Livewire

Media and Entertainment industry is growing at a very fast pace with its extensive adoption in our lives. Whether its entertainment, information or media services, especially digital media, service provider’s aim is to provide easily available and affordable content to the end users in an efficient manner. To thrive in the current competitive environment, it is imperative for service providers to constantly increase interaction with its customers, retain existing customers and evolve new channels for revenue generation.  

With the existing IT landscape, challenges that most media and entertainment providers are facing today are:
 Continuously differentiating and introducing new pricing models to combat customer churn as customers are rapidly switching service providers
 Retaining customer loyalty by ensuring accuracy and transparency in customer touch points such as bill details, plan details etc.
 Multiple partners required to support varied services which necessitates robust partner settlement mechanism to build a stronger buyer-seller partnership
 Bringing in transformation into the system and indentify additional revenue streams
 Legacy systems’ inflexibility to adapt to changing consumer needs
 Need for huge  infrastructure and investment to provide premium services

To overcome these challenges and stay ahead of competition, the service providers are embarking on their transformation journey to introduce modular, robust COTS products either by upgrading or replacing legacy system for better alignment of  their processes, to accurately rate concurrent services in real-time. An important aspect of this transformation journey lies in adopting a robust, efficient and transparent COTS billing system which would:
 Provide flexibility to scale operations and add additional business / service lines while reducing operational costs
 Accurately charge the customers and hence generate revenues for the service providers
 Increase customer satisfaction by providing customer self service options and quicker accesses to their accounts. 
 Provide enhanced operational transparency to change the customer billing needs and requests
 Migrate customers quickly  to new or better plans, retaining customer loyalty

Thus implementing of a real-time, value-based and transaction-oriented rating and billing systems becomes necessary not only for supporting new services but also enable them to create new revenue streams via flexible convergent services targeted to suit varied market segments.

Posted by Jayanth H M at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

To cope  with stiff competition, rapidly dwindling profit margins and ever increasing operational costs, Communication Service Provides (CSPs) are looking at various options to cut down costs, generate additional revenue from existing business models/systems and reduced lead time for new services’ launch. A large number of CSPs still maintain multiple legacy home grown billing systems which were developed earlier based on mainframe technologies with point to point interfaces. These billing systems being outdated have high TCO, longer implementation  & deployment windows and high maintenance and support costs. Also discrete billing systems maintained for different business units for different product lines lead to a fragmented customer view.

 

CSPs can significantly reduce these costs by rationalizing and consolidating their existing legacy billing systems into a single new generation high performance, scalable, flexible and SOA based billing solution from leading COTS product vendors like Oracle, Comverse, Amdocs, Intec etc. These new generation COTS products provide:
§  Quick implementation  on account of comprehensive out of the box functionalities and hence shorter lead time to market
§  3G service offerings
§  Online/ customer self customized  services to end-users
§  Integrated view of customer billing data
§  Agile & flexible Product catalogue features
§  New revenue growth engines
§  Real time rating & charging
§  Convergent billing
§  Enriched bill presentation features
§  On-line payments processing
§  Enhanced customer dispute handling

 

 A rationalized and consolidated next generation billing system will enable service providers to incorporate process improvements, gain market differentiation, enhanced customer  experience, achieve cost savings, generate new growth, gain better ROI on infrastructures, shared services and maintain agile work force who have access to next generation billing solution and cutting edge technologies to work upon. Also by investing and capitalizing on the new generation billing system, service providers can outsource non-core activities of systems maintenance and focus on their core competencies.

Posted by Shivakumar Ramachandran at 04:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With changing consumer lifestyles, continuously evolving in providing new services has become the mantra for Communication service providers (CSPs) to sustain stiff competition. Traditional stovepipe billing systems support either voice, data, mobile or video services at a time. Investing in individual billing systems for each service type is not an optimal proposition from an operational as well as maintenance perspective. Also from a customer’s perspective, they are keen to opt for bundled services which include triple play (voice, data and video) and quadruple play (adding mobility to voice, data and video), instead of buying single individual services. 

Customers today prefer to purchase these services from a single CSP and require these services to be invoiced in a single consolidated bill. Hence CSPs are forced to move towards convergence to provide new varied services with one single point of contact and providing a single view of the services opted by a customer.
Broadly speaking, convergent billing is an integration of all service charges onto a single customer invoice, by creating a unified view of all the services provided to the customer and a single-point customer care. Thus Convergence in the billing and Customer care platforms provides two fold benefits to the customers as well as the CSPs as follows:

Customer Gain: 
• Eliminates the need of multiple providers for different services.
• Single bill for different services makes payment and other processing simpler and faster.
• Cross-service discounts i.e. eligibility for preferential pricing if multiple services are ordered.
• Single point of contact to resolve the billing problems/queries for any of the subscribed services.

