The Next Killer App Isn’t Really an App

Whether you believe we’ve reached the end of this recession as many economists claim, or not, the undeniable fact is that the global business markets, including the communications industry, will continue to feel the effects of the downturn for years to come. In fact, it’s a fair assumption that many of the steps businesses took to weather this recession will remain part of their ongoing initiatives. After all, cost cutting measures were being implemented well before the economy took a turn for the worse.

Likewise, the strategies communications vendors have implemented over the past year to help their customers and end users meet their need to cut costs while remaining competitive will live on, perhaps in perpetuity.

Part of the strategy for service providers continues to be defining the “killer application” that is going to provide a competitive advantage for them in the market. It also means carefully considering any new technology investment, more so than ever before, which means that their vendors must, likewise, be ever more diligent in demonstrating how their products will help support providers’ bottom line initiatives.

I recently had a conversation with Aculab’s (News - Alert) Ian Colville and Andrew Nicholson about this very dilemma facing providers and their vendors, and we agreed the killer app is a moving target across time and across different providers and their different customers, not one single application that transcends differences between providers or their customers.

According to Colville, The key for providers is being able to provide customers what you want to provide – what they want you to provide – and having the infrastructure in place to be able to do that. That includes existing infrastructure as well as new investment in next generation networks – and, importantly an ability to bridge the two. It’s what Aculab appropriately labels “extensibility” – an ability to integrate new products and applications while continuing to leverage their existing infrastructures

“It gives customers the best of both worlds,” Colville said, “The opportunity to leverage the advanced communications solutions that are right for their businesses, without having to endure the disruption and expense associated with upgrading or replacing their networks.”

So, perhaps there isn’t really a killer app, rather a killer platform– either software or hardware – that is to which you can incrementally add new features to meet new needs and to bring new service revenues. In fact, this plays well into Aculab’s traditional strengths, its enabling technology that is built on the fundamental need to allow new services to be integrated into existing infrastructures.

Recent product enhancements from Aculab, including those to its Prosody S HMP software, a new version of its GroomerII gateway, and a new release of its ApplianX gateway, are all focused on the market’s need to bridge legacy technology with next generation implementations.

The fact is that providers still need the best of both worlds – they need to retain their legacy infrastructures to support a large number of existing TDM customers and applications, but the need to invest in next generation networks to remain competitive and attract new subscribers who want the latest applications and the latest technology at their disposal.

The concept of extensibility goes hand in hand with this need for supporting both customer segments. As Colville and Nicholson both note, it’s something of a necessary evil. Nobody wants to support two networks, but the migration of customers
to new infrastructures is a process, one that could take 10 or 20 years, because most providers aren’t in a hurry to rip out the their existing infrastructures and deal with migrating their entire subscriber bases all at once.

Aculab products, of course, are designed to enable just that – they can sit on both sides of the technology and to allow the same features to be applied to different networks at the same time.

“We are trying to make it easy for people to move from one to the other or to keep both types of So, as service providers and application developers continue to innovate – that, after all, is their means of attracting and retaining subscribers, they need vendors like Aculab that continue to innovate with them, and which recognize that, for all the wonder of next generation networks and applications, traditional networks are still here, and will be for some time.

There are, of course those newer providers that have effectively started with next generation networks and services, and in order to compete effectively against them, providers with traditional and hybrid networks will need to embrace this theory of extensibility, even as the economy begins its recovery. IT

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