Today, the telecommunications landscape is shifting as a result of service providers’ desire for new, revenue-generating services that can distinguish them from their competitors, technological advances that are enabling the delivery of a wide range of new services, and growing end-user demand for these services. The shift offers carriers an opportunity to address end-users’ interest in services that complement their lifestyle, allowing them to communicate how, when and with whom they choose — with the features they demand and have come to expect — regardless of the device they are using.

Service providers are seeking ways to increase market share, revenue, and subscriber loyalty, and they are looking to the burgeoning market for blended lifestyle applications to help them meet these objectives.

End-user interest in blended services has grown as an increasing number of employees work from home, from remote office locations, or from the road. As enterprise mobility increases, the delineation between subscribers as business professionals and as consumers has blurred. These individuals — sometimes referred to as “prosumers” — have a growing expectation for a communications experience that combines voice, video, data, and multimedia applications seamlessly across a range of devices.

A service provider that can meet these expectations, both in terms of supporting a range of access methods and offering a wide variety of high-value, end-user services can have strong appeal, especially when these features are combined with a trusted brand name associated with a positive user experience, a solid selection of attractive and easy-to-use devices (both hardware and software-based), and an experience that is consistent whether the subscriber is at home or roaming outside of their home service area.

What Are “Prosumer” Services?

Most professionals today have multiple sets of communications services — one at the office, another at home, and perhaps more if they regularly work in more than one location. The maintenance of these disparate service silos can lower productivity, and impede access to needed services and capabilities. As the lines blur between prosumers’ professional and personal expectations, the lines between their professional and personal services will need to blur as well. Blended lifestyle services for prosumers can help overcome this challenge.

For example, a user may want to receive business calls at home when they are telecommuting, and so might want separate ring tones to identify business calls from personal calls. They may also want to treat these calls separately such as forwarding all business calls to voice mail at certain times of the day. They may want to limit access to their instant messaging presence information to co-workers during the workday, and then reverse the scenario in the evening, sharing their availability information only with friends and family. They may be interested in seeing the latest sports scores, and even receiving a streaming video clip of the big play of the day in the evening, but would prefer not to receive the same information during a business meeting.

IMS: Meeting The Prosumer Demand

To meet the needs of this growing prosumer segment, service providers need to deploy an infrastructure solution that can enable them to better understand their customers’ needs and preferences and blend individual services into new, personalized offerings that meet the unique needs of these subscribers.

The standards-compliant IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture is an excellent fit for an operator that is looking to cost-effectively create and offer lifestyle services. IMS provides an ideal means of delivering voice, data, video, and other multimedia content. IMS also enables the interoperability of these services across different access technologies such as 802.11/WiFi hotspots, 3G mobile networks, or cable or DSL broadband connections, on a variety of devices such as mobile phones, wireless-enabled laptops and PDAs and desktop PCs or SIP (session initiation protocol) phones while still providing backward compatibility with existing circuit switched voice and data networks.

As importantly, IMS lays the groundwork for operators to deliver services that can be blended together to create even more powerful services that interact with each other by sharing common information such as subscriber profiles, presence and location data, and buddy lists, allowing existing services such as instant messaging to be combined with emerging capabilities to support newer offerings such as multiparty video conferencing and shared Web browsing. Through the blending of service features, operators can create intelligent “lifestyle” services, which generate greater end-user demand and yield higher average revenue per user (ARPU) than traditional services.

Beyond The IMS Standard

Standardized IMS platforms alone, however, are not sufficient to support this blending of services. To support the blending of applications, the IMS must remove the walls between the service delivery silos that exist today, and provide end users with an improved user interface that allows them to move between applications seamlessly, maintaining a common look and feel for services regardless of the access method used. The benefits to operators of this blending are obvious. Using instant messaging, push-to-talk, location-based services and content applications as examples, an IMS-based network — with the appropriate service layer enhancements — can enable these individual applications to be more easily blended into new services (Figure 1).

By providing a single, unified service delivery platform, an IMS architecture designed from the ground up to support this blending will enable operators to more easily and rapidly deploy new services because less time is required for service integration and provisioning. This produces a variety of benefits for service providers including reduced time to market (as much as six months per service) and increased user friendliness.

