QuadPlay and Beyond

Mobile & fixed operators have long been looking for ways to decrease their OPEX and CAPEX in their service environment. In recent years, as more and more services were deployed inside the core network, the need to also reduce the complexity of service management has become crucial.

Service Orchestration (SO) is the ability to centrally manage multiple services from various aspects, including:

• Introduction of new services - services are far from being plug-n-play and the service environment needs to be well-defined. However, an SO environment simplifies the integration and configuration of new services as well as provide means to combine them in the general service logic and flows
• Service path selection - the dynamic selection, in run-time, of the services (and their order) that need to be invoked on the specific request or event
• Policy Decision Point (PDP) - a centralized application that defines the possible flows and policies. Flows typically consist of conditions, based on various parameters such as the user profile, context, access network, service specific state, operator policy etc., and may invoke actions (send SMS, insert header, invoke service etc.)
• Policy Enforcement Point (PEP) - PEPs are responsible for enforcing the decisions made by the PDP. Some PEPs may be provides as part of the SO solution while other need to be implemented by various services, such as a Messaging Gateway
• Centralized OSS/BSS interfaces - usually, SO is required to integrate with the operator’s OSS/BSS components and provide other services an API to access the consolidated data. This approach reduces the risk and complexity of having all services integrate with these sensitive systems, and decreases time-to-market for each new service

Some operators refer to this functionality as MSP (Multi-Service Procedure) and such solutions vary in scope and focus depending on the specific operator requirements. One example of such a process comes from the Vodafone group that has issued and MSP RFP more than a year ago. We already see several Vodafone OpCos that follow with their own RFP processes including VF Ireland, VF Czech and more.

One of the new requirements already seen in existing MSP or Service Orchestration processes is the need for mobile-fixed convergence. Some operators already require vendors to provide solutions that work on multiple access networks (mobile internet, mobile broadband, DSL, Wifi etc.).

There are several solutions in the market for handling service orchestration but most of them were designed for IT and enterprise environments and not for telecom services. From my experience, most of the out of the box solutions (e.g., BEA, Oracle) were not designed to support the complex and converged environment of today’s networks.

An interesting company that offers such a service orchestration platform is Unipier with its Intelligent Policy Suite (IPS) product and derivatives.

The IPS is a generic flow engine and PDP that provides code-free definitions of service logic (policies, flows). IPS may be invoked upon an incoming event (e.g., SMS sent, HTTP request etc.) to execute the relevant flows for that event and to instruct the PEP what to do next. The IPS can also invoke actions such as data manipulation, invocation of other services and more.

On top of the generic IPS, Unipier have built several tailored solutions, including Advertising, Promotions & Recommendation, Access Control, and User Privacy.

Another interesting company in this context is Flash Networks with its Harmony platform. Flash Network, which started as a data optimization company has taken a strategic decision to become an MSP player. Flash Networks leverages its deep understanding of service path selection and traffic analysis capabilities to provide an environment for the operator’s services.

I expect more operators to follow these steps as their networks become cluttered and complex and as mobile-fixed convergence gain momentum.

IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) defines the functional architecture for a managed IP-based network. It aims to provide a means for operators to create an open, standards-based network that delivers integrated multimedia services to increase revenue, while also reducing network CAPEX and OPEX.

Until recently IMS was mainly the province of fixed-line operators but now it is essential to the success of mobile and fixed operators who are losing revenue from traditional sources. Operators look at IMS and similar solutions because they need to start generating more revenue.

According to a research by ABI Research (2008), IMS is expected to provide mobile telephone operators with a forecasted $300 billion in extra revenue over the next five years, and major operators such as Sprint, Verizon and British Telecom (BT) will increasingly deploy IMS across their networks in a quickening tempo starting this year.

France Telecom estimates, that between 5-10 percent of its revenues will be derived from full or partial IMS services by the end of 2008. France Telecom also merged their fixed, mobile and Internet technical teams into one big entity aiming at providing a single service architecture.

