CREATION OF THE KILLER APP

For every reason under the sun, development of new services should be the top of every network planner's priority list. Those reasons include revenue generation, customer retention and turf protection. But there is precious little new under the sun, and the next killer app remains at large. So service providers must think smaller when it comes to service creation. They need to think incrementally. And they need to think quickly.

Service providers can no longer invest millions of dollars or take several years to develop and implement services as they did when Caller ID, the last killer app, was rolled out by New Jersey Bell in 1987. Other notable services such as voice mail and DSL also were long in development. Granted, some also were long in returns and have supplied incumbent carriers with the cash reserves that keep them strong. But times and technology are changing — albeit more slowly than anticipated — and new services are needed more than ever to keep the cash flowing.

Just as the success of Caller ID depended on Signaling System 7 (SS7), new applications will depend on bandwidth — and primarily on the end user's ability to manipulate it. Suppliers of service creation platforms say they are ready when service providers are to exploit available bandwidth to create new services.

“People [realize] the need for service growth, but it is hard to really understand the marketability of [a service],” said Rich Alexander, director of marketing and business operations for Telcordia Technologies. “So having a flexible service creation environment is absolutely critical in order to conceive [a service], test it internally and then be able to roll it out.”

Still, it is not necessary to conceive of the next Caller ID — only to learn from its examples, good and bad.

When Caller ID was rolled out, SS7 was no more ubiquitous than broadband is today. It took years before Bell Atlantic (now Verizon Communications) rolled out the service in every state, let alone throughout New Jersey where the service began. It had to equip the network for SS7, and in every switch the company needed to purchase and install software, said Margaret S. Gardner, executive director of consumer affiliate integration, packaging and bundling for Verizon.

There were also regulatory and privacy hurdles to overcome. “Then it probably took a good year to get the provisioning, ordering and billing capability deployed,” Gardner said.

Despite the challenges, the slow-but-successful implementation of Caller ID also shows that services can be rolled out incrementally and grow with grassroots-like popularity. Vendors such as net.com and Telcordia are trying that approach to convince service providers to use service creation environments in two ways: to implement generic services created by third-party developers, and to let customers manage their own bandwidth to take advantage of those services cost-effectively.

“It is broadening beyond service creation into identifying applications that are available, taking advantage of the innovation in the industry today and plugging it into the environment,” Alexander said. In other words, with sufficient bandwidth and an inexpensive and less time-consuming implementation, services can be tailored to individual vertical markets and customers.

Whereas the consumer market drove the success of Caller ID, the small and medium-sized business market could drive new services such as videoconferencing, bandwidth-on-demand, telemedicine and distance learning.

“A large enterprise could always get whatever bandwidth they needed, but smaller businesses need the ability to get what they need when they need it for as long as they need it,” said Julian Thomas, director of product management for net.com.

More important, end users must be able to fulfill their own bandwidth needs on a whim and pay accordingly. Thus, providers of service creation environments become the collaborators between the various content delivery, bandwidth management and support solutions required to enable that capability today for broadband users. However, the need for new services-on-demand extends to the mobile market as well.

While platforms such as Telcordia's service creation and provisioning system, known as SPACE, focus on that market and enable the creation of certain new services, there are new services on the horizon for mobile communications in which implementation could prove as arduous as provisioning Caller ID — and just as profitable and controversial.

Those are services based on presence and availability, a concept under development that gives the end user control over when and how to receive communication. These new services do not fit the incremental or vertical market molds, nor will they necessarily require a great deal of bandwidth. The challenge here could be more political.

For services derived from presence and availability, profile information on every user would need to be shared across networks, thus requiring a scale of interoperability not seen since the introduction of the advanced intelligent network.

“If the industry does adopt this approach over time, it's like all the SS7 network nodes being interconnected so that it appears to be one logical network,” said Mark Abbott, vice president of marketing for Evolving Systems Inc.

ESI recently introduced its OMNIpresence server, which acts as a presence and availability management server and takes on part of the service creation role by providing open application interfaces for software developers to create presence and availability-based applications.

Whether operators have the patience for such an implementation remains to be seen, but it has worked before.