging methods. This proved lucrative to OTTs and provided them with greater control of their customers.

LS: If the business integration is there I think CSPs do have enough time. As much as there is more pressure and competition, there are more ways now to solve these problems. Where once deploying a big billing system was seen as the only way to do this, now flexible, hybrid approaches will work.

"Do (CSPs) still have

I see two approaches working well. One is the approach of making use of a product that is configurable as opposed to bespoke software. The configurable approach is widely adopted in enterprise IT but not so much in telecoms.

processes?"

The second approach is the idea that you can have cloudbased systems that provide flexibility as opposed to a legacy system that attempts to do everything. Tier 2 and 3 CSPs are adopting this approach but I think Tier 1s don’t have the courage to do it yet. I think the combination of on-premise and cloud-based billing by segments will emerge. Taking into account the differences in segments is important, because some don’t require the agility that others do.

is there, I think they do."

enough time to overhaul their systems and

"If the business integration - VanillaPlus & Lucas Skoczkowski, Redknee

For Tier 1s, we’re working with Microsoft and its ecosystem of partners. Agility is imperative for CSPs’ competitive position. We’re very excited to work with Microsoft to address the requirements of CSPs in a much better way, and to create a real viable alternative to the closed systems that have dominated the market so far.

We’ve deployed and transformed customers in EMEA, Asia Pacific and the Americas and the feedback is positive across all types of CSP. In the past, Microsoft might not have been seen as an alternative in this market but it has quickly gained a following and created confidence as a platform and partner ecosystem composed of companies like Redknee.

JN: We’re very pleased to have Redknee as one of our strategic partners – it’s a valuable collaboration. We see the features that Redknee brings to market as being very much in line with the requirements of CSPs. And I’d like to stress that this is very important to the alternative that we are bringing to the market, with Redknee and other partners, to create a suite of relevant, flexible, and agile solutions for CSPs.

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Creating the perfect blend To remain successful in the digital value chain communication service providers (CSPs) must learn to adapt billing and charging in a way that suits the customer but leaves them some room for profit. Mark Dye reports

Tony Jackson, Convergys: Blurring the distinction between payment methods

Gordon Rawling: Oracle Communications: Enabling providers to blend services

Billing used to be simple. It was done in two dimensions of time and distance in the traditional voice market. Then came consumption-based billing as users – especially mobile – turned on to data. CSPs, meanwhile, were left with the task of trying to make it all work without spending all the profit on systems to enable charging on the fly in real-time.

But just how has billing changed to encompass charging and real-time charging in its various forms, and what are the challenges it creates for CSPs today?

According to Tony Jackson, director of Telecoms Solution Strategy at Convergys, there has always been a distinction between the rating of individual events and the production of periodic invoices or statements that aggregated all these together and added periodic charges, although in the past these functions often all happened at the same time.

Isaac Szymanczyk, director, Marketing, Cycle360, feels that one of the major drivers goes back to the customer experience.

“Once customers have the ability to consume huge and costly amounts of data between billing cycles or even batch processing cycles, CSPs realised this could create chronic customer satisfaction and bill shock issues,” he says. “Add to that the ability to purchase apps, games, or other assets via mobile, and there are many reasons to need real-time credit checks and account calls that ensure the customer is approved for the consumption they're requesting.

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Blurring of payment methods “The main shift has been to split these functions, dependent on when they have to

occur,” he says. “Some traditional billing functions can only happen at the end of a billing period, but others need to happen in a more real-time manner. In order to give a true reflection of the status of an account, which is the expectation of most customers today and helps to avoid ‘bill shock’, charge calculations and bundled usage needs to happen either at the same time or immediately after an event occurs. This has created a blurring of the distinction between payment methods.”

For CSPs the trick, says Szymanczyk, is to prioritise the most critical areas where the system needs upgrading, so that all the profit isn't eaten up by the necessary system upgrades. Some believe that the traditional charging model, which evolved to accommodate voice, has in many respects struggled to meet the requirements of the data world in which we live.

“To a great extent, feature phone charging mechanisms have been applied to smartphone usage patterns and have been found wanting, nowhere more so than when it comes to charging for services used by subscribers when roaming,” says Guy Reiffer, VP marketing, MACH. “Things are changing, however. CSPs are increasingly seeing the value of designing roaming tariffs based on retail, rather than the traditional wholesale requirements,” he adds.

Customer segmentation By understanding on a granular level, right down to the individual handset, how their subscribers are consuming data and voice services when abroad, Reiffer says CSPs can react quickly to tailor tariffs that are bespoke to the subscriber segments.

“Such strategies require rigorous business intelligence tools that can provide the breadth and depth of information needed to assess usage patterns in real time,” he adds.

With an accelerating trend towards online charging, Gordon Rawling, senior marketing director, Oracle Communications, thinks it’s viable that at some point in the future all of this will be provided on an online basis. “This won’t eliminate the historical payment of customers in terms of pre- and post-pay but will give the providers the ability to blend service offerings and offer more choice to preor post-pay customers,” he says.

“At the present, if you’re a post-pay customer there may be services that you want on a prepay basis,” says Rawling. “For example, you might roam and want this service as pre-pay only to avoid spiralling costs.

By blending the things that users want on a pre-pay basis and offering the rest on a postpay basis and vice versa, Rawling believes CSPs open more of their offerings to a larger portion of customers and increase the ability to maximise potential revenue.

“If a CSP has loyal customers there might be things they wish to charge them for on a monthly basis, providing them with more flexibility in terms of how they make their payment,” he says. “Ultimately, CSPs don’t want the billing and charging system to be the determinant of the experience.”

Rawling suggests CSPs should look at this as a way to make it easier for customers to consume and pay for their services, adding, “At the moment, we have all been trained to think in post and pre-pay terms. CSPs have an opportunity here to truly tailor how not only how they deliver their services to customers, but also to redefine the billing relationship they have with them as well.”

Mary Clark, Syniverse: Solutions must keep pace with new charging models

Integrate billing and reporting Service providers who fail to integrate multiple billing and reporting platforms are limited in what they can offer to customers, explains Lucas Skoczkowski, CEO at Redknee.

“The real benefit of convergence is about capturing and sharing useful customer and market intelligence, (and the) ability to crosssell services and deliver relevant offers.

Ultimately, (the benefit is) to create a broad, coherent bundle of services that can be offered to all customers whatever their payment entry point."

Looking forward, Jackson says there will be two changes of note. “We will see a continuation of the trend that policy rules and enforcement need to be closely aligned with charging and account management, in order to manage flexibility,” he says, “as well as the introduction of more dynamic logic into billing and charging systems, in order to provide personalised services.”

Mary Clark, senior vice president, Roaming at Syniverse asserts that just as real time intelligence provides control and transparency to the customer, the speed and frequency of billing, both wholesale and retail, will change, requiring flexibility and nimbleness to capture the constantly evolving requirements of the customers.

“CSPs must ensure their charging solution keeps pace as these new charging models evolve, requiring a single point of management for the creation, implementation and financial settlement of these new charging models that will help them ensure efficiency and accuracy no matter how their charging evolves,” Clark adds.

“… Create a broad, coherent bundle of services (for) all customers whatever their payment entry point."

- Lucas Skoczkowski, Redknee

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EXPERT OPINION:

CSPs embrace personalisation for profit As the array of services that CSPs deliver becomes far wider and the number of providers involved in the digital value chain becomes greater, it has become critical that excellent customer experiences are delivered. In an interview with VanillaPlus, Tony Jackson, director of Telecoms Solution Strategy at Convergys Smart Revenue Solutions, explains how that granular, personalised experience can be created, supported and delivered.

Tony Jackson, Convergys: The industry has no choice but to attract OTT providers as partners

VanillaPlus: Is the industry moving from regarding OTT providers as a threat to seeing them as partners? How can policy and charging control capabilities help CSPs realise the OTT opportunity?

