The Lucent Technologies Messaging Solutions business at SUPERCOMM this week makes its move into mobile data. The company’s three-phase strategy on this front plays into Lucent’s legacy CA messaging systems and its newer AnyPath Messaging System, an Accelerate VoIP solution now in use with 17 million subscribers that offers unified communications multimedia messaging services to end users.
“We’re not just plopping a set of applications into the marketplace,” says JJ Lhospital, general manager of Lucent’s Messaging Solutions business. “We’re allowing our service provider customers to take advantage of the 150 million Lucent mailboxes based on AnyPath or CA.”
The first phase of the strategy focuses on pushing voicemail to mobile handsets. The user can choose to download the voicemail all at once or based on specific parameters such as the sender, the location or time of day, as three examples. “It’s simple, but it is really powerful for the end user, who can have the messages resident on the handset for easy retrieval,” says Lhospital. “It’s also a win for the service provider because we are moving from free- to fee-based services.”
Lhospital is referring to the fact that service providers today tend to offer voicemail bundled with subscriptions. But offering value-added capabilities through pushing messages to mobile handsets may make the service attractive enough to spur customers to pay for the service, he says. A study by Crescent Branding Research reveals that 53 percent of consumers surveyed were interested in having all their messages pushed to the handset, while 31 percent were interested in having select messages pushed to their handsets. Twenty-five percent of U.S. subscribers and 40 percent of Canadian subscribers surveyed said they’d be willing to pay up to $5 beyond their current plan for mobile messaging.
During the second phase of Lucent’s mobile data mobile messaging strategy, which kicks in this August, the vendor will launch a “hyperscalable”, low-cost-per-transaction, nonproprietary multimedia messaging solution. Multimedia messaging systems have been in networks for some time, says Lhospital, but they are based on proprietary architectures, are limited in the number of transactions they can handle and not very scalable. “The market is now ready for the next generation of multimedia messaging centers,” he says. And for service providers that want it, he adds, Lucent will integrate multimedia messaging with its AnyPath technology for an integrated look and feel for end users and OEMs.
The third phase of Lucent’s strategy, targeted to begin at the end of the year, will push content in addition to messages to end users. That way, customers can access their messages and other content through one interface with one password and number. For service providers and OEMs, it means on hardware, software and back office infrastructure for both mobile messaging and content services, which can result in 30 to 50 percent savings.
