Service Blending — Unlocking a New Wave of Innovation

By: Mike Jones, AppTrigger

Editor’s Note (Zippy Grigonis): It’s a rare occurrence when somebody comes along who can express a sophisticated idea better than we can. As it happens, Mike Jones, Sales Engineer at AppTrigger (www.apptrigger.com) is just such a person. Read the following and take heed…

Service Blending is the practice of taking more than one service and combining them to make something new. Services are typically deployed as discrete functions within a service provider network, such as SMS, voicemail, automated outbound calling, and pre-paid. These services are “discrete” because of the complexity of interworking the application with the network; overcoming this complexity is a leading cause of inefficiency in Telco networks.

What if these existing services could be unlocked and offered for free consumption to application developers? Applications are almost never universally adopted by every subscriber in a network, so there are opportunities to repackage one or more of these discrete functions into a new service that will be consumable by a new user. For instance, a mobile subscriber may only think of automated dialing as something a telemarketer would use. However, that same mobile subscriber may view an automated wake-up call service as a useful feature. This is just one simple example of how the same discrete network function can be blended with, let’s say, SMS to create a new service using piece parts already in a network.

As the blended services market continues to take shape, existing enhanced services are prime candidates for incremental innovation and ARPU enhancements. By leveraging the existing enhanced services and creating innovation “on top” of them, service providers complement an understood user experience while at the same time, enable an ecosystem to reinforce the first social network application, voice services.

Innovation comes into play for blending old with new. New services are created for NGN all the time, but how well do these applications work with the mainstay applications in the legacy network? Given that most NGN services duplicate the legacy networks’ core functions, it’s safe to assume that the new and the old interact very little or not at all. Which will be more profitable? Repackaging an existing service to address a new market aimed at revenue growth, or duplicating a service to the same market for some nominal cost savings?

An example of blended service innovation in the Telco market is the combining of “new” IT policy enforcement capabilities, such as web browser parental controls, with the “old” pre-paid application. This policy enforcement could be extended to control who, when, and where phone calls can be made or received. The blending of these technologies is another clear example of how two disparate technologies can be brought together to create a product that is marketed to people from two separate demographics — voice and IT security.

The Telcos need a quick, efficient and cost effective solution that will unlock their services for the purpose of creating something new market and ARPU opportunity. A solution that will:

1. Protect the Telco by ensuring that their services operate independently from the underlying network.
2. Prevent vendor lock-in by opening up the core network services as building blocks for new applications.
3. Support Telco and IT technologies such and IN and Web Services for the cultivation of multiple ecosystems.
4. Create service building blocks from the old and new networks for rapid creation of innovative services.
5. Support the reliability and scalabilty required by large scale services.

Service Providers must protect their legacy network’s value and innovation potential by ensuring that their services can be offered independent of the underlying networks, and more importantly independent of the vendors enabling those networks. Service Providers who choose to open up their applications for mass consumption have the potential to open up new markets. By doing this, Telcos can avoid falling into the vendor lock-in trap, and ensure that their investments in new technologies achieve maximum ROI.

AppTrigger provides the key to unlocking this innovation via the industry’s first Application Session Controller (ASC (News - Alert)). The ASC sits between the application layer and the core network to provide interworking and manage connectivity to the evolving network.

The ASC can connect any application to any user by incorporating a number of open standard APIs and is purpose-built to deliver the signalling, media and the feature interworking between disparate networks that converged and consolidated applications require. This functionality enables the ability to expose a “services kernel” of existing revenue producing applications facilitating innovation through a “blending” of services. The concept of a “ServiceBlender” provides the collaboration or glue between the legacy services and a delivery framework exposed to a developer ecosystem. The ecosystem is then immediately exposed to not only the legacy applications but the subscribers using those applications. IT

Editor’s Note: It appears that AppTrigger and its unique network element, the Application Session Controller (ASC), can open the door to an exciting new world of blended services innovation.

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