For example, a partnership could see the CSP guarantee a high quality of service for a specific OTTâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s services in return for some exclusivity or preferred status. For that to happen, the high level of QoS has to be demonstrated.

Tony Jackson: A few years ago, at the outset of the current boom in mobile apps and content, over-the-top (OTT) providers were viewed as a huge threat to the CSP. However, as the market has matured so have CSP attitudes and OTTs are now no longer viewed solely as a threat to revenues, but as potential partners in a more complex value chain in which profit can be extracted for all.

VP: Can you explain what is meant by Dynamic Decisioning capability? How can it help CSPs design tailored customer experiences while also managing customer issues intelligently?

The industry has no choice but to move towards attracting OTT providers as partners, as these providers are most definitely here to stay and have proven themselves to be effective competitors. Customers have come to expect that these services are available to them and so the CSPs are past the point where they could just prohibit access to those services.

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The strength of dynamic decisioning is in the combination of customer-specific data such as past usage and payment history, their location or any outstanding issues they have logged with data related to the action being taken by that customer at that precise moment. The customer will then receive a personalised service because the results of these actions are based on data that is relevant to them, and not predetermined relative to the overall subscriber base.

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Policy and charging control capabilities have become relevant here because all three parties involved â&#x20AC;&#x201C; including the customer â&#x20AC;&#x201C; need to get something from the arrangement, and this means that the services need to be closely monitored and controlled in order to maintain that three-way balance.

TJ: Dynamic decisioning capability refers to systems being able to decide on a course of action based on current data and so dynamically alter the system logic in real time.

These decisions are normally defined as a set of rules that are evaluated using the relevant customer and/or real-time action data and can range from very simple to incredibly complex.

Dynamic decisioning can be used within care applications such as self-care, IVR and agent desktops to provide a personalised response.

It is also a powerful tool for use in upselling situations, where an offer can be made to the customer based on an action they are taking right now. For example, when a customer is making their third international call in the past 48 hours, they are offered an add-on international calling bundle, which could include the current call.

VP: What role does self-care have in enabling smartphone users with secure, sophisticated capabilities to access and manage their accounts in real-time?

TJ: The immediacy users expect has been enabled by the proliferation of smartphones and devices including netbooks and tablets.

Users of these devices are increasingly looking to manage their services on the move in real-time and therefore secure, sophisticated self-care capabilities are required that enable users to access and manage their accounts in real-time.

Smartphone users are beginning to expect that they can manage more and more via selfcare apps or mobile-enabled web sites, so these are becoming key to the customer experience.

In allowing the customer to manage their own account, the challenge for CSPs is how to utilise all the service and charging complexity they have at their disposal in a way that customers can comprehend and appreciate when viewed through the limited portal of a smartphone. A customer will not add additional services or short-term add-ons if they do not understand what they are or if it takes a huge amount of data input to enable them.

VP: The number of channels by which CSPs can manage their customer service responses are increasing with the rise of social media. How critical is it that CSPs integrate social media into their strategies as a means to create long-term customer satisfaction?

TJ: Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not just about managing the relationship between customer and CSP in

ways that the CSP prescribes. Users are finding their own ways to interact, with social media radically overhauling customer communications.

"Smartphone users

Convergysâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; own research, conducted at its call centre business unit which has more than 70,000 seats in operation, has shown that social media has five times the impact of word-of-mouth in both recommendations and bad experiences, mainly because it reaches more people in a shorter amount of time.

and more via

... expect that they can manage more self-care apps or mobile-enabled web sites."

In fact, 62% of customers who heard about a bad experience on social media intentionally stopped doing business with or avoided doing business with the offending company. Equally, social media users who have a good customer experience with a CSP will often recommend them to their friends and followers.

The industry in general has now realised that the control of data policies needs to be tightly linked with the charging and subscriber management functions. Applying data usage policies without regard to the overall value a customer has to the CSP risks alienating subscribers, especially the top spending ones.

VP: The huge growth of data consumption is among the top concerns of CSPs as they seek to deliver great customer experiences profitably. How can they adjust QoS and prioritisation based on customer value and other value drivers?

TJ: This link between data control policies and subscriber information is required because otherwise the policy is simply counting the bytes and then following a set course of action, and this does not provide the best customer experience.

Instead, the action to take when a data bundle is exhausted, for example, should be different based on the customer, their other services, bundles and past history. Downgrading the QoS for one customer might be satisfactory, but for another temporarily maintaining the QoS whilst offering an add-on bundle may be more beneficial, from both the customer experience and increased revenue perspective.

VanillaPlus Jargon Buster CSP = Communication Service Provider OTT = Over-The-Top QoS = Quality of Service

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EXPERT OPINION:

Don’t become a dumb pipe, bring an ecosystem together and participate Jim Dunlap is president of Cycle30, providers of a hosted platform for scalable and reliable converged billing that includes convergent charging, rating and balance management for existing and emerging services across a variety of markets. The platform addresses point-of-sale (POS), self-care, roaming, pre-paid wireless, inventory management, invoicing and other functions that today's cellular and wireless providers need for a complete order-to-cash billing platform. Developed in response to the requirements of its parent company, North American wireless-and-cable provider GCI, Cycle30 is now offering its system to service providers of all types. Here Dunlap tells VanillaPlus how he sees the market developing.

VanillaPlus: Cycle30 has its roots in the cable market; how important is that in understanding what CSPs want from their order-to-cash processes?

Jim Dunlap, Cycle30: “Good quality customer service … doesn’t really exist any more and that must change.”

Jim Dunlap: We started the company 18 months ago because we saw a big gap between the functionality being offered by billing system vendors and their target market – the CSPs (communication service providers).

We knew that primarily because we at GCI were a customer and, frankly, weren’t getting the level of service we needed to compete with the tier one CSPs. We weren’t able to get the response we wanted and knew other tier two and three providers were also not getting what they wanted. So we built the company, investing tens of millions of dollars, and developed our offering.

VP: Is there room for another billing provider? What makes Cycle30 different?

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The other difference is there is no one else offering this who is also an operator. Others operate data centres or sell software but we’re focused on how to deliver the most value into the end customer, the CSP. I wouldn’t discount the value of being part of the CSP fraternity.

We know the industry in a way that others do not.

VP: You are targeting new service propositions such as the machine-tomachine (M2M) market. Why is that?

JD: We knew M2M would be an evolving market when we started out but we didn’t foresee how rapidly it would evolve, it’s now clear it will be an enormous market. We recognised very early on that we needed to have a streamlined flexible model because M2M was going to be all about high volume, small transactions which require an always-on model. In M2M you can’t take an outage to run a billing cycle when you’re always taking

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JD: We think we’re different because our offering addresses the entire order-to-cash process – everything you need from when an order is placed to taking cash into your bank

account. We have workforce management, customer care, self-service, EBPP (electronic bill payment and presentment) and many other functions integrated in the system, running end-to-end through our platform.

usage in because the platform has to have the flexibility to accept different types of usage and be always-on.

We developed an M2M-specific architecture that means we can help, not just with the billing, but when a provider identifies a new M2M product. We can identify what ways a provider can monetise that product. For example, it’s not just monitoring of a water pipe for leakages, it’s offering additional functionality that the provider can charge for.

That could be monitoring water temperature or water quality. We’re very much involved in our customers’ development cycle to suggest ways to monetise services.

VP: Can you give an example of how Cycle30 helps M2M service providers?

JD: We recently teamed with Arrow Electronics as it made a push into the M2M space. Arrow is a global business with US$20 billion in revenues which was established as a chip distributor. Arrow identified that it could become far more involved in the market than simply supplying the chips for M2M projects.

