Telcos set to offer richer messaging | Bangkok Post: tech

SINGAPORE : Fast, mature networks and open standards are setting the way for telcos to make a comeback and offer richer messaging services and gain customer loyalty and revenue while avoiding becoming nothing more than a fat pipe, according to the world's leader in messaging services for telcos.

Mark Williams, SVP and GM for Apac, says that richer messaging services is the key to telco profitability and avoiding becoming a fat pipe.

In an exclusive interview, Mark Williams, Senior Vice-President and General Manager for Acision Asia-Pacific, explained how his company was spun off from from the telecommunications solutions arm of consultancy firm Logica CMG two and a half years ago and is now looking to provide solutions beyond its core messaging services.

Many years ago, SMS was a feature of GSM that was only known to engineers and technical people. The old CMG people saw it as a mass opportunity and provide solutions around SMS. In the early days, not every handset supported SMS and sending messages across networks or countries was not possible. Of course, that has all changed and today we see billions of messages flying across the world every day.

Today Thailand is still classified as a low-messaging market with 15 billion messages sent annually, or just 250 messages per person per annum. One of the problems is standardisation and even today there are still problems surrounding language support and keypads.

Acision provides messaging to 8 out of the top 10 telco operators _ essentially everyone except the Chinese _ and has a 50 percent market share in the messaging industry. Revenue has levelled out, with many operators now offering unlimited messaging packages, while message volume is expected to double between 2008 and 2011.

The challenge is for telcos to continue to be profitable and find new revenue streams.

Acision has addressed this need and today offers a solution that allows a unified view of messaging, be it SMS, MMS, email or voicemail, all with a single address book. The idea is that an SMS can be sent through voice as speech to text; an email can be read out loud as an audio message, or any other combination.

This is moving away from the stove pipe mentality of messaging where SMS is just SMS and voicemail is a separate system.

Additional features can include the ability to deal with messages differently, depending on the time and sender. For instance, emails sent during work hours could be sent only to an assistant or only delivered directly after certain hours. Emails from a wife or girlfriend could be exempt from that rule. Outbound email to recipients in a personal address book might not be copied to the company.

Acision's customers are the operators and this idea is to provide these high value services beyond what is usually associated with an operator to enable loyalty. It is important for the service to work across a variety of handset brands.

3G is changing the game with the ability to break down specialised mobile space now that bandwidth is comparable with fixed infrastructure. WAP was first introduced because traditional HTTP was too bandwidth-intensive for most handsets.

Today, with smartphones and 3G, people are expecting the same level of richness from their mobile devices as they do from fixed infrastructure.

Mobility is no longer about providing a cut-down version of the web on handsets, but about how to leverage mobility of the extra information available to provide information in the right context.

For instance, when searching from a PC for a restaurant, one would want the restaurant's website and all its details. When searching from a smartphone, the user wants to know how to get there from his current position and if the restaurant is full or not. The key to generating revenue in the mobile space will fall to whoever finds a way to successfully leverage location and time. The next killer app will be personal.

NTT DoCoMo has commissioned drama and comedies that come in seven-minute episodes as research has shown that is the average amount of time people spend watching video on a mobile device.

In the past, capacity was a scarce resource and high tariffs were a way to limit the number of phone calls. Today, anyone with money and spectrum can build a high-capacity network. Telstra in Australia offers its users over 14 MBPS mobile broadband. The challenge is how to monetise; how to create value beyond just carrying the data and becoming a fat pipe.

What is starting to happen now is that ubiquity is starting to erode proprietary positions. NTT DoCoMo's i-Mode and the BlackBerry both started with tightly controlled ecosystems that leveraged client-server email for networks with limited bandwidth.

They succeeded because their tight control made the service quality excellent. However, today, thanks to reliable 3G networks, there are a lot of alternative ways to access these services. Nokia Ovi is one play by the handset maker, but there is no reason the telco could not play in that space too.

Away from messaging, Acision also offers solutions that help with caching and compression, as well as flexible billing systems. For instance, to reduce shocks to post-paid subscribers, it is possible to warn them that they have exceed their bundle and it is possible to continue, but at a certain price.

Williams noted that it was not so much the case that legacy systems out there were inflexible, but rather it was difficult to make a legacy system do what it was not designed to do in the first place.