CSP Gain:
• Opportunity to become a one-stop shop for multiple services, by offering triple and quadruple plays.
• Improve CSR’s operational efficiency and flexibility by making unified view of each customer available on a single click.
• Convergent billing enables multi-service packaging and pricing, whereby existing customers are lured to add new services and new customers are attracted by innovative bundled services. It enables CSPs to easily view the big picture by spotting cross-service relationships and buying patterns that spell out new opportunities helping them in adding new services to differentiate in this competitive market.

 Thus with convergent services as part of CSP’s marketing strategy, the success of their business model will depend to a great extent on the implementation of cutting edge billing and customer care platforms. 

Posted by Ashish M Wandile at 04:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The players in the Telecom industry that emerge stronger post the recession will be the ones following the mantra: innovation with cost cutting. How can the telecom operators focus on the innovation game and at the same time keep a hawk eye on the concomitant costs of innovation? Perhaps the answer lies in Cloud Computing.  Cloud computing is the way ahead as demonstrated by some of the leading analyst commentaries: Gartner estimates one-third of IT spending in 2012 will be on cloud computing. Merrill Lynch has forecasted a $95 billion market opportunity over the next five years (as quoted in Saugatuck whitepaper). There are immense cost savings and attractive business transformation opportunities lying untapped in the cloud, the big question is “what and how” can be taken to the cloud with a cost effective, secure and high ROI centric approach. Amongst the telephone operators’ application portfolio,  e-billing/self-care/mobile-application-store lend themselves well to cloud migration  essentially because of factors like fluctuating load factor, none of them being a mission critical application, suitability to a transaction/subscription based charging model and commoditized IT capability. E-billing/self care for long has been known to have a positive impact on customer loyalty, profitability and consumer behavior. Increasing awareness and evangelizing the use of e-bills is a big lever towards higher profitability and customer loyalty. The need of the hour is to go-beyond and ask “Is there a better way to deliver e-billing /self care services in the telecom space?” The transformation from an on-premise, licensed software solution to a cloud-based approach presents itself as a cost-effective, customer-collaborative and high ROI solution reflecting the evolving telecom industry landscape. It is imperative for the telecom operators that cloud based e-billing / self-care is not seen as a cost-cutting initiative, rather, as a core constituent of a larger business-transformation drive focusing on the hottest customer touch-points of the web 2.0 and social networking era, such as smart-phones, twitter etc.

 

Mobile applications store is another critical dimension in cloud space along which Telecom operators can diversify their offerings portfolio. According to Strategy Analytics, as quoted in the post, total mobile applications market is worth $8 billion in 2008 and the operators earn $2.8 Bn of this pie. The mobile applications market is expected to double to $16 billion by 2013 and assuming the same share of the pie, mobile operators will pocket $5.6 billion. This does not take into account the mobile advertising revenues into the revenues equation. These numbers imply a good story in the making for telecom operators but the key lies in the approach. My bet is on the cloud computing approach as it enables the telecom operators to innovate, collaborate with partners, interact with customers and at the same time keeps the costs low and ROI high!

Posted by Abhishek Singh at 05:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Most of the Telecom Service Providers do go for package-based Billing applications for their critical advantages over bespoke applications. Most of the rating and billing is happening using out of box functionalities offered by the COTS packages. In recent times, there is a major drift in services being offered to the end customers. More and more innovative products and services are being launched by the operators to retain their competitive stand in the market. Many of the leading billing packages are not capable enough to run at this pace of innovations in the product lines. Hence they fail to offer more than 80% of out of the box functionality to the operators, making the operator invest in customizing the package and making it complex, as they launch new product lines. Operators also lookout on putting a check on their license cost and expect the package do more for less.

One direct impact of this would be an incoherent implementation and customization of a package to the requirements. This makes the system complex, un-maintainable and counters the advantages provided by the package implementation. This could also potentially result in a revenue leakage due to various software issues of any complex system. These are coming from either a huge customization (of more than 50%) or in trying to make the existing older versions of package work for those brand-new, future-focused requirements. How would operators solve such issues when the package inplace doesn’t scale up to their new requirements and a forcible application of the same potentially results in a revenue loss?