If a utility meter, for example, has to have a chip, it also needs airtime and that’s likely to extend to a requirement for a financial settlement process.

Arrow, in common with CSPs, identified that it needs to be in the middle of the ecosystem offering services and not just a chip. It has 150,000 customers worldwide such as Lockheed Martin and Dell and we are the worldwide exclusive provider of the order-tocash process in that roll-out, which is now underway.

VP: So do you see your market as being one of helping organisations that have no billing heritage? For instance, is your target the likes of Arrow and tier two and three operators that want to enter new markets such as cable companies offering wireless services or wireless carriers offering M2M? JD: Those are certainly key targets for us. We

talk to operators that are interested in having an M2M offering as well as providers of the hardware and the service. The pitch we make to operators is geared around the lesson we have learnt in the telco and cable industry which is: don’t become the dumb pipe here – bring together an ecosystem and participate in it.

We have an entire business focused on M2M and we also see a huge opportunity in the traditional wireless sector. Those wireless providers clearly understand the infrastructure and the systems that were built for legacy industrial scale, but those simply weren’t built for where the industry is heading. Tier one operators are also looking to providers like us to accelerate their time-to-market so they rapidly deploy into new sectors like M2M without getting bogged down in traditional system deployment cycles.

Jim Dunlap, Cycle30: “The best analogy is that you want to be a passenger in the car where the driver is looking 10 cars ahead – not staring at the tail lights directly in front of them.”

VP: How is the CSP sector evolving so that it avoids becoming composed of dumb pipe providers?

JD: Two things will help CSPs stand out. The first is getting away from all the generic products and services in the market that make it so hard to distinguish between providers that there’s really no brand loyalty whatsoever. That must be done through creativity surrounding devices, services and functionality.

The second element is really a return to something fundamental and old and that’s good quality customer service. It doesn’t really exist any more and that must change if operators are to take up their role in the wider ecosystem.

To do that you need to be looking ahead. The best analogy is that you want to be a passenger in the car where the driver is looking 10 cars ahead – not staring at the tail lights directly in front of them. We’re excited because we see a growing opportunity in the market place for CSPs of all types and third party providers. Those are the companies we want to enable.

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The author is Georgina Elrington, an independent telecoms writer

M-Payments ‘go large’ (... but it’s not yet time to throw away your wallet) There’s a future of branded applications to extend reach, awareness and customer loyalty as retailers, banks and service providers recognise the mobile money trend. Report by Georgina Elrington Mark Richards, Actis: E-payments are cheaper and more convenient

The mobile payment market is being accelerated by the greater penetration of smartphones, particularly Android. Technology is streamlining transactions into a one-tap buying experience.

“There is an appetite for these services if they are introduced for everyone,” says Nir Shimony, marketing VP at Digimo. However, he goes on to say: “Although everyone is talking about NFC, it requires nearly all consumers to upgrade their handsets before they can use it. Instead of waiting for NFC to happen there are solutions that can work immediately and on any handset for any consumer.”

Ray Connolly, eGain: Letting customers communicate on the channels they are most comfortable with (establishes) trust and rapport.

The leading Italian bank, Banca Sella, has already adopted HI Credit’s QR code technology for simple and smart transactions. The HI Credits platform adapts to location-specific purchases; for example, a QR code at a bus stop could substitute a valid travel ticket.

“Retailers hope to improve the interaction with customers, providing them with a new mobile purchase channel characterised by freedom, simplicity and safety of use, as well as increase the number of non-cash transactions and streamline in-store checkout processes,” Cicchese adds.

Opportunity Mark Richards, partner and head of financial services at Actis proffers: “Creating an efficient payments infrastructure requires three things: points-of-sale, cards, and a rational reason for people to use them. Electronic payments are cheaper and more convenient than other forms, and it is therefore unsurprising that the first two of these things are now spreading across Africa.”

Richards continues: “In the same way, as points of sale and enabled cards (or mobile devices that can act like cards) are rolled out in developed markets, we believe that users there will see the same fundamental advantages that have already convinced many African consumers.”

One example of this is McDonald’s. Six months

Sponsored by:

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Luigi Cicchese, partner at Concept Reply says: “By transforming the modern mobile device into a POS (point of sale), users will be able to perform mobile payments in, for example, high street markets and taxis, where traditionally it has not been possible. Further opportunities will enable users to perform impulsive purchases

through QR scans on flyers, adverts from TV commercials and web banners.

www.redknee.com

after enabling NFC payment terminals in all of its 1,200 UK restaurants, the company processed its millionth contactless transaction. Payment time was reduced from seven seconds to just one with authorisation in 0.6 seconds.

Simon Collins, technical director at Praesidium Services, a consulting division of WeDo Technologies says: “For operators the key to mobile money for 2012 will be to ensure that they are involved in the space. If operators do not create their own products soon, other players in the market, such as banks and credit card companies, will take over and leave operators behind. The areas that pose the greatest risk for operators are the design, security and risk mitigation of mobile money services.

“The key aspect is to thoroughly research both mobile money technology and the potential business risks related to social engineering and manipulation. These are things fraudsters are very good at. The full risk model cannot be evaluated without a thorough understanding of these areas.” Says Collins, “So far, we have yet to see the perfect solution; but risk mitigation and control are crucial to the success of mobile money.”

Security Protection is paramount regarding the safety of personal information that will, inevitably, be stored on mobile phones. A flood of passwords, PINs and other sensitive data will be hitting the airwaves – all at risk from malware, rogue apps and phishing scams.

A survey by ValidSoft and FSTech into the current sentiment regarding security in the retail banking industry revealed that 71% of respondents thought that UK consumers weren’t ready for the mobile wallet; and 47% believed that security was the most likely factor to prevent the adoption of the mobile wallet next year.

Attitudes to mobile banking took a different stance, however; Datamonitor expects UK usage to not only match global uptake but also to overtake the internet as the main way for consumers to bank: 63% of banks surveyed believed that m-banking could actually reduce fraud.

Pat Carroll, CEO of ValidSoft, said: “Mobile money transfers will make life more convenient.

The example set by successful schemes such as mPesa in Kenya shows what’s possible, but with every new technology comes a new risk. Mobiles have been the subject of malware and man-in-

the-mobile threats in the past year. Banks therefore need to up their game on the security front by ensuring that fraudsters can’t use any bank details they obtain. This can be done by using a multi-layer authentication process. Voice biometrics can play an important part in the security of mobile money transfer as it strikes the right balance of being sufficiently secure and easy to use.”

Another way to authenticate mobile transactions may be fingerprint scanning. SmartMetric is looking into such technology which could help raise consumer confidence and, in turn, drive the adoption of m-transactions. eGain’s sales director, Ray Connolly, said: “In our experience, service providers considering mobile money products will need to look at the level of customer service they are capable of delivering. Consumers’ criteria for selecting a mobile money provider is based on high levels of service and brand reputation, coupled with a strong sense of security and confidence. Customers need assurance that if they have a problem they can solve it quickly: trust is incredibly important to establish and can be your differentiator.

“Letting customers communicate on the channels that they are most comfortable with (email, text, web chat) is an excellent way to establish trust and rapport. Service providers then need to harvest all the information from those multi-channel conversations and use it to deliver a swift resolution to the query or problem.” Connolly concludes, “That’s really the lesson for the wider world: a focus on customer service strategies is critical if service providers are going to successfully deliver mobile money and transfer services.”

The last word goes to Dale Youngs, director Product Management at Subex. He says: "Mobile money and other transaction-based services are growing strongly. We are seeing the emergence of fraud associated with these services, and especially hacking of internet banking applications and associated mobile phone accounts (such as account take-over and SIMswapping) to perpetrate fraud.

