I had a chance this week to catch up by phone with Jeff Popoff, VP of Marketing at equipment vendor Redknee. (Looking at their web site, Jeff's had a vigorous haircut since we last met. Here in impecunious Scotland they call it "value for money". Only kidding, Jeff!)
Jeff was one of the recipients of my RFP From Hell when I was at Sprint. Think "IMS for the Web", and you're half way there. Anyhow, we've known each other from back in the darkest days of the telecom meltdown, when even responding to Martin's RFP seemed like a good idea.
Apart from all the usual new product stuff that anyone with a browser, one finger and an eye can find, Jeff kept me up to date with where Redknee's strategy is going. Because Redknee is fairly small, they can't afford grand visions that play out over long time periods. Most of their products are up in the higher layers of the stack, which is where telcos are most vulnerable. They don't have a pile of patents on obscure radio technology that they can use to leverage themselves into all sorts of other businesses. They're forced to iterate quickly, deliver stuff that works and makes money for its owners. So I see them as being the canary in the cold, dark, scary telecom coal mine.
Two themes came out of what they're up to. The first is what they call "personalisation", which is a mix of digital identity, and contextually aware services. If "mobility" is the service, how does it adapt to the user's different contexts? When you're at work in your home office and have a Vonage phone you might want a different call handling behaviour to when you're in the airport on their WLAN; and a different behavior when you're on the plan on the satellite-fed WLAN; and yet again something different when you're in the corporate office behind a PBX.
As Jeff highlighted, the flip side is no carrier or service provider will do it unless paid. How to reap some value? Can you do it directly, like how MSN offers a premium email bundle? Or does it have to be indirect, the way Google uses your content in Gmail to perform contextual ads both in GMail and (potentially) other Google properties?
Also, people's expectations changed from 5 years ago. We now have high mobile penetration, a saturated market in most regions, and strong commoditisation. The classic response according to Jeff is to segment and differentiate. This means moving from adding subscribers to stealing them. How do you appeal to these new subs?
The Redknee way is to personalise, and offer a better mousetrap. Yippee! Maybe not quite Voice 2.0, but at least Voice 1.5 Beta 2 with Extension Pack, plus bonus Web 1.4 speical offer if you buy this week (credit option available, see in store for full details).
So Redknee do a bunch of network analytics to bring relevant stuff to you. I didn't dig too deply into the details. It's enough to know that the telecom borg is moving. Finally we're seeing some (potential) improvement in the core stuff that brings home he bacon, and not peripheral entertainment fripperies. OK, it's still trapped in smart, intelligent, centralised, slow, expensive networked telcoland. But it's progress, nonetheless.
An example they gave was being able to call someone's work PBX number, but prefix it with a '5' and get routed to their mobile (if their preferences allow it). Not earth shattering, I'll grant you. But it means you can keep your mobile number private. Why should you have to give your mobile number to all your work colleagues who can hassle you at all hours? So it's a significant privacy boost and convenience. People who don't have your number, but whom you do want to receive calls from out of hours, can also get hold of you. I suspect some carrier also gets a nice slice of call termination revenue to lubricate the deal. Everyone's a winner.
Another example was routing of SMS messages to an e-mail inbox when someone's on the road. I'm probably not doing them justice, because my brain freezes over for 60 seconds whenever I hear the words "ARPU uplift".
These examples may seem small, but it's the kind of mundane stuff that users want. It's just that they can't seize control today, and are stuck on the glacial telco timetable for new features and functionality. Anything that moves stuff along has to be good for the users.
The other big activity for Redknee is, um, selling stuff. Carriers retail communications services and devices, often in tandem. Many own large retail chains, or have a big presence as "virtual stores" embedded in large electrical retailers. They host web portals whose main function is the retail of content and online services. Telcos might appear under the "retail services" section of the stock listings one day.
So Redknee are working on helping telcos become better retailers of connectivity and content. Jeff observed how there are radically different purchase patterns, with teens making impulse buys of $2 ringtones of "must have" content to obtain school bragging rights. On the other hand, he might only access such content as part of a cheap bundle. But the retail lifecycle of mobile content is badly managed, and the pricing options are often too constrained. Redknee see a fundamental divide between "impulse" and "discount" mobile segments that they believe others haven't picked up on properly. As Jeff amusingly put it, telcos are selling naff furry dice to decorate your car. The furry dice market works differently from the car market, and it also works differently for the Kia and Lexus buyers.
Redknee are also working on ways of allocating different parts of your connectivity into different buckets. So your VPN usage from your laptop 3G card to the company mothership goes to the corporate account; but general web surfing stays on your private personal bill. Redknee also want to offer "personalised pricing" for content. I guess framing for these things makes all the difference. Give 'em a coupon, or offer to unload some cost onto your employer, and people's privacy worries melt away. At least that's Redknee's bet.
I'm sure Jeff's PR folk will be adding me to their Christmas card list for quoting this one, but it's worth repeating. "What 1-click does for Amazon, Redknee does for mobile retail." Actually, I've been advising some of my clients similarly. Mobile operators do an awful job of managing basic up-sell and cross-sell between services on your phone. They've got a lot to learn from wired e-commerce, still. Shouldn't every SMS be followed with a line followed by the message "Press the [green call button] to call Bob"? (And in Voice 2.0, "...to call Bob who is available for incoming calls.")
That said, Jeff said it's a challenge beyond what Amazon do, because they only retail to one context (the PC). Mobile retail has many contexts. If you're roaming, you need to offer a completely different selection of services to when someone is on the train, or at home.
Now for the fun bit. "What's Redknee's take on IMS?"
I guess none of this will be news or secret to their clients, because their product portfolio in this space (or absence thereof) speaks for itself. Redknee declare themselves as IMS skeptics, despite "making a ton of money migrating people to IMS-like architectures" (their words). Jeff says IMS is a bridge too far: 5-10 year standards effort, 5-10 vendor implementation, 5-10 year rollout. That means a 20 year cycle to reach the IMS vision. (Telepocalyptic aside: apparently if you ingest enough tryptamines you get the IMS visions much quicker. Ho ho.)
But the carriers see most services won't port. Nobody wants to pay for an IM sent via IMS.
Some vendors going to "pre-IMS" implementations. Get the unified charging and rating, policy, service and session control, profile, preferences, buddy lists etc. sorted out. And then use it as a grab-bag to implement whatever services carriers do want to roll out.
This approach works, and there's some value to the convenience the end user gets from those services. They'll be better integrated and easier to pay for and provision. But that's it. Sensible carriers are not going to swap out core infrastructure. You go 1/4 of the way to get 90% of your business objectives reached. Nobody needs an IMS-compliant core network.
Jeff recounted how it was like the old days with location-based services. Every pitch came with the example of using LBS to find an ATM. But you know where all the ATMs are near your home and office already. And it's too easy to find one when elsewhere, if only by just stopping and asking. There are too many substitutes to make it compelling. Same for IMS. Stuff like mobile TV doesn't make sense. It's better to unbundle, and say use a short code SMS to initiate and pay for the download, which then arrives via your broadband connection. Jeff's take is that IMS may be a good control path (Bellhead speak for signalling system), but is a bad bearer path (the media). Just plain too expensive.
Carriers can survive by making better services, being better retailers, and not killing themselves re-inventing the intelligent network. And I can't really top that analysis, so here I'll stop.
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