Tag: Voice

Dealing with the ‘Disruptors’: Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft/Skype and Amazon (Updated Extract)

Executive Summary (Extract)

This report analyses the strategies behind the success of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Skype, before going on to consider the key risks they face and how telcos and their partners should deal with these highly-disruptive Internet giants.

As the global economy increasingly goes digital, these five companies are using the Internet to create global brands with much broader followings than those of the traditional telecoms elite, such as Vodafone, AT&T and Nokia. However, the five have markedly different business models that offer important insights into how to create world-beating companies in the digital economy:

  • Amazon: Amazon’s business-to-business Marketplace and Cloud offerings are text-book examples of how to repurpose assets and infrastructure developed to serve consumers to open up new upstream markets. As the digital economy goes mobile, Amazon’s highly-efficient two-sided commerce platform is enabling it to compete effectively with rivals that control the leading smartphone and tablet platforms – Apple and Google.
  • Apple: Apple has demonstrated that, with enough vision and staying power, an individual company can single-handedly build an entire ecosystem. By combining intuitive and very desirable products, with a highly-standardised platform for software developers, Apple has managed to create an overall customer experience that is significantly better than that offered by more open ecosystems. But Apple’s strategy depends heavily on it continuing to produce the very best devices on the market, which will be difficult to sustain over the long-term.
  • Facebook: A compelling example of how to build a business on network effects. It took Facebook four years of hard work to reach a tipping point of 100 million users, but the social networking service has been growing easily and rapidly ever since. Facebook has the potential to attract 1.4 billion users worldwide, but only if it continues to sidestep rising privacy concerns, consumer fatigue or a sudden shift to a more fashionable service.
  • Google: The search giant’s virtuous circle keeps on spinning to great effect – Google develops scores of free, and often-compelling, Internet services, software platforms and apps, which attract consumers and advertisers, enabling it to create yet more free services. But Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility risks destabilising the Android ecosystem on which a big chunk of its future growth depends.
  • Skype: Like Facebook and Google, Skype sought users first and revenues second. By creating a low-cost, yet feature-rich, product, Skype has attracted more than 660 million users and created sufficient strategic value to persuade Microsoft to hand over $8.5bn. Skype’s share of telephony traffic is rising inexorably, but Google and Apple may go to great lengths to prevent a Microsoft asset gaining a dominant position in peer-to-peer communications.

The strategic challenge

There is a clear and growing risk that consumers’ fixation on the products and services provided by the five leading disruptors could leave telcos providing commoditised connectivity and struggling to make a respectable return on their massive investment in network infrastructure and spectrum.

In developed countries, telcos’ longstanding cash-cows – mobile voice calls and SMS – are already being undermined by Internet-based alternatives offered by Skype, Google, Facebook and others. Competition from these services could see telcos lose as much as one third of their messaging and voice revenues within five years (see Figure 1) based on projections from our global survey, carried out in September 2011.

Figure 1 – The potential combined impact of the disruptors on telcos’ core services

Impact of Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft/Skype, Amaxon on telco services

Source: Telco 2.0 online survey, September 2011, 301 respondents

Moreover, most individual telcos lack the scale and the software savvy to compete effectively in other key emerging mobile Internet segments, such as local search, location-based services, digital content, apps distribution/retailing and social-networking.

The challenge for telecoms and media companies is to figure out how to deal with the Internet giants in a strategic manner that both protects their core revenues and enables them to expand into new markets. Realistically, that means a complex, and sometimes nuanced, co-opetition strategy, which we characterise as the “Great Game”.

In Figure 3 below, we’ve mapped the players’ roles and objectives against the markets they operate in, giving an indication of the potential market revenue at stake, and telcos’ generic strategies.

Figure 3- The Great Game – Positions, Roles and Strategies

The Great Game - Telcos, Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Skype/Microsoft

Our in-depth analysis, presented in this report, describes the ‘Great Game’ and the strategies that we recommend telcos and others can adopt in summary and in detail. [END OF FIRST EXTRACT]

Report contents

  • Executive Summary [5 pages – including partial extract above]
  • Key Recommendations for telcos and others [20 pages]
  • Introduction [10 pages – including further extract below]


The report then contains c.50 page sections with detailed analysis of objectives, business model, strategy, and options for co-opetition for:

  • Google
  • Apple
  • Facebook
  • Microsoft/Skype
  • Amazon

Followed by:

  • Conclusions and recommendations [10 pages]
  • Index

The report includes 124 charts and tables.

The rest of this page comprises an extract from the report’s introduction, covering the ‘new world order’, investor views, the impact of disruptors on telcos, and how telcos are currently fighting back (including pricing, RCS and WAC), and further details of the report’s contents. 

 

Introduction

The new world order

The onward march of the Internet into daily life, aided and abetted by the phenomenal demand for smartphones since the launch of the first iPhone in 2007, has created a new world order in the telecoms, media and technology (TMT) industry.

Apple, Google and Facebook are making their way to the top of that order, pushing aside some of the world’s biggest telcos, equipment makers and media companies. This trio, together with Amazon and Skype (soon to be a unit of Microsoft), are fundamentally changing consumers’ behaviour and dismantling longstanding TMT value chains, while opening up new markets and building new ecosystems.

Supported by hundreds of thousands of software developers, Apple, Google and Facebook’s platforms are fuelling innovation in consumer and, increasingly, business services on both the fixed and mobile Internet. Amazon has set the benchmark for online retailing and cloud computing services, while Skype is reinventing telephony, using IP technology to provide compelling new functionality and features, as well as low-cost calls.

On their current trajectory, these five companies are set to suck much of the value out of the telecoms services market, substituting relatively expensive and traditional voice and messaging services with low-cost, feature-rich alternatives and leaving telcos simply providing data connectivity. At the same time, Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook have become major conduits for software applications, games, music and other digital content, rewriting the rules of engagement for the media industry.

In a Telco2.0 online survey of industry executives conducted in September 2011, respondents said they expect Apple, Google, Facebook and Skype together to have a major impact on telcos’ voice and messaging revenues in the next three to five years . Although these declines will be partially compensated for by rising revenues from mobile data services, the respondents in the survey anticipate that telcos will see a major rise in data carriage costs (see Figure 1 – The potential combined impact of the disruptors on telcos’ core services).

In essence, we consider Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Skype-Microsoft to be the most disruptive players in the TMT ecosystem right now and, to keep this report manageable, we have focused on these five giants. Still, we acknowledge that other companies, such as RIM, Twitter and Baidu, are also shaping consumers’ online behaviour and we will cover these players in more depth in future research.

The Internet is, of course, evolving rapidly and we fully expect new disruptors to emerge, taking advantage of the so-called Social, Local, Mobile (SoLoMo) forces, sweeping through the TMT landscape. At the same time, the big five will surely disrupt each other. Google is increasingly in head-to-head competition with Facebook, as well as Microsoft, in the online advertising market, while squaring up to Apple and Microsoft in the smartphone platform segment. In the digital entertainment space, Amazon and Google are trying to challenge Apple’s supremacy, while also attacking the cloud services market.

Investor trust

Unlike telcos, the disruptors are generally growing quickly and are under little, or no, pressure from shareholders to pay dividends. That means they can accumulate large war chests and reinvest their profits in new staff, R&D, more data centres and acquisitions without any major constraints. Investors’ confidence and trust enables the disruptors to spend money freely, keep innovating and outflank dividend-paying telcos, media companies and telecoms equipment suppliers.