Luigi Cicchese, Concept Reply: Freedom, simplicity and safety of use

Pat Carroll, ValidSoft: mPesa in Kenya shows what’s possible

Dale Youngs, Subex: Operators must ensure that services are absolutely secure

“Even if an exploited weakness is not the operator's fault or their financial liability, the potential reputational damage to the operator can still be enormous. Operators must, therefore, take a strong stance and ensure that these services are absolutely secure, even when they are acting as little more than a 'dumb pipe'."

Encourage the market: • Enable all phones for all users • Lower the premium SMS rate for m-payments • Realise customer demand for trust and rapport

Simon Collins, WeDo Technologies: Challenge to operators from banks and credit card providers

Sponsored by:

www.redknee.com

BILLING & CC SUPPLEMENT B15 VANILLAPLUS FEB/MARCH 2012

MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 FEBRUARY / MARCH 2012

CEO GUIDE D R I V I N G

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TALKING HEADS

CSPs have much to offer other businesses by tapping into new markets, says SAP

BETTER LTE THAN NEVER! How to support a smooth 4G rollout

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE JDSU redefines customer, content and network intelligence

SERVICE LAYER CSPs find new role in the value chain by deploying their real-time assets

MOBILE MONEY

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MWC 2012 PREVIEW The Devil is in the Data!

It’s time to shed the ‘one-trick pony’ image

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PLUS!

Customer Care for Nigeria’s ‘Unbanked’ • IPX essential in 3 years, say Mobile Operators • Mobile to hit 15% of Online Ad Spend by 2016 • Breaking News: www.vanillaplus.com

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Mobile will account for 15% of global online advertising spend in 2016, says Berg Insight CONTENTS

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News & Contents

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Talking Heads: Telco 2.0 is getting real – are you ready?

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MWC 2012 Preview: The Devil is in the Data

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Redefining customer, content and network intelligence

C14 Mobile Money sheds its ‘one-trick pony’ image C15 Expert Opinion: Real-time service innovation… Now! EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Jeremy Cowan Tel: +44 (0) 1420 588638 EDITOR George Malim Tel: +44 (0) 208 292 4036 george@vanillaplus.com DIGITAL EDITOR Nathalie Bisnar Tel: +44 (0) 1732 808690 nathalie@vanillaplus.com BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR Cherisse Draper Tel: +44 (0) 1634 243869 cherisse@vanillaplus.com BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER Mark Bridges Tel: +44 (0) 1732 897645 mark@vanillaplus.com EVENTS & OPERATIONS DIRECTOR Charlie Bisnar Tel: +44 (0) 1732 844017 charlie@vanillaplus.com DISTRIBUTION UK Postings Ltd Tel: +44 (0) 8456 444137 CIRCULATION Circdata Tel: +44 (0) 1635 869868 DESIGN Jason Appleby The Ark Design Consultancy Ltd Tel: +44 (0) 1787 881623 PUBLISHED BY Prestige Media Ltd. Suite 28, 30 Churchill Square, Kings Hill, West Malling, Kent ME19 4YU, UK Tel: +44 (0) 1732 897645

© Prestige Media Ltd 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be copied, stored, published or in any way reproduced without the prior written consent of the Publisher

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According to a new research report from the Gothenburg, Swedenbased analyst firm Berg Insight, the total value of the global mobile marketing and advertising sector will grow from €2.6 billion in Rickard 2010 at a compound Andersson, Berg annual growth rate Insight: Brands are (CAGR) of 37% to €17.2 embracing the billion in 2016. This will mobile channel from games and then correspond to entertainment to 15.2% of the total online utility applications advertising market, or 3.8% of the total global ad spend for all media. Mobile advertising is defined as the digital media exposed on a mobile handset screen.

The report predicts that a boom in mobile advertising is on its way after several years in an experimental stage. “The popularity of smartphones and the increasing availability of mobile media that can include mobile advertising are the main game changers,”

said Rickard Andersson, telecom analyst, Berg Insight.

A common strategy is to integrate mobile components in traditional media campaigns.

“Brands are now progressively embracing the mobile channel, including the entire range of apps from games and entertainment to utility applications. Also mobile web advertising and opt-in SMS campaigns are popular,” said Andersson. He added that advertisers are also keen on exploring opportunities with location-based advertising (LBA) making marketing messages relevant both in time and place.

The mobile marketing value chain is fragmented and the industry has not yet reached maturity, so many different roles are involved. Traditional digital players and major mobile OS providers such as Google, Microsoft, Apple and Yahoo! are competing for market shares in mobile advertising.

Facebook is also said to be on the verge of establishing a presence here, and may become an important player if leveraging user data for targeted mobile campaigns.

FETS selects eGain to support mobile money services for ‘unbanked’ Nigerian population Funds and Electronic Transfer Solution (FETS) Nigeria Ltd has chosen eGain Mail™, eGain CallTrack™, and eGain KnowledgeAgent™ from the provider of cloud and onsite customer interaction software. eGain aims to underpin customer service support for FETS’ newly launched mobile money services.

critical business consideration for us. We worked closely with our technology partner, Onpoint, to evaluate various solutions.”

The largely unbanked, rural population is estimated to include as many as 80% of Nigerian residents. To overcome this, FETS uses Nigeria’s fast-growing mobile telephony penetration rates to enhance financial inclusion.

Oluwadare Owolabi, managing director of FETS, said, “Ensuring the agents in our contact centre can provide efficient, timely and accurate responses to individuals using our service was a

As many as 80% of rural Nigerians are unbanked

IPX ‘essential’ within 3 years, say most mobile operators Mobile operators around the globe consider IP Exchange (IPX) an essential ingredient for next generation wireless services, according to a study (IPX: New Interconnect Strategies for Operators) www.sybase.com/operatorsurvey of global operators commissioned by Sybase 365 a provider of mobile messaging and mobile commerce services.

According to William Dudley, group director of Operator Services Products at Sybase 365,

MWC SUPPLEMENT VANILLAPLUS FEB/MARCH 2012

“Despite the interest in IPX as a next-generation play, operators also report benefits on today's congested networks. The majority rate the security and manageability of IPX as the main benefits, however operators are also excited by the potential to cut costs by reducing the number of connections needed. Operators see potential in IPX to enable them to bring over-thetop services including multimedia and other high-bandwidth content, and social networking into the fold."

TA L K I N G

HEADS

Telco 2.0 is getting real – are you ready?

TM

Jens Amail is senior vice president of SAP Telco

The Telco 2.0* concept has been in existence for many years now. However, up to now, CSPs did not generate significant incremental revenues with new business models. Here, Jens Amail, senior vice president of SAP Telco, tells VanillaPlus why SAP believes service providers have so much to offer to other businesses and how SAP can help them tap into these markets, access new revenue streams and take up a very relevant role in the value chain of the new digital economy.

VanillaPlus: Telco 2.0 has been around as a concept for some years. Why is it now becoming a reality? What's the urgency?

Jens Amail: There are two key reasons. The first is that, with a continued global decline of their core business in the area of voice services – which has been even sharper than they first expected it to be – CSPs need to identify incremental revenue streams and invest in new business models to achieve the next level of transformation – and they need to do this now.

While there has been a strong focus on achieving operational efficiencies over the last few years, the focus of CEOs and CMOs is now back on growth – because the timing is right both from a market and a technology perspective. New software applications can enable innovative business models in a very flexible and costefficient way.

The second driver is that telcos have a huge opportunity because other industries now face similar challenges to those that CSPs have already overcome, to a large extent. Several, such as the high-tech, automotive and consumer products industries, are trying to enhance their business models and develop relationships with end customers into a services model. These industries want to ‘be like a telco’ because they identify it as an industry that has gone through similar challenges already. Service providers have deployed an infrastructure and processes which puts them in an excellent position to help these other industries as they face similar pressures.

Another example is in the construction industry.

