After hearing from some of this year’s exhibiting BSS / OSS companies ahead of the event, VanillaPlus reports on the most likely discussions to arise at MWC 2011. And the word on the street, says Georgina Elrington, is that the sector buzz will surround the data explosion; how to cope with demand from an infrastructure perspective, QoS and profitability.
After hearing from some of this year’s exhibiting BSS / OSS companies ahead of the event, VanillaPlus reports on the most likely discussions to arise at MWC 2011. And the word on the street, says Georgina Elrington, is that the sector buzz will surround the data explosion; how to cope with demand from an infrastructure perspective, QoS and profitability.
The boundaries between services, channels and devices are blurring. Increasingly, new devices with a focus on automating the house, connected consumer electronics and new media delivery are coming to market.
Amdocs describes this as an emerging age of multi-dimensional convergence, in which service providers can play a pivotal role. However, this adds to the pressure to migrate from legacy back office systems to those that can offer customers a differentiated converged experience while optimising and consolidating operations.
Rebecca Prudhomme, VP Product and Solutions Marketing at Amdocs, feels that exponential growth in data consumption will be at the top of service providers’ agendas, as they seek to find the best strategies to help realise the full revenue potential of data services while minimising costs. As such, Rebecca expects that a major theme will be monetising the data explosion and management of the capacity crunch. While this may involve innovative pricing models, traffic prioritisation and services that guarantee QoS, there will be more scope for service providers to generate additional revenue streams.
The President and CEO of CSG Systems and newly acquired Intec, Peter Kalan, also indicates that 2011 marks the start of the “multi era”, consumers and businesses will have multiple devices, and multiple uses for those devices. With (Long Term Evolution) LTE and the cloud, applications, devices and usage will only proliferate even faster. So, at this year’s event, Peter expects to see a stronger focus on improving, understanding and delivering customer requirements. He also expects discussions around M2M (machine-to- machine).
Increased levels of real-time data consumption will require effective network congestion solutions and control policies. Ken Denman, CEO at Openwave Systems, said: “As more operators experience network congestion challenges (some resulting in well-publicised outages) they are coming to terms with the fact that demand is outpacing capacity.
“Specifically, the rate of application development and the demand for mobile video means that many network providers won’t be able to add the physical infrastructure fast enough to accommodate the sheer volume of traffic headed their way. And even as they add capacity, they need to be certain that they are getting the most out of this costly investment,” said Denman.
Ken Denman also notes that the mobile browser is becoming increasingly consistent and powerful across all devices. “In November, converged communications became one of the hottest topics around when Facebook launched its new messaging service, Facebook Messages. While the technology itself is far from new, Facebook’s entry into the market suggests that converged communications is finally set to go mainstream.”
Operators will be looking to deploy policy engines across both arenas to manage them together in the most efficient manner. A scalable policy solution with flexible parameters, and charging plans with controllable variables, will be attractive to operators looking to monetise effectively over the unified space.
Michael adds that another key topic to look out for will be policy for Long Term Evolution (LTE), particularly for VoIP. He said that operators have long been considering how they are going to manage LTE networks, and part of their development involves building policy elements into the LTE standards.
Operators weren’t so on the ball when it came to monetising 3G networks so they are taking a more proactive approach for 4G. Plans for VoIP over LTE networks are also strongly on the agenda, which will take a lot of behind-the- scenes testing in labs, and careful policy considerations to ensure functional monetisation when capabilities go live.
Dan Joe, VP of Marketing at Napatech, commented that: “One of the issues that will face BSS / OSS vendors in coming years is the explosive increase in mobile traffic and thereby bandwidth requirements of the network. In short, there will be more data at higher speeds in the network, which will raise the need for real-time data collection. The mobile network is also being used for more services, which will require more service- specific intelligence closer to the network.
“The transition to all-IP networks makes these requirements all the more important. This can mean that BSS / OSS vendors can no longer rely on network equipment for their data collection needs. These nodes will be under pressure to keep up with the explosive growth in mobile data that is forecast. An alternative is to use dedicated data collection devices in the network that are non-intrusive and thus do not interfere with the network, but entirely controlled by the BSS / OSS vendor,” said Joe.
“These data collection devices ensure that real-time data can be collected, processed and forwarded precisely to the requirement of the BSS / OSS vendor. It is possible to build such devices using off-the-shelf, standard PC servers today, which provides an affordable path forward,” he added.
Oracle Communications’ Director of EMEA Marketing, Gordon Rawling said that the cloud will be another subject on the MWC agenda, as 2010 saw CSPs such as AT&T and Verizon increase their cloud service capabilities. So, 2011 will be a year of expansion of cloud services for many CSPs, and increasingly, other such companies will look to realise their potential for monetising the cloud. But they need to be able to ensure a delivery capability that will balance their offerings and ensure a profitable cost base.
The commercial potential for provisioning cloud services to enterprise customers is significant, and CSPs have a critical differentiator for enabling cloud computing – the network itself. CSPs already have a relationship with their enterprise customers and these are relied on for critical communications services.
As such, to offer extended cloud services could be seen as a logical progression of that business relationship. By positioning themselves at the heart of the cloud and getting end-users to operate through it, CSPs can greatly increase their network traffic revenues.
However, they do need to be mindful that the initial costs of provisioning cloud services will not exceed the profits that are there to be made. There are a number of challenges associated with the cloud – not least in terms of encouraging uptake amongst users – and these are likely to be discussed in and around the meeting rooms and bars of Barcelona.