By contrast, investors generally don’t expect telcos to reinvest all their profits in their businesses, as they don’t believe telcos can earn a sufficiently high return on capital. Figure 16 shows the dividend yields of the leading telcos (marked in blue). Of the disruptors, only Microsoft (marked in green) pays a dividend to shareholders.

Figure 16: Investors expect dividends, not growth, from telcos

Figure 1 Chart Google Apple Facebook Microsoft Skype Amazon Sep 2011 Telco 2.0

Source: Google Finance 2/9/2011

The top telcos’ turnover and net income is comparable, or superior, to that of the leading disruptors, but this isn’t reflected in their respective market capitalisations. AT&T’s turnover is approximately four times that of Google and its net income twice as great, yet their market cap is similar. Even accounting for their different capital structures, investors clearly expect Google to grow much faster than AT&T and syphon off more of the value in the TMT sector.

More broadly, the disparity in the market value between the leading disruptors and the leading telcos’ market capitalisations suggest that investors expect Apple, Microsoft and Google’s revenues and profits to keep rising, while they believe telcos’ will be stable or go into decline. Figure 17 shows how the market capitalisation of the disruptors (marked in green) compares with that of the most valuable telcos (marked in blue) at the beginning of September 2011.

Figure 17: Investors value the disruptors highly

Figure 2 Chart Google Apple Facebook Microsoft Skype Amazon Market Capitalisation Sep 2011 Telco 2.0

Source: Google Finance 2/9/2011 (Facebook valued at Facebook $66bn based on IPG sale in August 2011)

Impact of disruptors on telcos

It has taken longer than many commentators expected, but Internet-based messaging and social networking services are finally eroding telcos’ SMS revenues in developed markets. KPN, for example, has admitted that smartphones, equipped with data communications apps (and Whatsapp in particular), are impacting its voice and SMS revenues in its consumer wireless business in its home market of The Netherlands (see Figure 18). Reporting its Q2 2011 results, KPN said that changing consumer behaviour cut its consumer wireless service revenues in Holland by 2% year-on-year.

Figure 18: KPN reveals falling SMS usage

Figure 3 Chart Google Apple Facebook Microsoft Skype Amazon KPN Trends Sep 2011 Telco 2.0

Source: KPN Q2 results

In the second quarter, Vodafone also reported a fall in messaging revenue in Spain and southern Africa, while Orange saw its average revenue per user from data and SMS services fall in Poland.

How telcos are fighting back

Big bundles

Carefully-designed bundles are the most common tactic telcos are using to try and protect their voice and messaging business. Most postpaid monthly contracts now come with hundreds of SMS messages and voice minutes, along with a limited volume of data, bundled into the overall tariff package. This mix encourages consumers to keep using the telcos’ voice and SMS services, which they are paying for anyway, rather than having Skype or another VOIP service soak up their precious data allowance.

To further deter usage of VOIP services, KPN and some other telcos are also creating tiered data tariffs offering different throughput speeds. The lower-priced tariffs tend to have slow uplink speeds, making them unsuitable for VOIP (see Figure 19 below). If consumers want to use VOIP, they will need to purchase a higher-priced data tariff, earning the telco back the lost voice revenue.

Figure 19: How KPN is trying to defend its revenues

Figure 4 Chart Google Apple Facebook Microsoft Skype Amazon KPN Defence Sep 2011 Telco 2.0

Source: KPN’s Q2 results presentation

Of course, such tactics can be undermined by competition – if one mobile operator in a market begins offering generous data-only tariffs, consumers may well gravitate towards that operator, forcing the others to adjust their tariff plans.

Moreover, bundling voice, SMS and data will generally only work for contract customers. Prepaid customers, who only want to pay for what they are use, are naturally charged for each minute of calls they make and each message they send. These customers, therefore, have a stronger financial incentive to find a free WiFi network and use that to send messages via Facebook or make calls via Skype.

The Rich Communications Suite (RCS)

To fend off the threat posed by Skype, Facebook, Google and Apple’s multimedia communications services, telcos are also trying to improve their own voice and messaging offerings. Overseen by mobile operator trade association the GSMA, the Rich Communications Suite is a set of standards and protocols designed to enable mobile phones to exchange presence information, instant messages, live video footage and files across any mobile network.

In an echo of social networks, the GSMA says RCS will enable consumers to create their own personal community and share content in real time using their mobile device.

From a technical perspective, RCS uses the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to manage presence information and relay real-time information to the consumer about which service features they can use with a specific contact. The actual RCS services are carried over an IP-Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), which telcos are using to support a shift to all-IP fixed and mobile networks.

Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefonica and Vodafone have publically committed to deploy RCS services, indicating that the concept has momentum in Europe, in particular. The GSMA says that interoperable RCS services will initially be launched by these operators in Spain, Germany, France and Italy in late 2011 and 2012. [NB We’ll be discussing RCSe with some of the operators at our EMEA event in London in November 2011.]

In theory, at least, RCS will have some advantages over many of the communications services offered by the disruptors. Firstly, it will be interoperable across networks, so you’ll be able to reach people using different service providers. Secondly, the GSMA says RCS service features will be automatically available on mobile devices from late 2011 without the need to download and install software or create an account (by contrast, Apple’s iMessage service, for example, will only be installed on Apple devices).

But questions remain over whether RCS devices will arrive in commercial quantities fast enough, whether RCS services will be priced in an attractive way and will be packaged and marketed effectively. Moreover, it isn’t yet clear whether IMS will be able to handle the huge signalling load that would arise from widespread usage of RCS.

Internet messaging protocols, such as XMPP, require the data channel to remain active continuously. Tearing down and reconnecting generates lots of signalling traffic, but the alternative – maintaining a packet data session – will quickly drain the device’s battery.
By 2012, Facebook and Skype may be even more entrenched than they are today and their fans may see no need to use telcos’ RCS services.

Competing head-on

Some of the largest mobile operators have tried, and mostly failed, to take on the disruptors at their own game. Vodafone 360, for example, was Vodafone’s much-promoted, but ultimately, unsuccessful €500 million attempt to insert itself between its customers and social networking and messaging services from the likes of Facebook, Windows Live, Google and Twitter.

As well as aggregating contacts and feeds from several social networks, Vodafone 360 also served as a gateway to the telco’s app and music store. But most Vodafone customers didn’t appear to see the need to have an aggregator sit between them and their Facebook feed. During 2011, the service was stripped back to be just the app and music store. In essence, Vodafone 360 didn’t add enough value to what the disruptors are already offering. We understand, from discussions with executives at Vodafone, that the service is now being mothballed.

A small number of large telcos, mostly in emerging markets where smartphones are not yet commonplace, have successfully built up a portfolio of value-added consumer services that go far beyond voice and messaging. One of the best examples is China Mobile, which claims more than 82 million users for its Fetion instant messaging service, for example (see Figure 20 – China Mobile’s Internet Services).

Figure 20 – China Mobile’s Internet Services

China Mobile Services, Google, Apple, Facebook Report, Telco 2.0

Source: China Mobile’s Q2 2011 results

However, it remains to be seen whether China Mobile will be able to continue to attract so many customers for its (mostly paid-for) Internet services once smartphones with full web access go mass-market in China, making it easier for consumers to access third-parties’ services, such as the popular QQ social network.

Some telcos have tried to compete with the disruptors by buying innovative start-ups. A good example is Telefonica’s acquisition of VOIP provider Jajah for US$207 million in January 2010. Telefonica has since used Jajah’s systems and expertise to launch low-cost international calling services in competition with Skype and companies offering calling cards. Telefonica expects Jajah’s products to generate $280 million of revenue in 2011, primarily from low-cost international calls offered by its German and UK mobile businesses, according to a report in the FT.

