The GSM Association (GSMA) held its Mobile Innovation Marketplace — Americas event in Atlanta, GA this past week. On June 3, 2008, Microsoft announced the Connected Services Accelerator Program, a series of projects designed to incubate, and ultimately commercialize, new types of consumer, business and mobile services through collaboration with independent software vendors (ISVs), developers and operators. Microsoft will collaborate with SingTel on the program’s first project, the Mobile Connected Services Accelerator. All Accelerator projects will utilize Microsoft Connected Services Sandbox as the platform for the creation, development and testing of these innovative new services.
You can see the Microsoft / SingTel Press Release here:
http://home.singtel.com/news_centre/news_releases/2008_06_03.asp
This work will also leverage the TM Forum's Service Syndication Catalyst Project as well as that of the Service Delivery Framework (SDF) workgroup. The Microsoft Connected Services Framework is aligned with the TM Forum's emerging recommendations for an SDF. This joint project with SingTel will enable Microsoft and SingTel to take the concepts and designs to the level of detail, both technically and commercially.
I have written here before that Microsoft is a service provider as well as a software vendor. Microsoft has an increasingly vested interest in addressing the difficulties of managing a large array of services both across Microsoft and out to the channels as Managed Service Syndications.
As part of this process, Microsoft has ramped up its involvement with the TM Forum (www.tmforum.org). Four the past year Microsoft has been working on a number of Proof of Concepts or "Catalyst" projects in conjunction with other service providers, partners, and TM Forum members. Hear is a brief summary of what will be on display at Management World in Nice, France in May 2008.
1. Building Marketplaces with Service Syndication
a. Objective: To test and apply the concepts of the Service Delivery Framework workgroup to create the marketplace for the next generation of services consisting service providers participation from across all industries and owners of various resources that can be commercialized as valuable services for customers under various business models.
b. Sponsors: BT, Microsoft, Telefonica
c. Participants: Accenture, CA, Iptiva, Netcracker, Telefonica,Tribold
2. Content Encounter (Phase II)
a. Objective: Content Encounter is a TM Forum Business Solution designed to make seamless, communications, information and entertainment services a reality. It is a solution approach that addresses the full content lifecycle from creation through to consumption tailored to a personal profile that delivers a consistent experience across multiple devices including IPTV, the PC, and Windows Mobile.
b. Sponsors: at&t, BT, China Unicom, Chunghwa Telecom
c. Participants: Alcatel-Lucent, Amdocs, CallGenie, Cognizant, eBIZ.mobility, IBM, Microsoft, Motorola, Oracle/BEA, Subex, Telcordia, Westwood One, BT Mobile, CDNetworks, HP, and Paramount.
3. Seamless OSS / BSS for IMS Services (Phase II)
a. Objective: Give more rich IMS services experience with an end to end solution of OSS/BSS for IMS services including service creation, delivering, services management, subscribing and activation, billing & charging validating the TMF NGOSS frameworks.
b. Sponsor: China Unicom
c. Participants: Amdocs, Microsoft, ZTE
4. One Stop Fixed Mobile Convergence Service
a. Objective: To help Chunghwa to be able to roll out a wide variety of new & compelling mobile services in a cost-effective way.
b. Sponsor: Chunghwa Telecom (CHT)
c. Participants: Amdocs, Microsoft, NSN Taiwan, TATA Consulting Services (TCS), Tech Mahindra, Telus Telecom
To read more about the upcoming event please visit:
http://www.tmforum.org/events/ManagementWorld2008/4807/home.html
To read more about the Catalyst Programs please visit:
http://www.tmforum.org/ManagementWorld2008/CatalystShowcase/5341/Home.html
An important enabler of the Microsoft Software + Services (S+S) strategy are Office Business Applications (OBA). They are made possible by key platform capabilities, called OBA Services, in the 2007 Microsoft Office system. These consist of: workflow, search, the Business Data Catalog, a new, extensible user interface, Microsoft Office Open XML Formats, and the Web Site and Security Framework. Read about OBA at: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/FX102204261033.aspx
The International Standards Organization announced today that "ISO/IEC DIS 29500 has received the necessary number of votes for approval as an ISO/IEC International Standard.