IMS is being deployed gradually as an evolutionary, rather than a revolutionary process, however, it is important to understand that IMS dramatically changes the way telephone networks operate with implications on applications and network enablers.

IMS is a disruptive technology that has profound affect over companies providing services and solutions to mobile and fixed-line operators. It changes the way applications interact with the networks by providing a well-defined framework. The changes imposed by IMS require companies to adapt and adopt new technologies but it also creates new opportunities.

Small to medium companies usually tend not to invest sufficient resources in new emerging technologies until they are realize that it affects their direct revenues and threatens their position. For such companies, a gradual evolutionary approach is recommended in order to keep pace with the demand for IMS-compliant solutions.

In order to prepare your company for IMS, the following steps are recommended:

1. Research the impact and influence of IMS over your current products and examine new opportunities created by IMS. If you do not have IMS experts in your organization, it is recommended to hire an external expert that brings knowledge and expertise in IMS technology and in product analysis.
2. Company management should devise a migration plan towards IMS. This should include changes in current products as well as introduction of new products.
3. Develop MRD (Marketing Requirement Document) and PRD (Product Requirement Document) documents
4. Develop at least a high-level SysRD (System Requirements Document) that will be extending when time has come.
5. Educate the organization about IMS to increase awareness and expand knowledge.
6. Prepare marketing and sales materials (Press release, sales toolkit etc.) about the company’s readiness and compliance to IMS.
7. Prepare canned responses to possible IMS questions in your next RFI/RFPs
8. Follow IMS deployments and requirements by reading market researches and by speaking with customers in order to decide the best time for your organization to actually start developing your IMS plans

The apparent slowdown in the US economics is starting to show its face in the hi-tech industry. From one hand, share prices are going down and on the other, there is a destinct decline in HR recruitment, especially for executives.

Here are two examples:

• On Feb 8, Cisco’s CEO John Chambers provided his troubling forecast for a slight drop in growth for Q3 and Q4. Since than, Cisco has declared a freeze in most recruitments worldwide.
• As usual, Amdocs froze all recruitments towards the end of 2007. However, Amdocs management has not released the leash yet and only selective recruitments are approved.

Discussions with several leading HR agencies in Israel reveal that there has been a decline in recruitments, and especially of executives in VP positions, all over the hi-tech industry affecting small startups as well as large public companies.

Want to share your recent trouble in finding a job? Add a comment below.

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Operators are now rolling out converged services on fixed and mobile networks, converting trials to commercial deployments. 2008 will see another spate of trials, as femtocell technology begins to become available.

According to a research by ABI Research, the move to FMC infrastructure is a natural evolution for the mobile network as broadband services, including Voice over IP and other Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) services, begin to be deployed. The research suggests that by 2012, FMC market will expand to 250 million users worldwide.

LinkedIn have recently announced a new mobile site targeted at users carrying iPhone, Blackberry or WAP phones. Linkedin mobile interface lets you perform some basic tasks on your LinkedIn account such as:

• Search LinkedIn profiles (including photos and bio) to help recall and connect with business acquaintances at events and conferences
• Research the common contacts they have with other professionals to help make real world referrals and introductions easier
• Invite professional acquaintances and peers you meet at events to LinkedIn with just their email address. Exchanging business cards is just not cool anymore!
• Receive regular Network update capabilities about your connections while on the go

Here are some of LinkedIn Features on your mobile device:

LinkedIn mobile is an excellent tool for people on the go as it lets them immediately look up people they meet and add them to their network.

The Multilang Firefox extension was developed to solved an annoying problem familiar to those of us having an additional keyboard layout on their PCs (e.g., Hebrew, Russian, Greek, French etc.).

Quite often, people type a URL in the address box without noticing that their active keyboard layout was left on a non-English mode, making their URL useless and forcing them to type it again.

This extension identifies such situations and automatically converts the URL to its intended value as if typed in English.

Since the conversion process is based on 2 character vectors stored in the Firefox preferences, users may define their own vectors and extend multilang to support any additional languages (unicode vectors can be defined from a menu item on the Tools menu).