The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC)

Concerned about their growing dependence on the leading smartphone platforms, such as Android and Apple’s iOS, many of the world’s leading telcos have banded together to form the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC).

WAC’s goal is to create a platform developers can use to create apps that will run across different device operating systems, while tapping the capabilities of telcos’ networks and messaging and billing systems.

At the Mobile World Congress in February 2011, WAC said that China Mobile, MTS, Orange, Smart, Telefónica, Telenor, Verizon and Vodafone are “connected to the WAC platform”, while adding that Samsung and LG will ensure “that all devices produced by the two companies that are capable of supporting the WAC runtime will do so.”

It also announced the availability of the WAC 2.0 specification, which supports HTML5 web applications, while WAC 3.0, which is designed to enable developers to tap network assets, such as in-app billing and user authentication, is scheduled to be available in September 2011.

Ericsson, the leading supplier of mobile networks, is a particularly active supporter of WAC, which also counts leading Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, LG Electronics, Qualcomm, Research in Motion, Samsung and ZTE, among its members.

In theory, at least, apps developers should also throw their weight behind WAC, which promises the so far unrealised dream of “write once, run anywhere.” But, in reality, games developers, in particular, will probably still want to build specific apps for specific platforms, to give their software a performance and functionality edge over rivals.

Still, the ultimate success or failure of WAC will likely depend on how enthusiastically Apple and Google, in particular, embrace HTML5 and actively support it in their respective smartphone platforms. We discuss this question further in the Apple and Google chapters of this report.

Summarising current telcos’ response to disruptors

 

Telcos, and their close allies in the equipment market, are clearly alert to the threat posed by the major disruptors, but they have yet to develop a comprehensive game plan that will enable them to protect their voice and messaging revenue, while expanding into new markets.

Collective activities, such as RCS and WAC, are certainly necessary and worthwhile, but are not enough. Telcos, and companies across the broader TMT ecosystem, need to also adapt their individual strategies to the rise of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Skype-Microsoft. This report is designed to help them do that.

[END OF EXTRACT]

 

Your Text is on Fire: OTT’s to burn 40% SMS revenue by 2015

Introduction

Background

STL Partners’ New Digital Economics Executive Brainstorm EMEA, took place from 8-10 November in London, and brought together 5 events in 1 venue, co-locating the Telco 2.0, M-Commerce, 2.0 Cloud 2.0, M2M 2.0 and Digital Entertainment 2.0 brainstorms, using a unique and widely acclaimed interactive format called ‘Mindshare’ to help clarify the important ‘next steps’ for both individual companies and industries.

Building on output from previous brainstorms and new market research and analysis from STL Partners, it focuses on new growth opportunities at the intersection of Telecoms, Media and Technology. The keynote Strategy Report Dealing with the ‘Disruptors’: Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft/Skype and Amazon was launched at the brainstorm, and a similar agenda will be discussed at the New Digital Economics – APAC Brainstorm, Accelerating New Growth Opportunities in Telecoms, Media and Tech, 30 November – 1 December, Capella Resort, Singapore.

This note provides an extract of key take-outs and votes on the ‘Voice and Messaging 2.0’ sessions from the EMEA brainstorm for Telco 2.0 readers and subscribers.

Brainstorm participants will also receive detailed write-ups and analysis from the event sessions they registered for, and we will be using the input from all the sessions of the EMEA, Americas and APAC brainstorms as input to new analysis across all of the topics covered in the coming months.

The telco business model challenge is getting acute in EMEA

Your text platform is on fire

Telco SMS revenue will decline on average by around 40% across the Europe and Middle East region by 2015 according to the senior execs at this month’s Telco 2.0 brainstorm in London. The main cause is competitive pressure from so-called ‘Over-The-Top’ (OTT) alternatives (Facebook, Skype, Google, BBM, etc).

Figure 1 – Predicted decline of mobile telco messaging revenues

EMEA 2011 Messaging Decline Chart 40% Telco 2.0

 

The cause of this predicted decline was unambiguous – the impact of so-called Over The Top (OTT) players’ messaging services like iMessage, BlackBerry Messenger, Whatsapp, Skype and Facebook.

Figure 2 – Causes of predicted mobile messaging decline

EMEA 2011 Messaging Decline Chart OTT Causes Telco 2.0

This is similar to the impact of the new services that we saw predicted in the survey conducted across 300 senior execs in the research for our latest report Dealing with the ‘Disruptors’: Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft/Skype and Amazon.

Indeed, KPN and some Middle-Eastern operators have reported even higher percentage declines among users of certain devices and applications.

The Voice platform is smoking too

While not as pressing as the impact on Messaging revenues, delegates had a pessimistic view of the prospects for voice revenues.

Figure 3 – Predicted decline of mobile carrier voice revenues

EMEA 2011 Voice Decline Chart 20% Telco 2.0

The causes behind the voice declines were seen as somewhat broader, with competition and regulation taking up 56% compared to 16% for Messaging, although ‘Responding to price pressures from OTT alternatives’ was still the main choice with 44% of the vote.

Figure 4 – Causes of predicted mobile voice revenue decline

EMEA 2011 Voice Decline Chart 20% reasons Telco 2.0

All in all, it looks as if the pressures on voice and messaging revenues are beginning to bite as we originally predicted in our 2008 strategy report Lessons from Internet Communications Services – Skype, Facebook, and others: how Telcos can adapt and compete – although the options for adaptation and competition have narrowed somewhat due to the success of the so-called OTT players and the relative lack of action by telcos.

Who should telcos fear most?

Delegates did not have an entirely consistent view of the threats and opportunities presented by the OTT players as shown below.

Figure 5 – Who should telcos support / fear most in voice and messaging?

EMEA 2011 Voice and Messaging Decline Chart OTT Fears Telco 2.0

This is not entirely surprising given the relative attractions and perils presented in different scenarios as we describe in Dealing with the ‘Disruptors’: Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft/Skype and Amazon.

However, what is consistent for operators is that:

  • There is most to gain, in the short-term at least, in supporting Microsoft as a counterweight to Apple and Google;
  • RIM / Blackberry is perceived to have the least power – and also presents a opportunity as a counterweight to Apple and Google, albeit a weakened one;
  • Facebook is indeed a ‘double-edged sword’ – as a threat in terms of its potential to enter communications and an opportunity in driving data use;
  • Apple and Google are the established players with the most current power, and hence threat.

Will RCS-e help?

At the November 2011 EMEA Brainstorm, Cenk Serdar, Director, Data & Communications Service, Vodafone, and Rainer Deutschmann, SVP Core Telco Products, DTAG, carried out a live demonstration of RCS-e, the GSMA-backed future voice & messaging solution using IMS. Morten Sorby, EVP of Strategy & Regulatory Affairs, Telenor, and Andreas Bernstrom, CEO, Rebtel, joined the vibrant subsequent debate with the audience and Simon Torrance, CEO STL Partners.

The following is an anonymised top-level summary of the resulting discussions and the votes.

Getting to market

Instant messaging, video, and file-sharing are the key features in RCS-e, and are being introduced as a refined set compared to the original specifications in order to bring applications to market as quickly as possible. This refinement was lead by the E5 Group of top European operators.

The most important item on the future roadmap is service discovery. Beyond that, contacts transfer, location sharing, and multi-device operation are on the to-do list.

