Tiger Woods 2.0

I hate almost everything about golf -- the goofy clothes, the Thurston Howell III affectation and the country club elitism. But even though I still roll my eyes when I see the words “golfer” and “athlete” in the same sentence, I’ve been a fairly fervent follower of the game for the past few years. As is the case with many others I suppose, my reluctant infatuation with golf can be explained in two words: Tiger Woods.

In the BT (Before Tiger) era, I would channel surf past golf tournaments with the same amount of hesitation I’d apply to infomercials or a shopping channel. But now, my eyes and ears perk up whenever my TV screen is filled with an expanse of green. I’ll even do a quick check of the virtual leader board from my desk on a Thursday or Friday – just to fulfill an unexplainable desire to know “how Tiger’s doing.”

For those who have some sort of fiscal connection to golf (tournament hosts, equipment makers, television networks, etc.), Tiger Woods has been a Godsend. When he plays, interest in the game soars and money flows. When he doesn’t, as he hasn’t for the past eight months due to an injury, the golfing world struggles to find a substitute. Tiger Woods, in technology parlance, is a Killer App.

Truly compelling applications, which create a surge of interest in -- and ultimately demand for -- telecommunications services, don’t come along that often. Telecommunications operators have been experiencing a Killer App dry spell for the past few years, going back to the introduction of SMS. The major fallout from this paucity of new revenue sources is that operators are willing to do little more than routine maintenance on their networks without a steady surge in ARPU to bankroll meaningful infrastructure enhancements. As a result, major construction projects that require architectural overhauls, such as IMS and SDP upgrades, remain largely on hold – or are proceeding at a near-glacial pace.

For the past year or more, equipment makers, which are desperate to move equipment that represents 10s of millions of dollars in investment, have been on a quest for an application (or set of applications) that will entice operators to loosen the purse strings and accelerate the adoption of IMS and SDP. Though the jury is still out on the potential of the services contained in the Rich Communications Suite (RCS) feature set to convince subscribers to shell out more money for communications services, a growing number of suppliers and operators are exploring the potential. The first release of the RCS specification had 70 companies on board.

The big attraction of the RCS isn’t the wow factor. Though the applications – an enhanced phonebook, integration of presence and messaging and file sharing – are neatly integrated and show off the advantages of SIP as a session control protocol, there’s nothing new about the features. Any mildly advanced user with an IP end point could string together a similar look and feel and functionality. The potentially “killer” part about RCS, and the attribute that could spark widespread use, is its reach.

One of the biggest roadblocks to mass adoption of multimedia applications has been the lack of universal interoperability. It’s a fragmented world out there and regardless of the popularity of a service, chances are not all of your associates or acquaintances will be using it. And then there’s the lack of interoperability across devices or across different networks. The industry has been so focused on personalization to attract new users, we’re guilty of overlooking one of the tenets of mass adoption – make it available to the masses.

That’s exactly the intention behind the RCS initiative. I’m clearly not part of the demographic that operators are targeting with newfangled services but even I would be willing to invest in a data service or shell out a few extra dollars a month if I knew that I could share presence information, IM or swap photos with essentially anyone with a mobile telephone. The next version of RCS is slated to bring PC to mobile connectivity into the mix, further extending the service to any of the millions of Internet users who are willing to or already using proprietary VoIP services from Skype, Google or other Internet-based service providers.

If the RCS initiative turns out to be popular, everybody will benefit. Operators will have found a new source of revenue to accelerate the transformation of their IP services infrastructures and equipment makers will start to clear their warehouses of that dusty IMS gear, as RCS runs on IMS-enabled handsets and infrastructure.

It’s too early to tell if RCS will even come close to being the Tiger Woods of the telecommunications industry. At the very least, however, it’s refreshing to see the industry taking a big swing for a change, instead of just puttering around.