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Run it up the flagpole and see who salutes. That well-worn adage has been applied to all manner of human endeavors. Politicians send up trial balloons. Marketers try out various shampoo or breakfast cereal formulas and packaging colors on real-life consumers in real-life supermarkets. Software companies, at minimal cost, post plug-in modules at Web portals and wait to count the downloads.
The problem for full-service network operators, however, is that no such flagpole exists for testing demand or willingness to pay for new, differentiated voice, video and data services. "Service providers' somewhat timid approach to developing new services is based on uncertainty of revenue," says Hitesh Shah, senior director of business application services for the eBusiness Services Marketing unit of BellSouth Corp. "The question is 'Which flavors are going to fly with buyers?' So the ability to quickly and cheaply trial new services, to catapult things that don't work and retool things that do work, is critical."
"An integrated architecture for service creation" that amounts to a complete new-product pipeline, from open application scripting interfaces to automated provisioning of delivery to tracking and billing of usage is needed, Shah says. "Without integration help from vendors, that process is difficult," he says.
Such help appears to be on the way from technology vendors and wholesale-managed service hosters, especially in voice enablement of a wide range of business and consumer applications, multimedia conferencing and visual communications.
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In late June, for example, Polycom Inc., a maker of a VoicePlus bridge that combines audio, video and Web conferencing, joined forces with Web-based billing solutions provider MetraTech Corp. to enable dynamic creation of offerings that include any combination of circuit or IP-based voice, video, Web and data collaboration. Now those offerings can share a single billing structure that covers rating, billing, customer care and revenue sharing. "Anyone can flat-rate a service and subsidize it in early stages, but it's time to revenue, not just time to market, that matters," says MetraTech's president and CEO Scott Swartz. "With our Web services, a nontechnical marketing person can define how he's going to rate and manage this or that service, publish the service and then prove defensible margins."
A few weeks earlier, IP Unity Inc., a provider of enhanced telephony media and application servers, partnered with applications developer ECI IP Inc. to enable service providers to offer prepaid and postpaid conferencing and calling services to retail and business markets. ECI's IPrating application integrates those services with the ability to authenticate and authorize users and to track usage on a real-time basis over complex combinations of circuit, packet or cell-relay networks. IP Unity promises commercial implementation in a little more than one month with a payback within four months, "and key to that is integrated provisioning, billing and maintenance before you go to the customer," says marketing senior vice president Brett Azuma.
Such preintegration can relieve service providers of a huge burden where new applications must interoperate with literally scores of incompatible end user devices. Third-party hoster and technology provider LightSurf Technologies Inc. is tackling the job on behalf of providers like Japan's second-largest carrier, KDDI Corp. In July, KDDI chose LightSurf to power its new Team Factory service, which is designed to enable users to capture, view and share pictures with other users over all of Japan's Internet-connected networks, including ezWeb (KDDI), i-mode (DoCoMo) and J-sky (J-Phone). The eSwitch server guarantees pictures sent by KDDI users to any other mobile user will be optimized for the display specifications of the nearly 200 handsets available in Japan. The server also is at the heart of LightSurf's wholesale hosting service for Eastman Kodak Co.'s online photo album portal service, branded by 50,000 photo-processing retail outlets.
LightSurf provides hosting services and similar integration of about 150 end user devices for Yahoo! Inc.'s auction site in Japan, and last February Sprint Corp. agreed to deploy the LightSurf III Instant Imaging platform for its launch of 3G PCS services later this year. "We have the infrastructure and technologies and know-how to get a service provider into the market in 60 to 90 days under your brand," says Robin Nijor, vice president of marketing. Where uptake on a service is strong, he says, contracts are constructed so that service providers can migrate from LightSurf's private label hosting to in-house hosting.
BellSouth has constructed a similar partnership with voice-enablement portal provider BeVocal Inc. BeVocal, employing industry standard VoiceXML programming interfaces, has attracted at least 1,600 developers. For BellSouth, this "abstraction layer" for developers has yielded some "powerful niche applications," Shah says. These include voice-enabled form-filling applications for IRS tax preparation and McDonald's Corp. food inspection auditors reporting by phone from the field.
"In a virtually cost-free manner, developers instantly can test scripts on the BeVocal portal, and there are thousands and thousands of opportunities like this," Shah says. "Vendor efforts to preintegrate all the gears not only is welcome, but we're making those service creation platforms internally as well," and the benefits extend to BellSouth and Cingular Wireless, co-owned with SBC Communications Inc., he says. "Cingular has outsourced application and application hosting during trialing of market receptivity and pricing. Then over time, there are increasing options to bring more in-house to BellSouth, that can handle larger scale."
Like IP Unity and NMS, other speech recognition and voice enablement hardware and software vendors, including Syntellect Inc. and Sylantro Systems Corp., also are leveraging VoiceXML and Java to open new service creation to a broad community of developers beyond voice switching vendors alone. Further help in pretesting pricing schemes and packaging also is coming from rating and billing vendors like MetraTech, am-beo, Convergys Corp. and HighDeal, and even from service assurance software vendors like Concord Communications Inc., which launched an Enabled Managed Services professional services package July 22.
Swartz says service providers are being "prudent" in launching new services, and that approach is line with MetraTech's warning that, "without billing, it's just a hobby." While providers certainly must trim risks and pinch pennies, "savings are finite," he says. "Revenue, on the other hand, is boundless, if you get on the right track."