Approval required at least 2/3 (i.e. 66.66 %) of the votes cast by national bodies participating in the joint technical committee ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology, to be positive; and no more than 1/4 (i.e. 25 %) of the total number of ISO/IEC national body votes cast to be negative. These criteria have now been met with 75 % of the JTC 1 participating member votes cast positive and 14 % of the total of national member body votes cast negative."
You can read the press release at: http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1123 By the June timeframe, the service provider community should be able to continue move forward with their plans for Service Delivery Frameworks and Services Marketplaces confident in the knowledge this important standards issue has been resolved.
Software + Services (S+S) is a major initiative at Microsoft. S+S, as opposed to the more limited concept of SaaS, is all about combinations of local software and remote services interacting with one another. Local software leveraging remote services can create a better overall experience than either are able by themselves. The S+S architecture brings together the best of both worlds, maximizing choice, flexibility and capabilities.
The MSDN web site has added a new section to the MSDN Architecture Center devoted to Software + Services Architecture.
Check it out.
Recently I seem to have been involved in multiple ongoing discussions that revolve around the impact of greater than 100 Megabits per second wireless data service (via 4G / Long Term Evolution (LTE)) and the apparently increasing ease of creating rich digital media experiences. All of sudden there is talk about service providers and even wireless carriers becoming a commodity. Anybody can do it, including Google. On the infrastructure side, some like Shelly Palmer, Managing Director of Advanced Media Ventures Group LLC in a recent blog entry (http://www.shellypalmermedia.com/category/blog/) wonder whether “two pre-teens [could] use WordPress, OpenSocial and a few free third party plug-ins to create [a better than a $2 million development effort] media experience … for pizza money?” Focused on the media delivery application layer she comments: ”It is about to become extremely inexpensive to create full-featured, consumer-oriented digital media experiences…”
I am having a case of déjà vu. I am not quite so sure the end-to-end media experience is going to be that simple. We need to be cautious of oversimplifying the apparent role of the service provider and the infrastructure provider. In these new service mash-ups, we could have a wireless broadband access network, an associated service provider’s core transport, 3rd party enterprise networks, data centers with syndicated services on application servers, and maybe, a 2nd and 3rd service provider’s wireless broadband access network(s) plus their associated core transport networks. All of this will have to work together in harmony to deliver an excellent end-to-end digital user’s experience to an ever increasing standard.
There is a lot of work that needs to be done to get just the currently available services to work properly across all these disparate network pieces. The demands that these newer < 20-30 Meg per second services are going to impose on the network are incredible. Just the economics, engineering, and management of over-subscription of the core verses the edge is mindboggling. Trying to manage all of this across multiple provider networks and infrastructures is not really possible today except by brute force over-engineering – not a feasible long term strategy.
Content providers should not trivialize this and just assume the bandwidth with needed Quality of Service (QoS) they need to satisfy their customers are just going to be there. Far from being in danger of being relegated to just a “dumb pipe”, service providers are in a strong position going forward. Equally significant will be the Infrastructure providers. They also have a critical role to play defining services that include in their service descriptions technical, commercial, fault/performance, and QoS characteristics that enable such services to be readily syndicated, aggregated by other service providers, and subsequently consumed. For real revenue to be recorded, Business Support Systems, Operations Support Systems, Service Delivery Frameworks are going to have to work effectively with conventional as well as SaaS delivery and advertising generated revenue models.
Content providers are going to come under pressure to deliver certain levels of QoS and they are going to learn that both the infrastructure player and the service providers provide critical services necessary to actually offering and managing end-to-end service delivery in true commercial environment be it on a per service, per transaction, and/or per subscriber basis.
Last week, the TeleManagement Forum (www.tmforum.org) held its Management World Americas event in Dallas, TX. Walking through the exhibit areas and reviewing the two Catalyst Projects that Microsoft contributed to, I began to think about how Microsoft has evolved into a Service Provider over the past several years.
Microsoft has been viewed by this industry as primarily a software or platform vendor. Microsoft still fulfills that role of course. But two other roles have begun to emerge: that of Network Equipment Provider (NEP) such as the IPTV Mediaroom product, and that of a Service Provider. Microsoft has hundreds of millions of subscribers and users of MSN, Live.com, and its Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings. Complementing this is an entire line of business around search and advertising. Much like a tradition telco, Microsoft has had to put into place common processes for Service Creation, Provisioning, Service Assurance, and Billing.