True Blended Services

But what does blending really mean? Is there a common definition of a “blended lifestyle” service? Certainly definitions will differ from equipment vendor to equipment vendor, and from operator to operator, but there are some characteristics that will help define true blended services from those offerings that are simply cobbled together through some customized, patchwork solution. Some of the characteristics of a blended service are:

• Common directories and addressing across applications;
• Presence, availability, location and policy sharing across applications;
• Spawning sessions to compliment existing sessions;
• Single identity and common billing;
• Network-hosted data; and
• Personalization and customization of devices and users.

These features will provide for a blended service environment that will significantly enhance and simplify the communications experience for end users, making it easier for them to use and enjoy new multimedia and content services. The key to success is not just delivering new applications and services, but how they are delivered, and accessed by subscribers that will determine success or failure.

End User Willingness To Pay

Primary market research shows significant pent-up-demand for these blended lifestyle services, along with a high willingness to pay, and an overarching desire for a seamless experience across applications, and across devices.

Moreover, these blended lifestyle services can actually expand the “telecom wallet,” the amount of money consumers and business users spend on communications services. The research and modeling indicates that users are willing to expand their subscriptions and overall spending on enhanced services, a very attractive feature for service providers seeing more and more price pressure on their existing offerings.

Personalization Through Blending

Blended services also offer great benefits in terms of customization and personalization. Blending allows operators to develop services to address specific markets, and targeted, for instance, toward individuals interested in services that provide comfort, convenience and/or entertainment. A service aimed at the “convenience” market, for example, could provide users with a single contact list that spans all of their services so they no longer need to have one contact list for e-mail, another for messaging, another for voice services, and so on.

Location-Based Services (LBS) are another example of an application that can cut across many markets including comfort, convenience and entertainment. Successful commercial LBS offerings will use location information as an enabler to provide data and an array of potential services to a subscriber. Security services — such as E-911 — that utilize location and presence data to provide security features for subscribers are another popular “convenience” service category for consumers and enterprise customers alike. While privacy issues remain a concern for many customer segments, schemes that enable customers to restrict access to location data can make location services an attractive proposition.

Enterprises will value the improved productivity resulting from the ability to immediately locate personnel in the vicinity and quickly communicate with them to resolve issues (e.g., automatically sending critical event messages to field service technicians that are nearest to an event site). With the ability to immediately locate technicians or other personnel on the road — enterprises can expedite service requests, reduce downtime and increase customer satisfaction.

Consumers will value the more efficient use of time resulting from being able to easily find people, events, and points of interest that they care about. And in today’s uncertain world families will value the greater peace-of-mind that comes from knowing where any one of their family members might be during their daily routine, and will appreciate being able to keep track of each other on outings such as family vacations. Teens will enjoy staying connected with buddies at school, at the mall or during other activities.

The Benefit Of Blending To Service Providers

Ultimately, the real value of the blended lifestyle services business model accrues to operators. An IMS platform designed to support blended services will help operators introduce a range of new services that simply don’t exist today, and can be extremely attractive to consumers and business professionals. Moreover, these new services can be customized to the needs of particular end-user segments, and brought to market more quickly and at lower cost than is currently possible.

This not only will enable operators to tap new market opportunities, but it will give them the flexibility to adjust quickly to changing market needs, helping them stay competitive. And for those operators that move quickly to pursue this opportunity, the first-mover status could be invaluable. These new services can help operators establish greater customer loyalty, an important asset in today’s competitive market. Also, the additional revenue from these new offerings can be reinvested in further advances to help these operators establish a market leading position that will be difficult to overcome.

Finally, the characteristics that define the prosumer segment won’t long remain limited to that segment. Like other early adopters segments, the characteristics that define prosumers may soon define the general public, and the sooner operators are able to meet this emerging demand, the better position they’ll be in to take advantage as it becomes a mass market phenomenon. IT

Sandip Mukerjee, PhD., is vice president for business strategy and marketing with Lucent Technologies’ Applications Solutions business. For more information, please visit the company online at www.lucent.com.

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