Interestingly, it seems that some of the RCS-e use cases focus on supporting enterprise applications such as trying to provide a platform for better CRM and person-to-organisation applications (for example, an enhanced helpdesk for a furniture company). This has consequences for the design of APIs and business relationships facing upstream towards enterprises and developers.

Arguments for success or failure

Arguments put forward at the Brainstorm for RCS-e included:

  • While Apple’s iMessenger and RIM’s BlackBerry Messenger are impressive products, they aren’t ubiquitious or necessarily deeply integrated with other applications in the way that SMS, MMS, and telephony could be.
  • RCS-e doesn’t require the user to download any new apps – the vast majority of users aren’t already using sophisticated communications tools like smartphones.
  • RCS-e ‘is a service for mass-market users’ rather than just smartphones.
  • Seven of the major device makers are committed, and the RCS-e standard is an open standard, so nothing prevents Apple iOS or RIM BBX developers implementing it independently.
  • RCS-e is building its global footprint. Spain, France, and Germany will launch sequentially between now and the first half of 2012. South Korea is committed to deploying RCS-e, and discussions were going on with other Asian countries.

Arguments put forward against RCS-e included:

  • Smartphones will change customer behaviour and catalyse change as more people get them. Horace Dediu, Associate Analyst at STL Partners, predicts that Western Europe and North America will go 100% smartphone within 18 months – so control will be further ceded to the Smartphone OS owners.
  • Cost is the main reason users move to Skype and similar services, and RCS-e doesn’t reduce costs.
  • The feature set just isn’t that convincing compared to what else can be done using VOIP services and other smartphone apps.

Delegates were split in their views on the likely efficacy of RCS.

Figure 6 – Will RCS-e offer an attractive alternative to OTT services?

EMEA 2011 RCS-e attractive vs OTT Telco 2.0 chart

Telco 2.0’s questions

The value of RCS-e is a subject that stirs strong opinions from across the industry, and it was intriguing to see the extreme polarity of delegate views at the Brainstorm.

Figure 7 – Is RCS-e ‘too little too late’?

EMEA 2011 RCS-e too little too late Telco 2.0 chart

Telco 2.0 will be conducting an in-depth analysis of Messaging and Voice 2.0 strategies, including RCS-e and its prospects in coming months.

Our questions on RCS-e at this point are as follows.

How many Christmas 2012 handsets will have RCS-e?

An critical factor is whether the wave of cheap smartphones will support RCS-e and if so, whether they support it well or only half-heartedly. The great bulk of them will be Android devices, and therefore the key vendors will be HTC and Samsung.
HTC are signed up, but their device line-up is concentrated on the high end, and they are very much second to Samsung in terms of volume.

Samsung is shipping more Androids than any other vendor, and indeed more smartphones than any other vendor, and they have a portfolio of products from the Ace to the Galaxy S II rather than a single top-end hero product. A key question is to what extent across their handset range they will sign up to RCS-e.

Are the features really convincing?

It is notoriously difficult to accurately predict the appeal of features in advance of consumer trials. However, a challenge for operators will be that, unlike Apple, they will have limited control of the design and implementation of the end-to-end customer experience.
How quickly can RCS-e evolve?

An important issue regarding services “embedded” in the core network or the device operating system is that they are unlikely to get upgrades anywhere near as quickly as either standalone applications or Web services. Operators tend to be slow to push out OTA upgrades to device OS, even after the manufacturers release them, and software iterations in the core network are taken slowly for very good reasons. App developers and Web 2.0 players tend to have much faster development cycles, so in terms of both user experience design control and release iteration operators are at a disadvantage.

What is RCS-e realistically intended to achieve now?

Opinions vary on what RCS-e is meant to achieve for operators, though few people we’ve spoken to in private recently believe that RCS-e is a ‘silver-bullet’ to combat so-called ‘OTT’ revenue erosion. Indeed, there appears to be a growing minority who appear to have ‘given up’ on voice and messaging revenues.

A more tenable position perhaps is that RCS-e may help a little, and that extending the life of the Messaging and Voice revenue streams by only a few months would justify the business case. One argument we’ve heard is that RCS-e is about enhancing and protecting the telco services bundle of minutes, texts, and data.

In a wider sense, it is a move by operators to provide something new to consumers, and it may at least be a small step to revitalise their relevance to consumers. In our view, it is far from the only strategy that operators should explore.

Content

  • What else can be done?
  • A new strategy framework for Messaging and Voice 2.0 Strategies
  • Developing alternative sources of value

 

  • Figure 1 – Predicted decline of mobile telco messaging revenues
  • Figure 2 – Causes of predicted mobile messaging decline
  • Figure 3 – Predicted decline of mobile carrier voice revenues
  • Figure 4 – Causes of predicted mobile voice revenue decline
  • Figure 5 – Who should telcos support / fear most in voice and messaging?
  • Figure 6 – Will RCS-e offer an attractive alternative to OTT services?
  • Figure 7 – Is RCS-e ‘too little too late’?
  • Figure 8 – Strategic Messaging and Voice options for operators

 

Voice 2.0: Strategic Threats and Opportunities

Voice & Messaging 2.0: Strategic Threats and Opportunities,
Presentation by Phil Laidler, Director, Consulting, STL Partners.
Which of the disruptors – Apple, Facebook, Google, Skype – is the
biggest menace? Presented at EMEA Brainstorm, November 2011.		 Strategic options for telcos - resisting the disruptors in voice

Download presentation here.

Links here for more on New Digital Economics brainstorms and Voice 2.0 research, or call +44 (0) 207 247 5003.

Example slide from the presentation:

Mobile Standards Processes: Do they inhibit business model innovation?

(This is a modified version of a post first published by Dean Bubley on his Disruptive Wireless blog)

An important area for Telco 2.0 strategists to consider is the way that technical standards are created in the communications industry, and the direct and indirect impact this has on future business models.

Either by deliberate intent by “traditionalists”, or accidental inertia, standards often tend to entrench Telco 1.0 thinking and processes. Going forward, it will be important to influence the way standards (and requirements) are developed, in order to ensure that business model innovation is not “frozen” out of future technlogical deployments.

Attendance at the recent LTE Summit in Amsterdam stimulated this note, as various presentations and offline discussions highlighted the way that standards bodies operate (notably 3GPP).  Various examples showed risks that could delay ecosystem development, entrenching legacy business models for operators and others.

This is not necessarily intentional, as many standards groups are staffed by engineering-type people, who often try and avoid the whole issue of commercial models. This is either because they have limited understanding of that side of the industry, or limited time – or perhaps are worried about regulatory and anti-trust implications. But having said that, there is also a huge amount of politics involved as well, ultimately driven by commercial concerns.

Often, this is particularly driven by vendor-centric vested interests, looking to promote inhouse specialisms and protect future revenue streams, rather than operator-based concerns. Where they are operator-based, they tend to reflect “old-school” views from legacy silo business units, rather than the newer “2.0” thinking which is evolving in corporate strategy departments.

The problems arise because certain aspects of technical architecture can act as limiting factors in a market context. Physical SIM cards, for example, need to be distributed physically. Which means that a customer has to go physically to a store, or have them delivered via the post. So what seems like a basic technology-led decision can actually mitigate against particular business models – for instance, ad-hoc usage of mobile networks – by adding in “latency” of hours or days to a process of sign-up for the customer. In this example, there is also an implicit requirement for the distribution of the SIMs, as well as associated production and management costs.

