This article provides a summary of Day Two of Informa’s SDP Asia conference in Singapore on the 27th November. Day One summary is covered in this article.
Overall Summary
Another day dominated by operator SDP presentations, demonstrating the maturity of content based SDPs, some of the challenges in evolving those SDPs, and the emergence of next generation SDPs focused upon Open Innovation. The final panel session had 5 application developers discuss their needs in working with operators. Simply, customer access and letting the customer decide are the keys to an operator’s success in Open Innovation.
Session Summaries
Content And Service Delivery On NGNs: A BT 21CN Case Study, Alex Lim, BT Telconsult
21CN’s objective is to make BT #1 in customer service through a real-time open network. The #2 objective is to reduce operational costs. Focused on Common Capabilities that the lines of business agree upon. ‘Common Capability’ examples include Storage, Content Distribution and Application Hosting, which are managed by a new organization responsible for new product development within BT. They achieved over 80% reuse across a broad range of converged products.
A SOA Approach To Expose Operator Services : Telecom Italia’s Experience, Francesco DiCorpo, Telecom Italia
Described their Telco Service Exposure (TSE) which is analogous to a SDP, used their in-car service innovations using the TSE as a case study. They started with exposing messaging, location; and are now moving into bandwidth control, user status and authentication. TSE core functions include abstraction, identity management, policy and SLA (Service Level Agreement) management, security and charging. They followed OMA OSE (Open Mobile Alliance Open Service Environment) with exposure based on ParlayX (they use Oracle’s Communication Services Gateway (OCSG)), with both web service and legacy service exposure interfaces. Highlighted the performance issues they’ve seen with some web service exposure, as well as the importance of REST (Representational State Transfer) and legacy interfaces.
Practical Aspects Of Deploying SDP In A Emerging, High-Growth Market – The Indian Experience, Ranjith Mukundan, Wipro & Krishna N Basudevan, Aircel, India
Market characteristics: even assuming an addressable market of 500m subscribers, penetration is still only at 31%. ‘Mobile is cheaper than Mangos!’ 90% prepaid base. Described the Aircel SDP, enabling a broad range of business models. Key features: J2EE/COTS (Java 2 Enterprise Edition / Commercial Off The Shelf), SOA/ESB (Service-Oriented Architecture / Enterprise Service Bus), unified user profile, and incremental (a theme common across many operators rolling out NG SDPs). Wipro does their NG SDP integration.
SDP Implementation & Charging Issues – Indosat’s Experience, Achmad Darmawan, PT Starone Mitra Telekomunikasi, Indonesia
237 million customers, 50% penetration, 13 national operators. Content is Astrology, Religion, Quiz versus India’s Astrology, Bollywood and Cricket versus European Gambling, Games and Girls. First SDP provided real time charging for SMS content introduced in 2002, similar approach to Globe. A second SDP implemented in 2006 for USSD and MMS. Then in 2008 a third SDP focused on 3G streaming and gaming. This created significant complexity particularly for charging and problems with partner settlement. Solved through a charging gateway to manage the complexity of the multiple SDPs.
Understanding How SDP Supports Telco Services, 3rd Party Exposures And Services And The Role Of Web 2.0 To Open New Business Models For Operators And Enable Them To Compete At Internet speed, Dr Stéphane H. Maes, Oracle
Stéphane described the thinking behind Oracle’s SDP (web application server on steroids) and their SDF (Service Delivery Framework) an integration framework between all their products. Explained how the recipe for their SDP is based upon OMA OSE, and realized using JEE/SOA (Java Enterprise Edition). Took a swipe at the JAIN/SLEE (Java™ APIs for Intelligent Networks Service Logic Execution Environment) framework, which drew a response form the JAIN/SLEE members of the audience 🙂
Panel Discussion – Stimulating Service Innovation Through The Application Developer Community, Alan Quayle, Thomas Clayton, President & CEO, Bubble Motion, Varun Arora, CEO Home Camera, Steven Chan Consultant and Product Evangelist EZY Dial, Liew Kong Nam Managing Director at Nano Equipment, Amit Gupta Co-Founder, Product & Strategy Director at Affle, Singapore
In most of the conferences I attend, there is much talk of Open Innovation and using 3rd party applications, without the 3rd parties being present to state their requirements. This panel is unique in the industry in bringing together highly innovative applications relevant to the telecoms industry, and giving operators and suppliers a chance to understand their needs. The main points raised by the application developers were:
- The critical importance of direct customer access;
- Don’t be negative, let the customer decide what applications are successful;
- Help developers manage the handset diversity challenge; and
- A sandbox for developers to test their applications.
These points reflect the findings from a broader analysis I performed and reported in these articles on Open Innovation and Application Developer Needs and Application Developer Needs Part 2.
Below are the websites of the application developers on the panel, if any operator does not have these applications on their network, they should seriously ask why not.
Bubble Motion: voice SMS plus lots more cool stuff
Home Camera: world’s easiest-to-use Internet home surveillance