A better approach for the operators would be to componentize their BSS systems as much as possible. While doing so, the entire functionality of BSS would get scattered to these multiple modules and thereby we can avoid the first risk of having to depend only on one core billing system for everything. The components could include separate systems for Product Master Data, Revenue Reconciliation, Billing, Invoicing etc. Once componentization is done, a good modular architecture should be crafted to integrate these various systems. Thus, new product launches could only impact the relevant components and not the core billing system, most of the times. One more advantage with this approach is that the operator will have the liberty to have a low-end billing system that is not very complex in functionality, easily maintainable and not heavy on license-costs.

Posted by Prasanth Kumar at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The key drivers for a communication service provider’s (CSP) billing transformation can be summarized as follows:

§  Mergers and Acquisitions to sustain growth

§  Legal requirements from a regulatory body to provide fair service to customers at a competitive price

§  Consolidation of Business Support Systems to improve operational efficiencies

§  Technical requirements in case of vendor support discontinuation for hardware/OS/DB

§  Product vendor releases newer versions of the product.

During this transformation phase, CSPs have to deal with data migration and process changes in their OSS/BSS systems, particularly billing systems which are mission critical since any issues during billing migration directly impact revenues. Today, we see that most of the transformation projects are either delayed or get into effort overrun, adversely impacting cost and quality. Let us see the key challenges that CSPs face in adhering to the time lines and budgets of a billing transformation project:

1.       Complex and heterogeneous data: Over a period of time, the legacy systems and data might have undergone a lot of changes, making billing data very complex. For example, applying one time scripts or workarounds in production to correct data and introduce customer specific pricing plans/offers to attract customers, which otherwise requires major changes in the application. The standard migration tools may not be able to handle such complexities without heavy customization/tailoring.

2.       Understanding the data: With data residing in multiple systems, forming a 360 degree view of the customer becomes difficult especially when there is lack of product hierarchy in the legacy system. For example, a customer might be allowed to order multiple quantities of a particular product in the legacy systems but the new system does not allow such lapses on account of product hierarchy capabilities.

3.       Customer Experience: Migration programs are high risk programs as they involve migrating highly complex and historical data. Thus post migration, maintaining the same level of customer satisfaction if not better becomes a daunting task.

4.       Changing requirements: Many a times CSPs maintain new billing system for new customers and legacy for the existing customers. In such a scenario, the changes recommended by business teams for the new billing system have to be considered by the team working on migration.

5.       Level of customization: Upgrading the existing billing systems to newer versions involves complex data migration due to the high level of customizations involved.

6.       Synchronization: Replacing only rating and billing engine, gives rise to data synchronization issues from legacy systems to the new billing system.

7.       System downtime: Longer down time of rating and billing systems during migration can lead to delays in rating and bill generation processes which in turn affect the CSP’s revenue generation from its customers.

Posted by Ashok Reddy Nomula at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The most obvious and salient features of an effective billing system would be:

•   Configure price plans and rates

•   Capture call data effectively

•   Rate calls accurately in a timely manner

•   Generate bills on time and provide accurate invoice

But, with cut throat competition in the telecom sector, it is imperative for Communication service providers to constantly explore ways to differentiate in the market. Exploring the power of an effective billing system beyond the obvious outcomes would help the CSPs in the long run to reduce costs and generate new revenues. This will also help CSPs in gaining larger market share and retaining customer loyalty.

One such opportunity would lie in using the billing system effectively to optimize the operational expense (OPEX) of the CSP. Listed below are the few activities that can be performed via an effective billing system to optimize the cost of the service provider:

Segment the subscriber base by mapping relevant categories from usage trend to the new category of service being introduced. Say internal segmentation based on Mobile usage, data usage, SMS Usage, MMS and other VAS usage. This would optimize the CSP’s marketing expenses for target audience identification.

Integrated Customer communication to increase customer engagement and hence reduce nonpayment. This can be achieved via billing system as follows:

­   SMS/Mail/IVR  on Bill generation

­   SMS/Mail/IVR on due date

­   SMS/Mail/IVR on loyalty points

­   SMS/Mail/IVR on Credit limits

Analysis of payment modes will enable payments within the desired timelines. An example would be to suggest a customer who makes payment through his credit card or debit card each time, to switch to Standard Instructions/Electronic Clearing Service (SI/ECS) enabling auto debit from customer’s account.

Analysis of payment locations will enable the service provider to take decisions with respect to increasing or changing the customer touch points like retail outlets, payment outlets or company owned showrooms.

All these cost optimizers and more can be derived out of a billing system effectively and these can be outsourced activities with a revenue sharing cost model or billing in accordance with cost savings achieved by the client.

What is your POV on this? Thoughts, if any, are more than welcome.