Alternatively, dependencies between otherwise separate sub-systems can cause huge brittleness overall. LTE is being optimised for use with IMS-based core networks and applications. But not all operators want to deploy IMS, even if (in theory) they want LTE – again, restricting business model choices or forcing them towards what is now a non-optimised radio technology. It seems as though 3GPP is trying to use a popular technology (LTE) as a means to crowbar an unpopular one (IMS) into broader adoption.

A specific knock-on impact of this has been the very slow definition of a voice and SMS service for LTE mobile networks – the IMS-based standard called MMtel has been criticised for three years and has achieved almost zero market traction. This now threatens to delay overall deployment of LTE networks – which ironically may mean that vendor politicking and intransigence in the standards processes will ultimately prove counter-productive. It has already drawn pragmatists to work on a non-standard voice-over-LTE technology called VoLGA.

A parallel set of issues are seen in the insistence of a lot of mobile operators to only view each other as peers, through the GSMA club, and various of its standards initiatives like IPX. This reinforces the notion that alternative communications service providers like Skype or FaceBook are *not* peers, but instead deadly enemies, pilloried as “over the top players”. For some operators that competitive stance may be valid, but for others they might be critical partners or even (whisper it) in a dominant role, for which the MNO is a junior part of the ecosystem.

Freezing old-fashioned assumptions into standards and architectures, often without even identifying that those assumptions exist is a recipe for disaster. Numerous other standards processes, such as RCS (Rich Communications Suite) also seem to perpetuate 1.0 models – essentially next-gen walled gardens.

This isn’t to say that standards are bad – but just that there is often no mechanism by which seemingly-sensible technology decisions are double-checked against potential future business models. Having a cycle in which people ask questions like “Will this work with prepay?” or “What’s the wholesale model?” or “What happens if 3 people want to share one ‘account'” and so forth, would avoid many of these mistakes. You can never account for all eventualities, but you can certainly test for flexbility against quite a range.

Again regarding the LTE event, it is notable that there was not a single mention of the word “MVNO” during the whole conference. Nobody has thought what an LTE-based MVNO might look like – or whether there might be cool features which could enable such an provider to provide more valuable services – and generate more revenue for the host MNO. One panel of luminaries returned blank stares when asked about implementing open APIs on the radio network, to make it “programmable” for developers or partners. It seems likely that there won’t be latency-optimised virtual mobile networks for gaming, any time soon.

Many speakers appeared to view the only mobile broadband business models as traditional contract and prepay mechanisms – there was no talk of sponsored or third-party paid access. No consideration of the importance of Telco 2.0 strategies. No discussion about where in the 4G architecture that a content delivery network might interface, and so on.

One option for fixing this problem is via the other industry bodies that don’t set standards themselves, but which can consider use cases and business models a bit more deeply – NGMN, OMTP, Femto Forum and so forth. Many of these groups are pragmatic and much broader in vision than the purely technical standards groups.

Perhaps this is the level to bring in these commercial considerations, so that they can then “suggest” specifications for the standards bodies to work to. They could ask questions like “does this architecture make MVNOs easier or more difficult to create & run?” or “what could be done to the standard to enable richer wholesale propositions?”

So maybe documents which say things like “Future mobile networks MUST be able to support a variety of MVNOs of example types A, B and C” could force the standards groups to refocus their efforts.

In any case, the Telco 2.0 Initiative believes that the future success of business model innovation could be gated by well-meaning but inflexible standards. Strategists and C-level executives must ensure that their organisation’s participants in standards bodies are aligned in thinking with holistic, 2.0 view – and not just trying to protect historic silos against the forces of change.

Full Article: Voice telephony, death or glory?

At our November Telco 2.0 brainstorm, the second session concentrated on the business opportunity in the core voice and messaging business. Here we review the key messages, and explore some of the future business model scenarios.

Telcos have consistently abandoned their core product, and are ignoring new business models, whilst pursuing fools’ gold in media content. The timing of this discussion is rather apposite. Despite our belief in Vodafone’s long-term strength, they have just announced that their core voice business has stagnated:

The performance of the company’s European operations suffered from the tough economic climate with margins decreasing from 38.2% to 36.2% on revenues that were down 1.1% on an organic basis. The company blamed ongoing price pressure on core voice and messaging services.

As we said before, if you don’t improve your core product at all since launching digital networks, and assume two-sided Internet business models won’t have any effect on you, you get all you deserve. Please see our Voice & Messaging 2.0 report?]

Re-thinking dialling, voicemail and freephone for 2-sided markets

The lead-in to the session was by Chief Analyst of STL Partners, Martin Geddes. His thesis is a simple one: telcos have consistently abandoned their core product, and are ignoring new business models, whilst pursuing fools’ gold in media content. The old model — charging users for software services that have no marginal cost or barriers to entry — is dying. That doesn’t stop initiatives like Rich Communications Suite (RCS) from trying.


Martin Geddes, Chief Analyst, STL Partners

To illustrate future business models he gave three examples of how money could be made in future. Each of these focused on different aspects of the consumer to call centre interaction. As you may remember, customer care is one of the key B2B2C value-added services in a Telco 2.0 platform. [For full details, see our report The 2-Sided Telecoms Market Opportunity.]

The first of these was from a Canadian start-up we’ve profiled before, called Fonolo. It exquisitely demonstrates that the value is in integration of telephony and the Web, as well as moving from the call itself to the set-up of the interaction. We asked their CEO, Shai Berger, to tell us more in this video clip:


Shai Berger, CEO, Fonolo

Note that their current business model is a mixture of advertising and end-user premium fees. This is being positioned as a traditional consumer VAS, with a sprinkling of two-sided markets via advertising. The question, however, is who benefits more: the consumer, or the call centre? We think that it’s the latter, and the consumer is the price-sensitive side. The call centre wants the maximum rate of self-care, high customer satisfaction, and the web site offers the ability to do all kinds of enhanced multi-modal interactions that a 0-9*# keypad can’t do well. Even basic things like showing where you are in the queue, and a picture of the person you’re talking to, would make for a far better user experience.

Therefore in our two-sided market world, we’d get telcos to distribute and promote this tool (on their fixed, mobile and on-device portals). They would then sell these enhanced capabilities to call centres.

The second example Martin gave was around outbound calling from call centres. Today the typical experience is something like the following. The call centre operator has to wait for the phone to ring, finds it goes to voicemail (up to 80% of calls to business users go to voicemail), and then leaves a message asking the user to call back to complete the business process. By the time the user gets the message, the call centre may be closed. Or the user simply never responds. So you’re burning labour on leaving these messages, in a process that is both ineffective and inefficient. According to Oracle, customer service representatives making outbound calls typically spend 20-30 minutes per hour talking to customers. The rest is wasted.

A better experience would be simply to deposit a VoiceXML document directly into the user’s voicemail system. “The product you have requested is now in stock. Press one to have it shipped immediately, two to reschedule your delivery, three to cancel.��? The business process completes right their inside your voicemail system. And the telco collects and order of magnitude more revenue than they would get from a few cents of termination fee.

The third and final example was more futuristic, looking at how Paypal-like services could be brought from the Internet to telephony, taking out the errors, cost and fraud on today’s information and transactional exchanges to call centres.

These were just a few examples on how to re-imaging telephony to service the needs of call centres. There are many more such examples, and many more business processes to integrate. Telephony could easily become a growth engine again for telecoms, if only telcos would wake up to the new two-sided business model.

