Time-to-market more important than cost
Rating: Theme from Telcordia E5 event
by Tony Dennis
What the E5 event here in San Fran lacks in any startlying news, it makes up for with big guns from within Telcordia’s customer base. Victor Chiu from Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom was particularly entertaining.
But a common theme has slowly emerged. The current focus is on launching new apps and services to raise mobile subscriber ARPUs. To help them do so, operators are indeed turning to Telcordia.
Several attendees revealed, however, that the lowest cost bid is no longer the most attractive to them. What they actually want is confidence that their service partner can actually deliver.
One speaker even spelt his out. What had attracted him was the timeline – 90 days between initial concept to first sales to subscribers.
There was a great deal of talk here at E5 about how such services could be rolled out so quickly. Naturally Telcordia was pushing the whole concept of centralisation and reusable software modules.
But what has this produced? I was particularly impressed by Andy Badstubner, of Cybeyond’s presentation. His VoIP based MVNO targets only SMEs.
One of the services he has rolled out is shared voicemail. Not only is the same mailbox shared across fixed and wireless services, it can be shared amongst a group of employees, too.
He also revealed that Cbeyond’s billing system can cope with sharing minutes across fixed and wireless, too.
Another revelation came from Navin Chadha of India’s Tata Teleservices. To compete in this fiercely competitive market, Tata had first developed ‘Non-stop’. This provided prepaid customers to receive calls even when they’ve no credit. To stay ahead, Tata then developed ‘Don’t stop’. It’s the same as Non-stop except that creditless prepaid subscribers can still call other Tata handsets.
What I noticed was that few seemed to be taking into account what the quantity of data potentially good applications might create. For example, automatically backing up every customer’s SIM card contacts could prevent churn. But it would create a data records nightmare.
Andy Badstubner kind of agreed. He is forced by regulations to itemise every charge for a particular customer. Being green, Cbeyond sends these out only as PDFs, not on paper. But some customer’s bills can turn into 100 page PDFs. To give any kind of meaning to all this information, Cbeyond stores these PDFs on a separate web site. So if the customer wants to query a particular bill, it’s easy to view previous bills to provide a historical analysis.
Nice idea.
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