To support the delivery of services to its channel partners via a process known as service syndication, Microsoft is moving towards its own version of a Service Delivery Framework or SDF. Some from Microsoft attending the Dallas event were there to see how they could leverage TMF architectural approaches such as NGOSS and the SDF working group in their own work to support Microsoft Software plus Services (S+S) strategy.
When we consider the issue from a telco perspective and apply some of the concepts of NGOSS and SDF to the problem, we can visualize a Service Delivery Platform built around the Microsoft Connected Services Framework (CSF) product quite easily. The implementation can leverage NGOSS, the SID, and MTOSI interfaces. However, two problems come to focus: First, much of the TMF's focus is still Next Generation Network (NGN) centric. This does not really apply to the Microsoft as a service provider use case. Microsoft has a network but it does not have a telco NGN / IMS type of network. Second, since Microsoft services transcend multiple industries, a TMF standard approach that is too telco / NGN centric is not helpful when assembling services from both telco and non-telco domains.
To be really useful to the broader universe of service providers, including in particular the non-telco web services based providers, the recommended Service Delivery Framework architecture is going to have to be independent of the telco specific / NGN use case. A telco specific/ NGN / IMS SDF should be one possible specific implementation example of a SDF but, it cannot be the baseline or starting point of the SDF definition if it is to achieve significant adoption outside of the telecommunications industry.
In an article by Business Week on MSN, we can see a new era in "Bypass" taking shape.
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/Extra/WhatAGooglePhoneMightLookLike.aspx
The incumbent service providers are busy building out IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) infrastructures and associated service creation/service runtime environments whose main purpose appears to be to collect a toll for users that pass their way. However, Microsoft has been arguing for some time that the purpose of a Service Delivery Framework and a Service Delivery Platform ought to be to enable service providers to become a marketplace for hosting and exposing services that can be assembled rapidly into useful combinations. The Microsoft Connected Services Framework is explicitly for this purpose. CSF enables the abstraction of the service provider’s infrastructure from the service. CSF can also abstract revenue models from services. This enables the transition to an income model based on growing revenues by increasing the number of “listeners” (“users” in the new vernacular) and claiming increasing advertising rates.
U.S. service providers are leery of this approach. Their product managers are familar with having a business case associated with each new product. The idea of launching a product without any revenue directly attached to it is just too strange to contemplate.
Worse, since each new product must stand on its own, the IT systems necessary to manage each new product or service could never be more costly than the projected revenues for that one product. More efficient framework approaches are often not adopted resulting in literally thousands of OSS systems within the typical service provider and a legacy of high operating costs.
Many have thought that Google could not possibly buy spectrum and compete effectively against the large U.S. wireless carriers. It is just harder than it looks. However, leveraging "beleaguered Sprint" to provide infrastructure and domain expertise plus new technologies like WiMax could be just the combination needed to pull it off. This could dramatically disrupt the wireless industry.
I have spent most of my career involved in Telecommunications managing outside plant, inside plant, business and residential services, voice, data, and the people that figure it all out. Traditionally, Microsoft has made an important contribution to information worker productivity on the enterprise side, but it has not been greatly involved with the customer facing operations side of telecommunications. This is beginning to change.
During the time that service providers were wrestling with the implications of moving rapidly from the PSTN and SS7, through softswitches, network delayering, and towards IMS, an entire new world of services has emerged. Since the early 2000s, Microsoft has been introducing new technologies, new concepts for services, and new models for service delivery that leverage the concepts of Services Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Web Services. Microsoft Mediaroom, Windows Live, Office Live, Windows Mobile, Hosted Messaging & Collaboration are changing the very nature of “services”. Other market forces are challenging traditional business models and assumptions about the way services are expected to generate revenue.
The Microsoft Software + Services model and its potential for services providers requires new agility in the management of network resources, network services, and a new higher level services that need to be completely abstracted from the traditional BSS/OSS layers. The Microsoft platform is poised to play an increasing central role in the creation of these systems: the BSS, the OSS, and the way business processes are defined and assembled. Microsoft is also helping to redefine the meaning of Service Delivery Frameworks. These topics, and other miscellaneous items that may arise from time to time, will be the primary focus of this blog.