Since Google changed the face of Internet advertising, many companies have adopted solutions based on Contextual Advertising, where ads are selected based on the contents of the Web page/Email/IM. In some cases, the user’s profile, if known, is also used to better match ads.
Mobile Advertising is also based on the context but usually relies heavily on the user profile as each handset is directly associated with a specific user. Since mobile operators can collects a lot of information about their users, the generated profile greatly assists in the matching process.
Unlike Internet and Mobile domains, it’s not trivial to understand the context of a video stream and to identify the person watching it. First of all, how can we know whether the TV is turned on when even the Set-Top-Box (STB) is unaware of it? and even if we knew that the TV is on, how can we identify who is watching the program?

In the early days of Interactive TV (iTV), applications used to require users to ‘login’ to the service however this approach was not accepted by users and was neglected along the way. Solutions that attempt to build user profiles for TV watching habits must find a way to bypass these constraints, either from the STB side or with assistance from a server-side application.

But the questions still remains - is it really worthwhile to target ads on the TV domain? In their article “Using Data Mining to Profile TV Viewers“, Spangler, Gal-Or and May show that targeting TV viewers creates a lifting effect that increases the changes of having a household person that matches the ads’ intended segment.

“The table here outlines the gains from viewer profiling for five target gender/age segments defined by Nielsen Media Services, Inc.; for a discussion of segmentation strategies. If an ad is sent to everyone, 25.18% of the recipient households will include a female aged 18 to 34. If an ad is sent only to households selected by the profiling system, 58.06% will include such a person. A household selected by the
profiling system group is therefore 58.06%/25.18%, or 2.3 times more likely, to be of the desired type than one selected at random. This ratio is the model’s “lift”; the lifts in the table are different for different demographic groups because some groups’
characteristics are easier to predict based on their viewing patterns”.

Several companies have already started to work on such solutions, although most of them are in stealth mode. An example of such company is Invidi, which already provides tools for various sorts of targeted advertising.

TV viewing has undergone profound changes in the past few years with the emergence of Digital Video Recorders (DVR), and especially those with time-shifting capabilities, that turned TV watching into a non-linear experience. This change in watching behavior jeopardizes traditional advertising models and are likely to raise the need for alternative advertising solutions and models. Forrester Research has predicted the viewing of television commercials could decrease by 20% in just a few years. Forrester analyst Joshua Bernoff suggests this is because the DVR “degrades the value of advertising,” predicting the eventual disappearance of an important social element of the television viewing model, that is, “television in which you sit through the commercials is about to be replaced.

But time-shifting is not the only threat facing TV advertising. It is already apparent that TV advertising revenues are generally in decline due to several reasons:

1. Decline in total audience of “traditional” channels
2. Fall in the attractiveness of TV advertising compared with alternative media such as the Internet where ads are adjusted to specific users, selected according to the context and can be effectively measured (CPM, CPA).
3. Reduction in the effectiveness of TV advertising due to time shifting, PVRs, VOD and poor measurement capabilities

Advertisers and services providers need to adapt to these changes and the opportunities they create for new solutions that will tackle these problems through new models and technologies. Such solutions will allow advertisers to target their preferred audience by means of segmentation (possibly using DVRs for generating watching patterns and profiles), and offer an advertising model that will be resilient to ad-skipping and time-shifting.

So, why don’t we see such solutions on the major cable networks? believe that the main reasons are the difficulty to penetrate STBs, the complex business model that requires cable/satellite operators and broadcasters to join forces (and share revenues) and the reluctance of broadcasters to produce accurate measurements of real ad exposures.

A mid-way solution that is already tested in several cable networks is based on geographic targeting where the ads are inserted (using splitters) at the Video Hub Office (VHO) nearest to the end-points (STBs). VisibleWorld is one of the leading companies offering such a solution. VisibleWorld has trials in Comcast, Cablevision and other cable operators. Another company playingin this domain is Navic.