BT: From phone company to business communications platform

The next speaker was JP Rangaswami from BT. Excluding the (important) access line revenue, BT only makes a small fraction of its revenue from telephony. Nonetheless, it has embarked on a multi-billion pound programme to create the ultimate voice and communications platform with its 21CN network initiative. Under JP’s guidance, BT has also recently bought Ribbit, a platform that extends telephony integration to Web developers. Clearly BT understands there’s life in being a “phone company��? yet (as long as you’ve a two-sided business model, naturally).


JP Rangaswami, Managing Director, BT Design

What JP proposed is that voice is a very much a feature, not the product. Using a Dali image to emphasise the strangeness and difference of the world we find ourselves in, he told his story through the history of two other media: the printed word, and photography.

In both of these cases, we’ve seen a mass democratisation and de-centralisation of the technology. Printing presses were centralised, and printing became an industry unto itself. It was a tool of control. For a while, there was a central printing shop in every company to do reprographics. Now, we see a “Print this page��? icon on your screen, and the printing press under your desk can smudge some ink on paper fibre for you in a moment, at a cost low enough you don’t even think about it. “Print��?, therefore, has simply been embedded into every other application. Likewise, imaging has gone from an industry into a feature. You don’t need to go twice to the photo shop, once to drop off your films, and again to pick up your prints. “Upload image��? is a standard feature of many web applications. It’s two clicks to share one from your photostream.

The message is that the model is undergoing fundamental change, and voice is following the same trajectory. Calls will increasingly be launched from within Web applications. Whoever can capture that context, enrich those interactions, and (particularly) ensure business processes complete will make the money. Carrying the data from A to B and counting minutes is not the model.

BT therefore clearly understands the nature of future business models, even if they are keeping their cards close to their chest in terms of execution. If their CEO can explain this to investors in a way they can grasp, and they can demonstrate some real revenues, then BT is seriously onto something.

Voice as a spice, not the meal

Our third presenter, Thomas Howe, is an independent consultant and blogger, and brings a hands-on perspective to using telco voice and messaging APIs to build a business.


Thomas Howe. (Apparently Barack wears a Thomas Howe tie.)

Thomas spoke about the new business model he sees for telcos. He sees the value is increasingly in knowing things about the customer, not doing things like moving bits around. Doing has become cheap and easy due to continued exponential improvements in technology. It’s hard-to-replicate data that provides business advantage, and telcos have that by the bucket load. In particular, telcos can combine the data with the network to offer new capabilities. It’s not particularly useful to know someone’s latitude and longitude. It is very useful to know if someone is at home, for example to take a delivery. That means understanding “someone��?, “at��? and “home��? — i.e. who are you, where are you, and what is “home��?? (This reflects our analysis on the seven questions any telco platform must answer.)

Going to market

In the attendee feedback, there were three clear messages:

  • People like the ideas, and see the value in these new capabilities that telcos can offer businesses who want to take friction out of interacting with their customers.
  • Everyone wants to know pricing, volume and revenue models.
  • There are concerns over privacy, brand positioning, and ability of telcos to execute co-operatively.

For readers interested in getting answers to these questions, and how to execute these ideas, we’ll be diving into these issues in our research in the run-up to the next Telco 2.0 brainstorm in the spring.

To summarise, existing voice platform initiatives like Parlay/OSA are network-centric, and what is needed is a business process centric approach. There are a few global commerce platform emerging, and none of them are from telcos. Yet there are already great telco successes in two-sided markets, such as SMS short codes and premium SMS. Telcos have to continue to build on these to service a wider range of business processes and upstream customers.

Meanwhile, astute attendees will have picked up the protestations of earlier keynote speaker Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon. “And finally — our telecoms platform. Don’t worry, this is no threat to you.��? But he would say that, wouldn’t he?

Full Article: Vodafone, too much data and not enough vo and fone?

As there’s a change in leadership occurring at Vodafone, it’s a good time to reflect on the direction of the large convoy of opcos and investments being led by the good ship Newbury. Arun Sarin has stepped out of his asbestos business suit, albeit scorched by the flames of investors and board members, safe in the knowledge that his mission to vanquish more timid enemies is won. Although they don’t say it aloud, The Economist notes that the core of this success was clinging on to markets where vertical integration is turning a profit (USA, emerging markets), and exiting those where is isn’t doing so well (Japan), whilst cost-cutting elsewhere the inevitable detritus of a decade of hyper-growth.

However, as the more acerbic tongues at The Register point out, rather choppy waters lie ahead. The business is rapidly maturing, cost cutting reaches its limits, and new revenue streams (entertainment content, advertising, data) are either slow to ramp up or come with significant supplier costs that dilute margins.

According to their corporate history website, the name Vodafone is derived from ‘voice and data phone’. True or not, the conundrum of whether ‘voice is just data’ persists to this day. So as Vittorio Colao becomes fleet admiral, our burning question is: what to do about the stagnating core product? Along with its peers, Vodafone has conspicuously failed to significantly enhance its voice telephony offer, beyond offering better coverage. We don’t think that’s going to be a long-term winning position as access becomes hyper-abundant, and people’s time does not. Rather than ask how data services can replace lost voice revenue, ask how data can be used to rejuvenate that voice business. And as the biggest player in the international scene, Vodafone is very well placed to do something about it.

Telephony is built on false assumptions

The chart below (from our recently published Consumer Voice & Messaging 2.0 Report) compares the cost of telephony and labour. We show the per minute cost in the USA of using a telephone (fixed or mobile), along with hiring someone (high school or college graduate). What it tells us is that the ‘scarcity’ used to be in the telephone network, and now it is in our time and attention.

Only a decade ago, it was worth paying a graduate for an hour if it would have saved you from making an hour’s worth of mobile phone call.

Today, we barely factor in the cost of calling into our lives. Yet we are buried in voice messages, missed calls, emails and texts. Delivering ever more data to the user is not the same as creating ever more value. The value comes from brokering the right relationships, helping interactions occur at the right time and medium, eliminating unwanted intrusions, automating flows of information, and making users productive.

“Ask not how data can replace lost voice revenue, but how data can rejuvenate the personal communications experience.��? Satisfying people’s need to collaborate, chatter, and communicate should be central to every operator strategy. Here’s why…

Not a new problem

Mobile telephony is built off the same product template as fixed telephony, with the same assumptions and problems baked in from the 19th century. From the very beginning, problems have been evident. When Bell called Watson in that first call, the result wasn’t “oh, ****, he’s gone out for an afternoon in the pub��?. No, Bell had pre-arranged for Watson’s to be there ready at the other end. It was a bit of a fraud, to hide the absence of presence, availability or scheduling features.

We see these problems still today. You call me, but I just fail to answer in time, so you go to my voicemail. I see a missed call, and call you, not knowing your talking to my voicemail. As you’re already in a call, speaking to my voicemail, I get your voicemail. Why on earth doesn’t the phone network just connect us together?

This particular instance is an example of a failed rendezvous, and we examined the context and unfilled user needs in more depth in this previous post. Many of today’s short phone calls are manual transfers of presence, location and availability data that should ideally be eliminated. Why can’t I request a call from you, rather than only interrupt you? Why can’t I tell you’re calling me back about the message I left a week ago? Sadly, operators are too well rewarded for terminating calls of zero or negative value.

Voice: one product, many business models

As with all telcos, there are three inter-linked business models that Vodafone needs to support. These require very different features.

The first is its retail offer. This takes hardware from the network equipment providers, plus software from various innovators, and packages it up as the core bundle offer or as an add-on value-added service. This supply chain is slow, costly and inflexible today, and their Betavine effort is only a small step towards what’s really needed.

