Are Smart Devices/Apps Creating New Opportunities or loss?

An Era of Unpredictable Data Usage Trends – Addressing Monetization Challenges with Multi-dimensional Policy Approach Take an example of a typical user called Sonali. She’s eighteen-something, studies in college and spends 600 minutes everyday on iPhone. Her day starts on a Snooze alarm with the musical player, Last.fm playing in the background while she gets ready for class. While driving, she keeps checking Google Maps along with Facebook and Twitter apps. During the day, she frequently takes pictures on Instagram and publishes it on social media and uses Google Voice to catch up with her buddies. Playing Angry Birds and Real Racing 2 summarizes up her daily routine. Notice the clear absence of the operator’s mentioning in the daily ecosystem of your average user! According to a Gartner forecast, worldwide mobile app store revenues will triple from $5.2 billion in 2010 to $15 billion in 2011, and keep growing to a remarkable $58 billion by 2014. Apple developers currently dominate this market with other big players like Android Market, Nokia’s Ovi Store, RIM’s App World, Microsoft Marketplace and Samsung Apps fast catching up on the gravy train. These apps are generally treated a missed opportunity for operators but are simultaneously notorious for consuming huge bandwidth and slowing down networks. A Nokia Siemens NSS report recently suggested that an Android-based device playing Angry Birds generated 2422 signals in one hour of play! [1] In fact a South-Korean player called KT recently suffered network outage where a third-party app took the voice-call success rate down to 10 percent because the signaling traffic generated by the app simply overloaded its network.[2] If you’re an operator, you can clearly see that if you don’t take action now, you will be forced to become a transport mechanism for the other players. Won’t it be better for you if you can achieve active cooperation through vertical integration of OTT providers, building a 2-sided revenue model. For example, you may consider jointly introducing dedicated QoS service to subscribers for an Application like Youtube while the OTT providers’ advertisers enjoy a better guaranteed viewership leading to higher ad revenues. So, where does the problem lie? Operators are constantly experiencing pressure to reduce their time-to-market for latest solutions. Currently, there is no policy solution in the market that can consider actual usage scenarios and combine it with Charging, Billing etc. to enable monetization plans – quickly and effectively. This is where Elitecore’s Multi-dimensional approach to Policy makes a difference. It goes beyond its one-dimensional policy role to integrate several multi-dimensional components including charging, billing, BI/CEA and Loyalty systems. It takes into account the growing role of IT and marketing teams in investment decisions related to new product portfolios and value-added services. It enables a profitable and innovative platform for CSP by being able to mine smart intelligence from all critical systems viz., Billing, Charging, Customer Experience Management and even BI Apart from adding greater depth to monetizing subscribers, NetVertex also gives plenty of service optimization and personalization opportunities which we shall take up in another blog post. [1] http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=208870 [2] http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=208775