Building equipment manufacturers such as providers of heating, air-conditioning or lighting, sell service contracts now along with the hardware that allows them to remotely monitor the efficiency of their devices. Contracts with building management can stipulate that energy costs will be cut by x% and they share the gains amongst themselves. This turns a more traditional business into a service-oriented business but requires massive process change, and they often look to telecoms providers as best-in-class for these types of business process management.

VP: Can telcos truly put themselves at the centre of digital economy business models?

There are many competitors and new entrants trying to do the same thing, so how can CSPs set themselves apart?

JA: Service providers have a tremendous amount of assets which are critical to be successful in the new Digital Economy. These, of course, start with connectivity based on their comprehensive network capabilities. CSPs also have a very strong customer base, particularly in the SMB and consumer space; which is for example very attractive for a company like us.

As already indicated, telecommunications companies also have a tremendous track record in large scale service delivery, which puts them

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Examples for this include tele-maintenance and connected devices. A washing machine that can be remotely diagnosed gives manufacturers not

only a service model to bundle with their hardware sale, but also a direct relationship with the consumer in order to gain deep insight into how the consumer is using the device and how often. This information can be used for future product development but also for upsell opportunities.

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“We are soliciting nominations from CSPs to challenge

HEADS

in an excellent position to offer this ‘as a service’ to their B2B customers. In addition, telcos can provide extra context to process innovations, for example with information about locations and personal data.

SAP with an innovative Telco 2.0 scenario they would like to see enabled in their organisation.”

Finally, and this is critical when it comes down to decisions on innovation partners in a space like SaaS, customer trust telcos – in areas like security, data integrity, but also with particular regard to their billing capabilities.

VP: What is SAP's role in CSP transformation? How do you enable Telco 2.0?

- Jens Amail, SAP Telco

JA: We believe that SAP is the only software company that can truly support all three pillars (see box report: ‘What is Telco 2.0?’) of the Telco 2.0 model. On the upstream side, we have extensive experience in working with telcos as a partner in delivering cloud offerings or managed mobility services. Alestra in Mexico and SingTel are only two examples for CSPs who team up with SAP to grow their B2B business in the area of Enterprise Applications.

In the area of enablement technologies, the middle pillar, we are providing solutions, composed of billing, business analytics, inmemory computing technology to name a few, which provide the most innovative platform for delivering upon the multi-sided business model aspects, the flexibility required to quickly adapt to ever changing market needs and the real-time requirements of Telco 2.0 scenarios.

And, on the downstream side we draw on our expertise in 23 other industries which enables us to partner with CSPs as they address other verticals making the shift to service-oriented

*What is Telco 2.0TM?

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VP: What are the critical enabling technologies required to power these new business models?

All five SAP portfolio segments – Applications, Analytics, Mobility, Cloud and Database & Technology – are relevant to power these new business models. Let me focus on three aspects.

The first is what we term ‘Fast Insight’. With near real-time visibility into financial and customer data, plus the tools to quickly analyse and understand that data, CSPs can make immediate business decisions that can dramatically impact both costs and revenues.

Take T-Mobile as an example. They are using SAP’s HANA solution, our in-memory analytics appliance, to analyse new service offer performance. T-Mobile can now report on the success, or not, of its new offers 50 times faster than in the past and take appropriate action. This kind of immediate response can have a significant impact on revenue.

The next step would be ‘Fast Insight to Action’.

With ‘SAP Billing for Telecommunications’ CSPs can launch new service offerings within hours and not within weeks or months. Our solution is fully configurable and can be used by the business without writing one single line of code, while at the same time offering unmatched flexibility to realise convergence on all levels. In addition, our delivery model based on rapid deployment solutions is non-disruptive and offers fast time-to-value with a low TCO. The third aspect I want to highlight is coinnovation. As the global market leader for Enterprise Applications we are not only a relevant upstream partner for telcos, but also a much sought-after partner for co-innovation. Our ability to offer real-time, closed-loop processes in the area of big data – from ‘fast insight’ with HANAbased analytical applications to ‘fast insight to action’ with solutions like Sybase mCRM which enables engagement with customers throughout the entire customer lifecycle using the mobile channel – puts us in a unique position to support the transformation to Telco 2.0 holistically and enable profitable growth for CSPs. VP: CSPs have billing systems in place and invest a lot of time and resources into them so why is billing still an issue?

Legacy billing systems often require massive teams to maintain them and make changes. As we move towards the need to be more nimble as a business, these mammoth systems will not

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The term Telco 2.0 was coined by STL Partners. It describes a standardised, federated system with CSPs as ‘service brokers’ between upstream partners or customers, such as enterprise software companies or advertisers, and downstream customers or users, such as consumers or SMB customers. Analysts and industry thought leaders see CSPs with their billing relationships as being at the “epicenter of the ecosystem” in the new digital economy.

business models. Our strong track record in helping customers in other industries transform their business as market pressures dictate means that we can be a valuable partner to service providers making the transformation themselves.

We are completely focused on powering the next generation telco, and are developing and delivering solutions that are made for the new requirements of a Telco 2.0 world.

make sense from a TCO perspective. In addition, real-time and scalability requirements for massive data volumes and the flexibility demanded by new business models cannot be met by most of the currently deployed systems.

SAP’s Convergent Charging solution was recently benchmarked as processing more than 750,000 records per second for real-time charging, a first for the telecoms industry.

The tests simulated pricing for 200 million customers, a base that few of the world's largest CSPs actually have.

The digital economy will require the ability to react quickly to changes in the market and have an underlying infrastructure that can support multi-sided revenue models, while allowing to further realise operational efficiencies.

So, from that perspective it’s only natural that billing is still at the top the agenda.

VP: SAP is hosting the Telco 2.0 challenge – what are its aims?

JA: The goals of the Telco 2.0 model – to be able to deliver new, revenuegenerating services and open up new markets – are universal to all service providers. New and innovative ideas for products and services are being suggested all the time by internal teams in marketing, sales, service or other functional groups.

What often stops them from being able to realize these ideas is technology. Whether it is limitations in their current infrastructure or an inability to see how or what solutions are required to make these services happen, technology at times stands in the way.

With the Telco 2.0 Challenge, we are soliciting nominations from service providers globally to challenge SAP with a highly innovative Telco 2.0 scenario that they would like to see enabled in their organisation. If their current technology is standing in the way of delivering this scenario, we can bring the full power of SAP’s solutions, services, and expertise to demonstrate how we can solve this challenge in a very short timeframe – usually in around two weeks.

Those nominations chosen to participate in the Telco 2.0 Challenge will be provided with a full Proof of Concept developed and delivered by SAP at no cost to the customer. We are very much looking forward to working together with our most innovative customers to jointly demonstrate that Telco 2.0 now becomes a reality which enables new revenue streams for CSPs.

VanillaPlus Jargon Buster B2B = Business to Business CSP = Communication Service Provider mCRM = Mobile Customer Relationship Management SaaS = Software as a Service SMB = Small- to Mediumsized Business TCO = Total Cost of Ownership

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;Data pipe monetisation will require DPI to make sense of the blizzard of packets flowing through the network.â&#x20AC;?

- Robin Kent, Adax Europe

The author is Georgina Elrington, a freelance telecoms journalist

Kaj Hagros, Tecnotree: Customer lifecycle value now a priority

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The Devil is in the data Deep service and packet inspection will be among the topics in the spotlight at Mobile World Congress 2012, reports independent telecoms writer, Georgina Elrington.

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Technological advances like 4G / LTE and rapidly expanding data traffic are ushering in a new mobile era. Comptel’s CEO, Juhani Hintikka, expects hot topics at the event in Barcelona to include the challenges CSPs are facing when it comes to managing the demand for data, bandwidth and faster speeds, answering to new and fierce competition like OTT providers, and increasing their margins and generating profit.