There’s still plenty of mileage though in selling conveniently packaged communications. We’re not yet at the point where “if it’s software, it must be given away for free��?. The users see the benefit to themselves, and are willing to pay for it. A good example at the moment is SpinVox, who offer a voicemail to text transcription service. Note how their own marketing copy says: “SpinVox has saved me at least two hours a week [our emphasis] of listening to often irrelevant voicemail.��? (And contrast this with the primary purpose of most mobile media content products, which is to fill dead time.) We’ll dive into the challenges and opportunities for retail products a little more below.

Next up are the wholesale products of the operator. We feel there is a massive hole here in most operators’ strategic approach, with a few honourable exceptions. Voice is already becoming just one facet of many applications and products, and operators aren’t making it easy to embed it in. Wholesale products need to be broader in scope (e.g. to include voicemail, push to talk, and 3rd party network integration), as well as deeper in integration (e.g. simple 3rd party trouble ticketing, provisioning of offers sold through non-operator channels).

Finally, there are the two-sided markets, which we’ve written about here. The telephone remains a wonderful way of consumers and enterprises interacting — think of it as ‘v-commerce’ — but there is a huge amount of friction and inefficiency involved. Whilst so much effort is being expended on entering mobile advertising, hardly any is being lavished on building new revenues on top of freephone numbers, call centres and interactive messaging.

Voice as a platform, not a product

We promised to come back to that retail proposition. Ten years ago, mobile phone penetration was in the low single digits. Today, more than half of humanity has one. A decade hence, the experience will also be transformed again. For example, your address book or contact list will be dynamic: ordered by who you ought to be talking to, giving real-time presence and availability data, and probably infused with messages from companies with whom you have ongoing commercial relationships. Mobile will be the ‘to go’ portion of the PC experience, not some separate world.

However, there is unlikely to be a one-size-fits-all evolution of the public telephone service. Instead, we move from an era of mass production to one of mass customisation. There are too many innovative applications, too many niches and customer needs, for any one company to address them all. Instead, operators need to take a leaf out of the Telco 2.0 book and focus on two things: providing distribution for these services (and integration with the core offer), as well as enabling a bunch of high-margin value-added services that the upstream partners pay for, not the downstream end users. If someone is a Facebook fanatic, help that partner get their experience into the user’s hands.

This requires synchronising a lot of moving parts of the puzzle: handsets, network, operational support, etc. The need for putting together a complete experience, rather than just piece parts, is becoming received wisdom, with the Apple iPod, iTunes PC client and music store trio being the canonical example. It’s hard to do, and it’s still early days. Apple have barely moved the needle with the iPhone — the only concession to the voice service is visual voicemail. (And they’ve made a mess of the SMS client.) It does nothing to address the underlying issues of why people are sending those messages, and how to either eliminate them, or make them more effective. Nokia’s Ovi is resolutely focused on the content side of the business, not communications.

As the biggest player, Vodafone has more leverage over handset suppliers and software platform vendors. Pick up the phone to Qualcomm. Whatever magic they’ve done for 3, ask for a bit to be sprinkled over the Vodafone handset range. We’d also expect an operator like Vodafone to produce handset and service offerings much more tightly coupled with the online services that users increasingly route their conversations through. On the corporate side, IBM, Microsoft and Avaya are obvious targets for closer integration.

One good sign is Vodafone’s acquisition of Danish social media start-up Zyb. This is completely the right direction, and we’d like to see the gas pedal pressed hard to roll this kind of “address book 2.0��? capability burned into as many handsets as possible.

This is also the time to make the most out of close relations with Verizon Wireless. Platforms need scale, new voice service features need scale, so why not become the de facto leader? Don’t wait for the standards bodies, make it a fait accompli.

Immediate action required: group communication

Whilst these long-term changes unfold, there a re short-term problems with the voice and messaging products, most notably in the pricing of services that compete against Internet offerings. Vodafone UK have cleverly priced ‘informational’ chatter differently from ‘social’ chatter with the ‘stop the clock’ promotion. After 3 minutes, you don’t rack up any more charges. This aligns value with pricing, and we like it.

The problem is that the online tools encourage users to communicate in groups, and to form conversations and communities. Voice and SMS pricing don’t align well with this. Why should a three-way call cost more? The users don’t see it that way. Why does sending an SMS to five people cost five times a much? Why does replying to a message cost the same an initiating the conversation? Why can’t I send Twitter status updates (with no termination charges) for free, to encourage more texts and calls?

There are many ways in which the traditional pricing assumptions of telephony and messaging don’t fit into our current communications landscape. Because Vodafone has shied away from being the price leader, it has more slack to play with here. You can afford to lose some money on termination fees to other operators if those charges have become illogical in the users’ minds. Or take a leaf from GupShup and use adverts to make group communications have no extra charges.

Be proud to be the phone company

Sometimes it feels like being a phone company is like an embarrassing medical condition nobody wants to admit to having. Voice communication will remain central to the human condition for as long as we’re around. Satisfying the need for people to collaborate, chatter, and communicate should be central to every operator strategy. Sadly, it too often ends up being delegated to the network equipment providers or handsets vendors, who tend to lack the skills or incentives to build complete services. If we had a shiny new R&D group, we’d be making the personal, social, human communications experience the top priority.

There are some carriers already making tentative moves towards a better telephony future. We like products like the H3G SkypePhone, but feel that there ought to be a lot more such examples. Embarq is making some useful moves with its eGo landline phone service. Verizon has made a good effort with iobi, but is utterly closed to outside innovation. Telekom Austria has some interesting softphone experiments on the go. Qwest has Q.Home on the launchpad. BT remains a bit of a dark horse here too.

Our own research found nearly 70 start-ups working on new voice and messaging services. (These are all documented in the report.) We’re sure there are more. None are really integrated with the telco platform. The opportunity to exceed the users’ expectations is there, and the business model — retail, wholesale and 2-sided platform — will bring in the cash to anyone who cares to execute on it.

Voice and Messaging 2.0

What to learn from – and how to compete with – Internet Communications Services

Summary: Voice and Messaging 2.0 is Telco 2.0’s analysis of the industry’s traditional core business, traditionally c.80% of $3 trillion Telco revenues, based on our unique insight into the emerging competition, the industry value chain, and original research into user needs.

There is a great wave of change and innovation in voice and messaging, although many telcos are missing out. Innovative new players are stepping in and there is opportunity for telcos is to work with them rather than compete – there are genuine opportunities as well as threats. This report illuminates the evolving opportunities and threats, and provides an invaluable guide to success in this exciting new world. (April 2008)

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This report is now availalable to members of our Telco 2.0 Research Executive Briefing Service. Below is an introductory extract and list of contents from this strategy Report that can be downloaded in full in PDF format by members of the executive Briefing Service here.

For more on any of these services, please email contact@telco2.net/ call +44 (0) 207 247 5003 

Key Points

  • An in-depth profile of the new Voice Applications opportunity.
  • Identifies and profiles the most interesting of the current crop of innovations.
  • Provides an original framework for assessing and developing successful new voice and messaging services.
  • Profiles the increasing threat to the traditional vertically-integrated model of voice services posed by these services.
  • Shows the surprising degree to which industry experts expect the landscape of voice and messaging, and increasingly ‘presence’ oriented services, to change in the foreseeable future.
  • Shows the pressing need for a different approach by Telcos.
  • Describes the strategies and practical approaches most likely to succeed in the near and long term.

