Center Stage at ITEXPO

Keynote Speakers Talk About What's Now and What's Next

By Paula Bernier (News - Alert)

The economy may have hit the brakes in 2009, but prominent communications service providers certainly didn't. Big names like Polycom, Skype (News - Alert) and Verizon Wireless last year shifted into high gear their efforts to deliver new products, services and business models. And they have the pedal to the metal as we move into 2010.

The economy may have hit the brakes in 2009, but prominent communications service providers certainly didn't. Big names like Polycom, Skype and Verizon (News - Alert) Wireless last year shifted into high gear their efforts to deliver new products, services and business models. And they have the pedal to the metal as we move into 2010.

NGN recently checked in with executives at these three solutions providers – all of whom were represented by keynote speakers at ITEXPO East from Jan. 20 to 22 in Miami – to get the details on some of the new and exciting things happening on the application development, cloud-based services, mobile and VoIP fronts. As Christopher Dean, chief strategy officer of Skype, who spoke at ITEXPO on Jan. 21, notes, "2009 was the year of the iPhone (News - Alert) and the App Store and how the incumbent handset manufacturers and operators responded to it."

This year, Dean adds, we will get to see which response, or responses, worked best.

Brian Higgins, executive director for ecosystem development within Verizon Wireless and an ITEXPO keynote speaker Jan. 21, is one of the key people in the communications space who is focused on responding to the changes in product creation and introduction that most people attribute to the popularity of the iPhone and the App Store.

He is a driving force at the Verizon Wireless LTE (News - Alert) Innovation Center, an organization established to help "unlock" new categories of LTE-enabled devices. "So that really comes down to the full gamut of product development, product design, and then full nurturing within a lab environment up in our facility in Waltham, Mass.," he says.

"Within the Innovation Center the types of things you're going to be seeing – and obviously the focus for us – is trying to embed LTE technology into really any device we think can benefit from having connectivity and intelligence put into that device," Higgins says. "A lot of them are going to be video-based. A lot of them are going to be gaming-based. There's certainly a focus on things like health care; given some of the native security you have with LTE that certainly makes sense and the ubiquity of the network that we're going to deploy. Telematics is going to be another big area for us... If I can offer a manufacturer of an appliance the ability to know where their devices are, how they're being used, whether or not they're incurring any problems, there's a significant amount of value in doing something like that."

Of course, the concept of embedding smarts and connectivity into household appliances and other devices has been around for years. Higgins says LTE, a standards-based, high-speed wireless technology that is expected to be ubiquitous worldwide, will enable this to move from concept to reality.

"You have everyone coming together on a single technology, recognizing that that's going to be the likely candidate for anything that needs to be connected into the future," he says.

Higgins also is responsible for technical support for the developer community within Verizon's application ecosystem. "Back in July we had a conference where we announced our intent to open up our own application storefront," he says, adding that Verizon Wireless is today working with thousands of registered developers. "In order to do that properly you need an organization that understands the developer community and can assist in their efforts to bring great applications to the marketplace."

While there are some parallels between what Apple (News - Alert) has done on these fronts and what Verizon Wireless is doing, the wireless service provider has a very different business model, says Higgins. Both companies, he explains, are providing tools and resources to developers to help them build applications on their devices.

However, Verizon Wireless offers a greater diversity of devices and operating systems. And because the company has significant network resources at its disposal, he says, it will expose some of those resources – such as location, messaging, presence, and capabilities linked to quality of service – through APIs so developers can better differentiate their applications in the marketplace.

The diversity of endpoints and operating systems supported by Verizon Wireless will mean the company's developer partners will and will give the carrier more flexibility. On the other hand, he concedes: "It will be trickier for us to get the scale."

Higgins also offers a reminder that it will take time to develop business models around new devices, applications and partnerships, and to roll out the new LTE network.

"A lot of the things we're working on now are more about developing concepts, building the products and communicating out the type of things we're thinking about, and less about the 20 things we know we're going to bring to market tomorrow," he says. "So we're still in the fairly early stages. Bear in mind that we're currently targeting to have the initial launch of the [4G LTE] network in the late 2010 timeframe, and that's just the starting phase." Mobile services also were a key theme during the Jan. 21 ITEXPO keynote by Skype's Dean. During his speech, he aimed to dispel the notion that Skype, and more generally mobile VoIP, are a threat to mobile carriers.

"The opposite is true," Dean tells NGN. "From a 4G perspective, Skype can offer ‘IMS in a box.' It is a rich, real-time communications experience that embodies the design goals of the IP multimedia subsystem, integrating all forms of communications – voice, video, e-mail, Web, messaging, etc. – based on IP."

He adds that Skype also is helping drive carrier economics to the next level.

"We've already got hard data from our partnership with Hutchison 3 in the U.K. [that] shows that Skype can be an important differentiator and a valuable new subscriber acquisition tool, while also contributing to higher revenue and margins, greater customer engagement and lower churn," he says. "I'll use my keynote to discuss carrier economics in a 4G environment, looking at how to monetize the technology using models such as tiered data packages with specific QoS and throughput service agreements."

Dean says that last year will likely be remembered in communications circles as the year "when we started putting the desktop experience into our pocket. "Skype, Spotify, Facebook (News - Alert) – even Ikea – all went mobile," Dean continues. "The idea that you can have a ‘desktop-only' strategy finally left us for good in 2009."

That said, Skype expects to continue its push to bring its experience to leading smartphones and mobile devices. "There are three ways we'll do this," says Dean. "First, we'll continue making marquee applications available directly to consumers in an over-the-top post-load model. For example, Skype for Symbian (News - Alert) just launched in beta, and we expect that to be fully launched in 2010.

"Alongside that, we will build on our partnerships with OEM device manufacturers, such as Nokia (News - Alert) and Sony Ericsson and others. These relationships will allow us to create a deeply embedded Skype experience within their mobile devices," he says.

"And finally," he concludes, "we'll continue to target partnerships with those wireless carriers who see that Skype is an important application that can help them appeal to both existing and, more importantly, new customers and improve their overall economics."

In addition to Skype and Verizon Wireless, Polycom (News - Alert) co-founder and CTO Jeff Rodman took a birds' eye view of the telecom space and how today's networks, devices and applications are leading us to the holy grail of business productivity where, "You work where you are… wherever that is."

The guiding forces, he says, that will allow users to focus on their conversations rather than the tools they are using are: telepresence, scalability, interoperability, and global reach. In order to achieve a shared, unified communications experience that will enable truly location-agnostic communications, technology must move past the challenges of richness, accuracy, reliability, breadth, and access, to allow users to simply "be" – not be somewhere – just be.

We have gotten a taste of these characteristics in small doses, with rich media and global access, but the key to true global convergence is the development, acceptance, and adoption of unified, accessible standards, without which Rodman says the benefits of technology will be muted.

Meaningful growth, he says, will come from reliability – where packet loss, missed and dropped calls, and connectivity lapses will be non-existent – as well as from global convergence – where carrier networks and infrastructure vendors all embrace global interconnectivity to enable inter-enterprise connectivity without imposed limits.

As communications networks become increasingly globalized, he predicts the next few years will be extremely exciting, noting five trends that will shape the next generation of communications and make these years "a very cool time to be."

1. IP transformation will make the network transparent.
2. IP communications will target richness of life and embrace the idea of being.
3. HD voice and video will become ubiquitous.
4. Reliability and ease of use become more important than ever.
5. The ITEXPO audience members will be the key players in transforming communicating into being.
To make it all happen, we must all avoid thinking about the impossible.
Rather, he says, we must consider, "If it were possible, what can I do with it?"

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