The CEM trend is also expected to come under the spotlight, with a shift from the traditional view to more real-time customer interaction.

Comptel believes that CSPs must start paying closer attention to customers at the point of usage, rather than the point of sale. Operators must take immediate action upon every network event and present an opportunity to up-sell or improve the customer experience (or both) to capitalise on the subscribers’ decision-making, which has become increasingly ad hoc.

Classes of service?

Nir Asulin, the newly-promoted CEO of FTS, expects that discussions will be moving on to include conversations about convergent charging and how we can move policy on from just traffic management and into helping to create new revenue models – through integrating charging and policy control. “We may also hear more about the different usecases for policy control and charging, for example should the telecoms sector offer different ‘classes’ of service based on different fees in the way that airlines or rail companies do. As an industry we need to become more customer-centric and so it will be interesting to hear the conversations around this. There’s an outside chance that we'll see more integration from the world of apps into the BSS / OSS sector too,” says Asulin.

“All future offerings have to contain a

“Already our customers are telling us that they require bundled service packages that meet the rapidly changing subscriber demand whilst lowering costs without making a compromise in service levels. By becoming more flexible in the way CSPs operate, through bundled packages and consolidated BSS, they will become more efficient and improve operational costs."

Teresa Cottam, founder and research director at Telesperience, is a judge at this year's GSMA Awards in the Best Network Product or Solution for Serving Customers category. She shares her weighty industry insight with VanillaPlus. “We expect to see the ‘rise and rise’ of policy control, albeit that the shape of that market is set to change substantially. We see continued consolidation on the cards on the vendor side and a new phase on the technology side. The challenge here is to make policy easier to buy, easier to roll out, support and use, scalable and cost-effective.

We’ve moved beyond blue sky thinking and the early market into serious implementation – driven by regulation, the requirement to manage and control QoS, commercial necessity and the need to improve the customer experience.

“Another rising star in the BSS / OSS firmament is subscriber data management, with many CSPs now daring to dream how they can use their data to improve the customer experience, differentiate their offerings and create new revenue streams.

Accessing and using data more effectively is one challenge, as is the need to develop policies and strategies around how this data should be used, not just how it could be used,” adds Cottam.

Robin Kent, director of operations at Adax Europe says that: “Today, mobile data traffic

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Tecnotree’s president and CEO, Kaj Hagros, says: “Whilst reducing churn has been a main driver for operators in the past, 2012 looks set to change the landscape with customer lifecycle value becoming the main priority.

With the likes of social media, music services

and internet space increasingly being demanded by consumers, this year we are likely to see operators become much more agile to meet consumer needs.

significant realtime aspect to maintain longterm customer appeal.”

- Andreas Freund, Orga Systems

Juhani Hintikka, Comptel: Data, bandwidth and speed demands

Robin Kent, Adax Europe: Data pipe monetisation requires DPI

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Noam Green, Mobixell, “As MNOs move away from unlimited data towards tiered packages it is becoming clear that many consumers don’t want to buy data in volumes.”

Andreas Freund, Orga Systems: Cut costs and optimise services

VanillaPlus Jargon Buster 4G = 4th Generation mobile networks ARPU = Average Revenue Per User CEM = Customer Experience Management CSP = Communications Service Provider DPI = Deep Packet Inspection DSI = Deep Service Inspection LTE = Long-Term Evolution to 4G OTT = Over-The-Top

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is significantly greater by volume than voice traffic across the network. ARPU for voice and SMS exceeds that for mobile data. But this will not remain the case for long as differentiated pricing for mobile broadband data services becomes the next big growth area for mobile operators. Data pipe monetisation will require Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) to make sense out of the blizzard of packets flowing through the network.”

Deep Service Inspection Noam Green, VP Marketing, Mobixell, expects to hear a lot more regarding technologies such as DSI at the event. “As MNOs move away from unlimited data and towards tiered packages it is becoming clear that many consumers don’t want to buy data in volumes. What they want instead is to access the content and services they recognise and love, whether that is Facebook, Twitter or YouTube.

“DSI makes it possible for MNOs to identify and group together many different types of content streams and charge flat rates for the

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recognisable services that comprise these streams. As an industry we need to provide consumers with what they want with regards to mobile data and DSI is the way we can do that, and make some money, too," says Green.

In a world of rapidly increasing data services, Andreas Freund, vice president of marketing at Orga Systems believes that the focus should lie on decreasing the network costs while optimising bandwidth availability, profit and a positive customer experience at the same time. This could be achieved by realtime capabilities, revolutionising policy and bandwidth management, ensuring billing transparency, satisfying customers and enabling access to attractive value chains.

As Freund points out, leading analysts underline that the constant increase of customer-generated usage will need to be processed efficiently to give customers instant access to the services they use. There is no doubt that all future offerings have to contain a significant real-time aspect in order to maintain long-term customer appeal.

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JDSU redefines customer, content and network intelligence with PacketPortal TM

CSPs have been operating their networks and businesses without clear insight into what is happening in terms of network performance and the individual experiences that their customers receive. Although probes are deployed and data is being collected there are still too many blindspots in terms of the picture that CSPs receive of the performance of their operations. Here, Paul Gowans tells VanillaPlus how JDSUâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s new PacketPortalTM proposition enables CSPs to gain insight into their activities across their entire domain by making use of the data collected and providing the means to do this in a massively scalable, cost-effective way. larger number of services, applications and content become available, security is an area that is rising up the CSP agenda. Ensuring that the network is secure and delivers a secure customer experience has become critical. The fifth key area is billing. It may

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VanillaPlus: Rows of green lights in the NOC don't necessarily mean your customers are having a great experience.

They just mean the attributes monitored are performing as expected. So, how can CSPs draw network and customer intelligence out of the network in usable ways that deliver excellent, monetisable customer experiences without the costs becoming prohibitive?

Paul Gowans, JDSU: Retain mobile customers by solving the issue of dropped LTE calls

Paul Gowans: There are essentially five key areas that CSPs need to gather data for in order to run their operations effectively.

Troubleshooting is an obvious area because being able to fix things quickly at minimal cost and time is fundamental to any CSPâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s business. Performance is another critical area because optimising network, service and application performance has far reaching impacts on profitability and customer satisfaction.

The ability to tailor new and exciting services to consumer needs more effectively also addresses profitability and customer satisfaction, and profiling is another core area CSPs need to address. As users do more and a

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seem self-evident, but being able to provide real-time billing and billing verification are among CSPs’ core strengths.

To get real intelligence to deliver value to these five functions CSPs need to be able to remove the blindspots in the network where, at best, they only receive a partial view of what is going on. To see and gain insight into what the consumer is truly experiencing means getting as close to the customer as possible in terms of intelligence gathering, not just looking at key performance indicators but getting a real personalised view of the content and customer experience.

“CSPs are in a unique position … because they sit directly between their consumers and all external and internal content.”

Paul Gowans, JDSU

VP: What are the limitations of test, measurement and monitoring systems today? What needs to happen to deliver the granularity, flexibility and scalability that CSPs need?

PG: I believe the industry is at a crossroads.

Network and service complexity continues to grow. Service economics are changing and so are customer expectations. We need the market to be thinking about consumers not subscribers.

This means something has to change because today’s systems are not keeping up – we are collecting masses of data but little intelligence. Today, you gather billing data, for example, from switches and elements and you can get detailed data typically only from major aggregation points. What is needed is to be able to economically gather real, personalised intelligence right across the network as close to the consumer as possible.

And, critically, to make this intelligence available to any application.

VP: So, how does PacketPortal address these requirements?

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PG: PacketPortal brings a revolutionary approach to solving this communications industry problem.

By decoupling the data collection and filtering from the management and analysis we are able to dramatically

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reduce the cost, footprint, energy consumption and complexity of information collection.