Posted by Sripathy Srinivasan at 04:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Mobile Applications market is growing at an unprecedented pace. Evolution in technology has enabled mobile devices to grow dramatically in features and computational capabilities. Innovation in the Mobile applications space is being fueled by the capabilities of the newer generation of devices and a growing number and success of Application Stores.

We have seen and used numerous mobile applications that enabled location-based information services (LBS). Now we are seeing a new generation of LBS applications utilizing the concept of Augmented Reality (AR). For starters, AR is the process of overlaying digital information above a view of the physical world. Though AR has been an old concept, it has become a reality only after the launch of the newer generation of devices last year.

AR on Mobile – Still far away from reaching the Masses

AR-based Mobile Applications are still in their infancy and I believe it will take a long time for them to achieve a mass market appeal. Today, there are hardly a few dozen (or even less) AR-based mobile applications collectively across all Mobile App Storefronts. The reason is very simple. There are hardly a handful of devices that technologically support AR-based applications.

Implementing an AR-based mobile application requires a few features to be available on the mobile phone namely – Camera, GPS, Compass, Accelerometer and Data Connectivity. Though a combination of Camera, GPS and Data Connectivity exists across a wide-base of devices in the market today, not very many phones have a Compass or an Accelerometer in them.

Only when the AR-requirements compliant device base  starts growing, will AR-based applications will even have a potential to reach mass adoption.

What is the market for AR on Mobile?

Is there a market opportunity for AR-based Mobile applications? There have been analyst predictions about the revenue and market opportunity of Mobile AR. But I believe it is still a big question which is yet to be answered or proven!

We have seen very few use cases being realized on mobile that are based on AR. Most of the apps that are out there overlay location-based metadata on a physical view of the locality that is seen through a mobile camera’s viewfinder. But such AR applications that merely provide location based information may not be really that compelling for an end user to pay for. Ad-based monetization of these apps (like any other free apps) can be a possibility too.

What would it take for Mobile AR to be successful in terms of Mass adoption?

Application of AR within Mobile Applications has been talked about across a number of application categories like Games, Social Networking, Location-based Information Services, Search and even Healthcare. We have also seen some examples (and like any new technology concept, AR-based apps are still having their initial hiccups). But, I hope all of you would agree with me that strong use cases for AR on mobile are yet to emerge and still developers are in a mode of experimentation. AR-based Mobile Marketing is also another domain which is getting a lot of attention. What use cases of Mobile AR will become successful and take Mobile AR from reality to mass market adoption is something that remains to be seen!

Do you think Mobile AR will remain one of those hyped concepts that will never see mass-market usage or do you think use cases will emerge to take it to the next level – from concept to reality to Mass Market usage in future? 

I would like to hear your thoughts on what kind of AR-based use cases, you believe, would start emerging.

Posted by Sandeep Chandrasekar Seshadri at 07:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

First of all, a very happy and prosperous new year 2010 to everyone out there. In this first post of 2010, I thought I will share my perspectives of what this new decade could hold for the Mobile industry.  Mobile industry has been a very interesting and a highly dynamic industry over the past decade. Mobile subscriptions have grown multi-fold across the world and we are seeing a big shift in the business models – revenues are now being driven by Data services more than it used to be by the Voice services.

I have summarized and listed the top 10 areas which could be interesting to watch out for. I believe these could be the areas where the most of the action will be at least in the initial part of the decade.

• Continued growth of App Stores – App Stores are growing. Apple saw 2B+ downloads and other newer application marketplaces on the block are also seeing continued growth. Large Operators have also jumped into this business trying to claim their stake at it. There is going to be a lot of push from both the Handset makers and the Carriers to make each of their App Stores a success by attracting more developers and trying to catch the consumer’s attention. There is a fear that is catching up about how this could cause a fragmented experience for both the developers and consumers. We need to see how this will shape in the years to come and which ones are going to become successful. But one thing that is clear is that all the other App Stores have a lot of catch up to do to with Apple’s App Store.             
• Explosion in Smart phone penetration – From being in the single digits in terms of market share, the Smart phones have started increasing their pie in the handset distribution chart. These days there is so much talk and push about smart phones that are being launched and so less about the feature phone segment. Consumers have also started to like these smart phones due to the feature functionalities they offer and since most of them have become affordable (of course with Carrier’s subsidies). I believe the forth coming years will see a lot of market share being gained by these Smart phones.
  
• Mobile Data Bandwidth Usage – Growing number of smart phones, explosion in digitization of content that can be consumed wirelessly and the growth in consumer’s appetite to be connected at all times via their mobile devices have all resulted in a (as some people call it) – a mobile data tsunami. There is an astronomical growth in bandwidth consumption that is clearly putting a lot of pressure on Operator networks. Though operators have made heavy investments in their Network Infrastructure, it will be interesting to see how Mobile Operators cope up with this growth in Data usage and manage to maintain the quality of their services – especially when the Mobile industry is shifting from a “Voice-oriented” industry to a “Data-oriented” industry.
  