Who is this report for?

The report is for senior (CxO) decision-makers and business strategists setting business strategy, and for product managers, and strategic sales, business development and marketing professionals acting in the Voice arena in the following types of organisations:

  • Fixed & Mobile Broadband Operators – to set and drive strategy.

  • Vendors & Business Partners – to understand customer need and develop winning customer propositions.

  • Regulators and Standards Bodies – to inform strategy and policy making.

Strategists and CxOs in IT and Investment Companies may also find this report useful to understand the future landscape of the Telecoms and related industries, and to help to spot likely winning and losing investment and operational strategies in the market.

Background Context – Voice & Messaging Revenues Under Threat

Core voice and messaging revenues – which remain 80% of the Telecoms industry’s global revenue – are under stronger threat than ever before:

  • Mobile operators are moving to HSPA and WiMAX networks that facilitate ‘over the top’ voice; flat-rate or supersize buckets of data are becoming cheap and widespread; maturing dual-mode and pico/femtocells technologies threaten the ‘mobility premium’ at home and in the office; and non-operator SMS and IM services force large/unlimited message bundles and price competition.
  • Fixed operators have found continued profit in enterprise voice, but voice threatens to migrate from being a distinct service (through a PBX or even IP Centrex) into just being a feature of an online collaboration and productivity suite. Consumer social media and communications technologies increasingly penetrate the enterprise, further weakening the differentiator of the telco as an IT services and communications integrator.

The consequence of this diversification in means of delivering voice and messaging is a major change to the forecast nature of industry revenues.

SR Voice And Messaging Image 1
Yet the industry does not believe that it truly understands it’s customers’ real needs from the most core products

Voice and Messaging Survey Image 2

(Source: STL Partners Telco 2.0™ Voice & Messaging Survey, January 2007 and 2008 (A survey of operators and vendors across the Telco industry); n=327

The Voice & Messaging report describes the forecast evolution of the market and shows how Telcos can work with the market to develop new services and distribution channels. It provides an original framework for identifying competitive characteristics of new applications and profiles 70 of the latest interesting Telco 2.0 innovations that we’ve encountered in our research – an invaluable tool for visionary CxOs, strategists and product managers alike.

Key Questions Answered

This report uniquely answers 3 key questions:

  1. What do ‘End Users’ really want – what are their unmet telephony and messaging needs and how to address them profitably?
  2. How to respond commercially – what features and functionality will enable telcos to grow their core business?
  3. How to refine product strategy – what is the best migration path to meet current and future market conditions?

In addition, the report seeks to help operators and vendors maximise future opportunities by answering the following questions:

  • What are the key unmet user needs?
  • Where is the money in telephony over the next 5 years?
  • What kinds of disruptors are there? When will they become a material threat? How to react to them?
  • What are the important trends in telephony toll arbitrage?
  • How to work with the Internet giants?
  • How can you manage cannibalisation of SMS and MMS revenue by IM?
  • What should you be doing about interoperability of new services?
  • How will the Web be voice-enabled, and what’s the impact?
  • When will click-to-call take off, and what to do about it?
  • What new revenue opportunities are there?
  • How can Telco 2.0™ business strategies be applied to voice?
  • What needs to be done to generate near-term benefits?
  • What are the pricing strategies to adopt or avoid?

Case Studies, Companies and Services, and Technologies & Applications Covered

Detailed Case Studies: 3UK, Skype, Iliad. Truphone, PhoneGnome, Verizon iObi, VoiceSage, Tesco Mobile.

Other Companies and Services Covered: 3 SkypePhone, 3GPP, 3UK, AOL IM, Apple, Apple iPhone, Apple Visual Voicemail, AT&T, AT&T Digital One Rate, Avaya, Bebo, Blackberry, Body Shop, BT Fusion, BT Web 21C, C&W, Carphone Warehouse, Change for Charity, Craigslist, Cyworld, DailyMotion, Dell, Easymobile, Ebay, Embarq eGo Phone, Facebook, FCC, Flickr, Fonolo, France Telecom, free.fr, Freebox, Fring, Gizmo, Google, Google Android, Google Mail, GrandCentral, GSMA, Habbo Hotel, Hutchison 3G, Indesit, Interoute, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, Jabber, Jaduka, Jaxtr, Lebara, Level3, Linked-In, LiveJournal, MCI Friends & Family, Meebo, Metacafe, MSN, Mxit, MySpace, NeuStar, NMS Communications, Nokia, Nokia 60 Series, O2, Orkut, QQ, Qualcomm, Ribbit, RIM, Salesforce.com, Softbank (Yahoo!), Telekom Austria, Telfort / KPN, TeliaSonera (IM), Terranet, The Cloud, TiVo, T-Mobile Flext, TV Perso, Twitter, Verisign, Virgin Mobile, Virgin SA MVNO, Vodafone, Vodafone “stop the clock”, Vonage, Vyke, Wal-Mart, Xbox, Yahoo!, YouTube.

Technologies & Applications Covered: 3G, Adobe AIR, ADSL2, AJAX, ASP, BREW, BSS, Calendars, Call Routing, CDMA, Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP), DECT, DNS, DRM, DSL, DVD, ENUM, Femtocell, Flash, Gaming Devices, GPRS, GSM/WLAN, HSDPA, IM, IMS, IP, IPTV, ISDN, IVR, Java MIDP, LTE, MMS, Mobile, Mod_Python, MS Silverlight, Network Address Book Synchronisation, NGN, OTT, P2P, PBX, PC, PHP, Picture Messaging, Prepay Mobile, PSTN, PVR, Ring-back, Ringtones, Roaming, Set-top boxes, SIM, SIP, SMS, SS7/TDM, To-do lists, UI, UMTS, Unified Communications, USB Dongles, VCR, Visual Voicemail, Voice, VOIP, Wi-Fi, WiMax, WLAN, XMPP.

Applications & Companies covered in the directory: Abbeynet, Apple iPhone, Bridgeport Networks, Brightroam, Bubbletalk, CallButler, Cellity, Convenos, Craigsnumber, DoCoMo, Evoca, flurry, fring, GoLoco, GrandCentral, Hotxt, icall, Ifbyphone, imity, iotum, Jaduka, Jaiku, jajah, Jangl, Jaxtr, Jott, Kadoink, Kirusa, Loopt, Lypp, Me.dium.com, meebo, Mig33, MobileMeWorld, mySay, Nimbuzz, Octro, Ogo, OZ Communication, PacketMobile, Pheeder, PhoneGnome, Phonevite, Pica, Pinger, Pownce, Radio Handi, renzoo, Ring2Conferencing, SearchtoPhone, Sightspeed, Sniff, Supcast.com, Tex2me, Toktumi, Treasuremytext, TruPhone, Userplane, Utterz, Vapps, Verizon, Vonage, Vyke, wablet, Woize, YackPack, Yahoo! OneConnect, yak4ever, Yugma, Zygo Communications

Summary of Contents

  • Executive Summary
  • Introduction
  • Part 1 – Understanding user needs
  • Part 2 – Market dynamics
  • Part 3 – How non-carrier communications spread
  • Part 4 – How operators gain and lose control
  • Part 5 – Competing in a low-cost world
  • Part 6 – Future corporate strategy
  • Part 7 – Finding new markets
  • Part 8- A theory of communication systems
  • Part 9 – A framework for product innovation
  • Part 10 – Product strategy
  • Part 11 – Long-term issues
  • Part 12 – Action plan
  • Appendices
  • Directory

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