The collectors can now be deployed right across the network. This unique cloud approach ensures maximum security, autodiscovery and management of such a massively scalable solution giving unprecedented reach and visibility.

The PacketPortal data collection technology can not only be embedded in micro-probes which slot into the network elements themselves as standard SFPs (Small Formfactor Pluggable), it can also enable instruments, CPE devices and end user devices. Your entire network and the devices that connect to it can all share intelligence through PacketPortal.

By providing PacketPortal as an open platform you can, not only empower existing applications, but also enable and extend new business models and new revenue streams.

The PacketPortal intelligence can be shared with all your business, monitoring and management applications.

VP: Can you give us an idea of what applications can benefit from PacketPortal?

PG: Let’s look at three examples. One is how to minimise support costs in IPTV service quality. By having access to the true customer experience at the network edge you can immediately isolate, diagnose and fix IPTV service issues without necessarily sending a technician to the site. This can have a dramatic effect on the cost and time to solve serviceaffecting issues as well as significantly improve the customer experience.

Another example would be how to retain mobile customers by solving the issue of dropped LTE calls. Visibility at the network edge in LTE is limited today, so when handovers fail you cannot easily diagnose the problem. PacketPortal gives you real-time data at the eNodeB allowing you to drill down from a central site into any resource issues.

Ensuring service availability improves customer satisfaction.

A third example would be to use customer profiling in order to offer new services. With PacketPortal you can now remove the blindspots from the network, capturing granular customer usage data. This allows you to tailor specific services and offer bundles that better address the consumers’ needs.

VP: How do you see PacketPortal developing to encompass an ecosystem of app providers, systems and services?

What benefits and capabilities will that provide to enable operators to monetise their role at the centre of the digital value chain?

PG: CSPs really are in a unique position in the digital value chain because they sit directly between their consumers and all the external and internal content. So, now they are able to use the intelligence from PacketPortal to advance their business models and take communications to the next level.

PacketPortal’s open, value-creating platform and partnering model ensures all applications can get the right intelligence from the right place at the right time. For the first time you can now see the network the way your customers experience it. www.jdsu.com/packetportal

Visit JDSU at Mobile World Congress: Hall 1, Stand 1G63

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MOBILE

MONEY

Mobile money to shed ‘one trick pony’ image According to Yankee Group, EMEA is the mobile money hot spot, says independent telecoms writer, Georgina Elrington. In 2011, EMEA accounted for 41% of mobile transactions by value, North America accounted for 35%, Asia-Pacific 22% and Latin America just 1%.

Nir Shimony, Digimo: Years before NFC is a mass market mobile solution

London-based John Devlin, ABI Research’s group director of security and ID, believes that 2012 will be a key year for m-payments with existing services expanding. Google Wallet will launch in Europe and USA and act as a competitive spur for European mobile network operators (MNOs). They have already begun stepping up with announcements of joint ventures offering payment platforms in France, the UK, the Netherlands and Denmark, amongst others.

By enabling national platforms in this manner the MNOs are providing a more attractive and simpler proposition to consumers and partners, removing the need for interoperability and providing a single partner for service providers.

Chris Newell, ImpulsePay: Mobile money services work best for the masses

ABI expects that 552 million NFC-enabled handsets will ship globally in 2016, which will help to boost the number of active mobile wallet users to 594 million in that same year. These mobile wallet users will exceed a forecast NFC spend (near field communications) of more than US$100 billion globally in 2016 alone. There is also a larger NFC opportunity beyond payments, with the technology being used as a platform for new marketing initiatives such as smart posters and loyalty.

Nir Shimony, marketing VP at Digimo, says: “Mobile payments services are very popular with consumers, but it will be another two to three years at least for NFC to be a mass market mobile solution and that is holding back the payments market. Operators need to act now to launch payment services that are ready today.”

Mass appeal Richard Johnson, Monitise: Convenience and ubiquity of mobile will drive adoption

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“Mobile money services work best when they are for the masses, not the few, connecting many people with transfer or payment type services,” says Chris Newell, CEO, ImpulsePay. “In the UK, mass mobile payment services were initially all based around premium rate SMS. However, the mobile operators were unprepared for the popularity of the service and the spectacular growth unfortunately led to serious problems

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with unsolicited charges, often compounded when consumers refused to pay their phone bill until the charge was removed.”

“It’s the supreme convenience and ubiquity of mobile that will drive the adoption of mobile money transfer, by both senders and recipients,” says Richard Johnson, group strategy director at Monitise. “Service providers will be keen to tap into this potential as part of their consumer engagement strategies. At the recipient end, we will see mobile wallets increasingly featuring as the vehicle of choice.

“At the sender end, banks, operators and others will want to incorporate money transfer into their mobile money service offerings. And it’s this change that will distinguish the next phase from what has happened to date. Money transfer will become fully integrated into mobile services; no longer under a stand-alone, ‘one-trick pony’ model which has inevitably constrained adoption,” Johnson concludes.

See pages B14-B15 for more expert insight into the changing landscape of m-payment technology and opportunity

S E R V I C E L AY E R

EXPERT OPINION:

Now is the time for realtime service innovation According to a recent survey commissioned by OpenCloud, 9 out of 10 communication service providers (CSPs) agree that their role and position in the value chain have completely changed over the past three years. OpenCloud’s Mark Windle describes here how real-time assets could provide the key for competing in this new arena.

The competitive landscape has undergone radical change driven by the emergence of agile, over-the-top (OTT) players delivering competing services often at very aggressive price-points.

Traditional CSPs risk becoming marginalised by the OTT players, and need to rapidly create differentiation in their own services to make them relevant in this new marketplace.

Network operators have assets at their disposal that can be leveraged for differentiation in a way that is difficult for OTT players to copy.

Presence and location information, while apparent in many OTT services, shouldn’t be written off: For OTT, these factors require a smartphone and a data connection, yet for network operators they require little more than basic 2G. CSPs then have advantages: in poor coverage areas; for roamers (who often turn off data connectivity); and for non-smartphone users (most developing markets have yet to reach 10% smartphone penetration).

Use device knowledge Additionally, knowledge about the variety of connected devices each subscriber has (phone, laptop, tablet, eReader), and about the specific device they are using at that moment can be used to enhance services and deliver more customer-centric (rather than SIM-centric) charging models. And real-time information about the subscriber’s expenditure can also be leveraged.

Arguably, these assets add the most value for differentiation as they vary in real-time. CSPs also appear keen to leverage them: Two-thirds of those in our survey rated “The ability to enable differential charging based on location, device, etc.” as one of the top three critical charging capabilities needed to support innovation.

However, incorporating these assets within new

services is problematic. In general, innovation is stymied by traditional solutions: ‘Time-tomarket’ and ‘Development cost’ are each rated as ‘critical’ or ‘significant’ barriers to service innovation by three out of every four respondents, and more than half added ‘Dependence on vendors’ to that list.

For pre-paid, and online charging for post-paid, the complexity and consequent problems of service development are magnified as real-time charging interaction is necessarily intertwined within the service control logic itself.

In a recent Heavy Reading white paper entitled, The Game Has Changed: Play to Win Through Service Innovation (Jan 2012), senior analyst, Caroline Chappell notes, “In today’s fastmoving, highly competitive market, a vendorled approach takes too long and costs too much. A CSP that takes six months to innovate a new set of personalised charges or to introduce support for a new business model is going to be out-competed by a rival CSP and certainly by an agile OTT player.”

Some CSPs cut time and costs The game has changed: to remain relevant in today’s markets, CSPs need to re-evaluate their service layer. Some CSPs have already deployed solutions that enable them to cut through the time and cost constraints. Using open platforms that support development by the CSP or by a free market of third party developers enables them to break free from vendor dependence and puts them in control of innovation roadmaps and costs.