• Rise of Android OS – From a humble beginning a few years ago when T Mobile introduced G1, Android OS has come a long way. Almost every OEM has started to embrace Android OS and we will be seeing more of the devices adapting Android in future. But what sets Android OS apart from other OS’s   and in the path for wide spread adoption is that Android OS is being adopted for a lot of different connected device segments (other than mobile device). We have seen e-Readers like Nook and Internet Tablets like Archos come into the market. It will be interesting to see how all these device makers adopt the “openness” promoted by Google and how Android OS matures and becomes the OS of choice for these type of connected devices.
  
• Growth of 4G – With growing usage of mobile broadband, the consumer demand for higher speeds and the growing adoption of high-bandwidth applications and services, Carriers have started to transition towards 4G. We have seen announcements from operators across the world who are investing and transitioning towards 4G technologies like WiMAX and LTE. Though there have been market rollouts of WiMAX, we have not seen LTE come out of the market trials yet. It will be interesting to see how quickly and effectively Operators transition towards 4G and what kind of differentiated services they will be offering over 4G.
  
• New Players in the Wireless Connectivity Market – Traditionally, when it comes to Wireless data connectivity, it used to be the Mobile Operators who used to compete with one another. The last few years has seen a number of new non-traditional players emerging to offer Wireless Data connectivity. We have seen Cable MSOs and other companies invest heavily on Wi-Fi hotspots (even though carriers were also investing in Wi-Fi hotspots). Cable MSOs like Cablevision bundled their Wi-Fi connectivity as a free value offering for their Cable Broadband subs whereas other companies like Boingo has been selling Wi-Fi connectivity to travellers. With a heavy influx of dual mode handsets and light weight laptops (or Netbooks), these companies have seen a big fan following for these services. Cable MSOs in the US have also heavily invested in WiMAX networks of Clearwire and have started introducing 4G Mobile Broadband services like Data Cards (Time Warner for example). We could soon be seeing devices like Netbooks (embedded with WiMAX modems) being sold by these Cable MSOs in direct competition to Mobile Operators. This will be an interesting space to watch out for.
  
• Non-Handset devices claiming their stake at Mobile Data traffic – The embedded mobile market has seen a lot of action over the past few years with introduction of non-handset devices like eReaders and Netbooks. With a lot of investment going into the Embedded Mobile devices and their applications in Industrial Machine-2-Machine (M2M) scenarios, we will be seeing a lot of growth in this particular segment in the coming years.
  
• New Billing Models on the horizon – With the growing usage of mobile broadband, some operators have already hinted at tiered-pricing for their Data users. It will be interesting to see how operators introduce such new billing models and how much these new models are accepted by the consumers. Another big change in the operator’s traditional billing models will be owing to the growth in the M2M/Embedded Mobile space. Embedded Mobile space will demand an “amount of data traffic” independent billing models as they will no more serve a traditional one-to-one relationship.
  
• Mobile Commerce and Payments – Mobile Commerce and Payments has been one hot area in the Mobile industry in the last few years. There have been a lot of market trials around Mobile Payments, Ticketing and Money Transfer. Though Mobile Banking has picked up a lot in a number of countries, the other applications are still nascent. With developments in contactless technologies like Near-Field Communications (NFC), very soon we could see Mobile Wallet applications enabling contactless payments at retail outlets, vending machines and ticketing terminals. It will of interest to see how quickly Mobile Payments and Commerce will evolve into a mass-market service that will drive consumer adoption.
  
• Increasing spends on Mobile as a Marketing Channel – Today, mobile is the king! There is no other mass media like Mobile that has a ubiquitous presence amongst consumers. Consumer-focused enterprises have increased their focus on Mobile as a channel to reach out to their consumers. We have seen branded applications which are aimed at promoting their brand or specific product lines including the delivery of coupons and deals from Retailers and CPG companies. Mobile, as a marketing channel, continues to offer exciting new opportunities. But Mobile Marketing is still at a nascent stage. Will this decade see an increasing adoption and spending on Mobile Marketing and Advertising?
  

There are some interesting days to come and it will be exciting to see how the Mobile industry gears up for another decade of evolution and growth. I summarized the areas that I believe will see a lot of interesting action.

What are your thoughts? What do you think are the areas to watch out for as the Mobile indsutry gears up for the new decade?

Posted by Sandeep Chandrasekar Seshadri at 01:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)