The author is Mark Windle, marketing manager, OpenCloud

“A CSP that takes six months to innovate a new set of personalised charges … is going to be out-competed by a rival CSP and an agile OTT player.”

- Caroline Chappell, Heavy Reading

Platforms that simplify service development, and crucially help overcome the complexity of wrapping real-time charging into service design, can help CSPs acquire the order of magnitude reduction in cost and time needed to effectively compete with today’s OTT challengers.

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4 G

D E P L O Y M E N T

Better LTE than never: Supporting a smooth 4G rollout Operators can avoid the pitfalls encountered during the upgrade to 3G and see a smooth transition to true 4G, argues Bob Suffern, CTO at CommScope.

Bob Suffern, CommScope: “4G networks are the key to overcoming the data capacity crunch and will form the basis of most operators’ long term growth potential.”

When operators began to upgrade their networks to support 3G in the early 2000s, many different hurdles awaited them. Significant war chests needed to be amassed to pay for both hefty spectrum licensing fees and the high CapEx requirements for physical network upgrades.

Even relatively recently in India, the 3G spectrum has been valued at over $2 billion.[i] The high cost of such licences resulted in many operators taking on large debts that later hampered their ability to deploy the necessary infrastructure to actually support 3G. The rollout of 3G also brought with it more technical challenges. Since 3G is further up the frequency bands than 2G, its range of coverage is more limited. Therefore, operators needed to deploy more base stations to meet coverage and capacity requirements, greatly increasing both their CapEx and OpEx. With all of these issues arising at roughly the same time as the telecoms market meltdown in 2001, operator 3G deployments saw substantial delays. Additionally, from the consumer perspective, 3G handsets were expensive, had poor battery life and there was a limited demand for the data services they offered. A combination of these factors forced many deployments to be delayed, postponed, or limited to a sparse range of hotspots for some time.

So, with true 4G or LTE-Advanced now firmly on the horizon, what lessons can operators learn from the 3G rollout to ensure that their deployments are absolutely cost-effective and technically fit-for-purpose?

4Ging ahead Operators have already begun to take significant steps toward rolling out large-scale 4G networks.

In the US, Verizon and MetroPCS have already introduced 4G connectivity in parts of the country, with AT&T expected to follow suit this year.

VanillaPlus Jargon Buster CapEx = Capital Expenditure DAS = Distributed Antenna System HetNet = Heterogenous Network

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However, there has already been some public confusion over what constitutes ‘true’ 4G. The

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Questionable claims of 4G Indeed, there is an argument that any technology offering a ‘significant improvement on existing 3G networks’ can be called 4G. This has led to networks adopting the forerunners of LTEAdvanced and WiMaxMAN-Advanced (LTE and WiMax, respectively) and other technologies such as HSPA+, being marketed as 4G. This is despite offering speeds that perform well under the ITU’s guide for true 4G network performance.

Despite this confusion, the emergence of pre-4G technologies, such as LTE and HSPA+ has served as a boon for operators – providing a useful stepping-stone to true 4G networks. As LTEAdvanced is based on the same 3GPP standards that produced GSM/EDGE and UMTS/HSxPA, many of the issues experienced in upgrading the network from 2G to 3G can be avoided.

In this technology refresh, LTE-Advanced has similar radio characteristics to existing 3G standards, requiring a much less dramatic change to network deployment topologies. This similarity also enables “software-defined” radios which also eases the upgrade path to true 4G. The problem of financing 4G networks has also become less of an issue due to increasing network capacity being of critical importance to operators’ survival and future growth. Operators universally recognise that 4G networks are the key to overcoming the data capacity crunch and will form the basis of most operators’ long term growth potential. In addition, 4G networks are designed to deliver a far lower cost per delivered data bit compared to 3G networks.

The most significant challenge for 4G that is emerging for operators is ensuring that highspeed connectivity is available throughout the network, even in highly congested urban areas.

Enter HetNets.

The role of HetNets A new deployment strategy, dubbed the HetNet

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Europe currently boasts the most live 4G networks, with Scandinavia, Estonia, Germany, Austria and Poland providing varying levels of coverage within each country. This figure is expected to more than double by Q4 2012 as operators in the UK, France, Portugal, and several other nations, expect their nextgeneration networks to go live.[ii]

International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which is responsible for defining industry standards, describes 4G as network technology capable of providing download speeds of 100Mbps on mobile devices or 1Gbps on fixed wireless connections. LTE-Advanced and WiMaxMAN-Advanced are currently the only two technologies that fit these criteria and have been given ‘true’ 4G status by the ITU.

(short for Heterogenous Networks), will play an integral role in 4G deployments because it enables a diverse set of options for operators to provide a seamless 4G experience.

A HetNet is comprised of two interlinking layers designed to provide coverage (the coverage network) and capacity (the capacity network).

The macro network is served by high-power base stations providing wide area coverage, whereas the capacity network is made up of multiple lower power technologies, including microcells, picocells and distributed antenna systems (DAS), designed to cover limited areas, such as office blocks or shopping centres. In some cases, operators may choose to deploy these two networks at different frequencies to avoid interference with each other.

This approach allows operators to build up their capacity network to reinforce high-usage hotspots, whilst expanding the network to eliminate blind spots. Wireless LANs can also be incorporated into the HetNet to bring additional capacity to bear and to relieve the core mobile network as required.

Ultimately, a subscriber will be able to pass from a coverage network focused primarily on mobility and wide area coverage (the coverage network) to a low mobility network focused on providing large amounts of wireless data capacity in highly congested areas (the capacity network). This network is made up of diverse mix of products such as micro and pico base stations, WiFi and DAS (the HetNet).

having a dedicated high speed network in place, the impact of these lower power sites on surrounding networks will be reduced, which has the knock-on benefit of freeing up valuable network resources elsewhere.

The most effective way to ensure in-building coverage is through a DAS, where radio frequency (RF) signals are routed through fibre or copper cabling from a single base station to multiple antennas throughout the building. This is a highly effective and efficient way to distribute wireless connections inside a large building and eliminate ‘dead zones’, as steel columns and layers of concrete can interfere with wireless signals.

Another key attribute of DAS is that most systems support several frequencies as well as protocols (2G, 3G, and 4G). In order to provide good indoor coverage, this ability to support a large segment of the user community from one system, is a key capability not provided by networks based on single frequency/single protocol micro and pico base station products.

Despite the transition to 4G, support for legacy technologies will be crucial for years to come.

We have already seen several different frequencies used in today’s active 4G networks, ranging from 700Mhz to 2.6Ghz. This variation, coupled with the prospect of new frequencies being re-farmed in the future, makes it essential for operators to ensure that both the coverage and capacity networks can support multiple frequencies.

A key objective of the HetNet’s capacity network is achieving flawless in-building coverage, as the majority of mobile data is consumed indoors. In fact, in many countries approximately 70% of the mobile network traffic originates from or terminates inside buildings – particularly in offices, residential buildings, dense urban areas, large public transport systems, stadia and highrise buildings.

It’s equally important for the infrastructure to support multiple operators, enabling certain carriers to share implementation costs in large areas or projects. Some operators may even opt to roll out 4G connectivity independently in key sites, leasing its use to other operators either on a long-term basis or around important events, such as a conference or concert.

By providing dedicated next-generation communications to the sites where much of the demand for additional bandwidth is concentrated, operators can maximise their 4G revenue streams as well as provide a better experience to their customers. In addition, by

Lessons learned?

The signs are that major operators have looked back at their 3G deployments and learned the lessons they taught them. Technologies and solutions are already falling into place that should make this decade’s path to 4G a far smoother one.

References [i] Source: Unwire India, 2010 http://unwireindia.com/search/id ea-3g-price/ [ii] Source: LTEmaps.org http://ltemaps.org/

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