After the discovery Competition increases in software-based enhanced services >BY DAN O'SHEA, Technology Editor

Being a software company that caters to the telecommunications industry may be more difficult than it used to be. A few years ago, the handful that existed could not afford to attend shows. When they did, their booths were often little stalls on the periphery of the action. Overall, their product development and delivery schedules were fairly flexible, made so by carriers that figured the technology took time to perfect.

That was the case until 1996, when last spring's highly successful Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association trade show and last fall's Personal Communications Showcase put software-based enhanced services on the map. The maturity of many enhanced services, and the development of new ones, coincided with a realization among carriers that they must inject new imagination and variety into their service strategies if they are to survive impending competition.

If 1996 was the year that competition drove the industry to discover enhanced services, 1997 may be the year that the developers and purveyors of enhanced services taste a bit of competition themselves, as many of their solutions mature as viable market offerings. It is also time to ensure that these new services are integrated smoothly into the existing wireless network realm.

"There has been a lot more discussion of value-added solutions recently," said Steve Mucchetti, general manager of telecommunications and media at IBM. "The industry has finally gotten to the point where wireless is a reliable access technology, and the new services are a natural consequence of the current market environment.

Many software exhibitors at Wireless '97 earlier this month in San Francisco displayed-in booths now much larger, more elaborate and closer to the center of the show floor-maturing platforms that form the foundation for a new generation of services. Some of these services, such as single number/personal number technologies have been around for awhile, but others, such as voice dialing, are just picking up speed. In fact, after seemingly years of lab-bound development, several enhanced service providers finally have cultivated voice dialing technology into product. There was perhaps no solution more demonstrated on the show floor-or off.

The companies displaying voice dialing included long-time marketers of the technology, such as Brite Voice Systems and VoiceCue Technologies, and a plethora of new entrants, such as Glenayre Technologies and Octel. Wildfire Communications showed off the capability on its new Network Wildfire during a breakfast at the City Club of San Francisco.

These companies believe that voice dialing, a long-studied and long-imperfect technology, is finally maturing. "There has been a lot of promise with this technology, but there has been a lot of experimentation to this point," said Don Espeut, vice president of engineering at Glenayre Technologies. "The technology is not quite 100% now, but it is very mature.

Glenayre formally unveiled the technology at the show, but it has been in beta testing for the last six months-the tail end of a three-year development period, Espeut said. "Now the market must work down the cost and make the technology more affordable," he said.

Glenayre will work to integrate voice dialing with its existing MVP enhanced services platform and services like its ConstantTouch single number solution. "Integrating a new solution with existing products is a big key to acceptance," said Espeut.

Octel views voice dialing as an extension of what started as a messaging-based platform. The company, an international leader in the messaging environment, sees speech navigation as a tool to enhance the value and flexibility of messaging and voice mail, giving it a well-integrated product from the very start.

"People should not just roll out services like speech navigation just because they have the technology," said Jonathan Visbal, vice president of marketing for voice information services at Octel.

VoiceCue Technologies sees directory assistance call completion as an immediate and viable application for voice-activated dialing. The VoiceCue voice recognition unit and application software are already deployed in Chicago and in a handful of international markets.

"There has been a big shift in directory assistance. It's now a revenue-enhancing market, and voice dialing can help," said Richard Meyers, regional sales manager at VoiceCue. "The key has been to keep improving the technology. We have had leaps of improvement over the last three years.

While voice dialing has had a long, sometimes bumpy trip to market, other enhanced services already are having strong market influence. Unified messaging, prepaid calling programs and conferencing were all much-talked-about applications on the show floor, as seen at the booths of companies such as Octel, Centigram Communications, Boston Technology, Glenayre and others.

In terms of messaging, many companies sought to extend previously one-dimensional messaging and voice mail offerings into highly-integrated multiapplication platforms.

"A unified messaging platform is really a strategy of multiple parts, and carriers must learn how to market it that way," said Bennett Marks, manager of software development at Boston Technology.

Unified messaging brings together capabilities in short messaging, e-mail, the Internet, voice mail, single number services, and now voice dialing and navigation to allow users to obtain, respond to or forward messages by a variety of methods.

In addition to voice navigation, the latest intriguing unified messaging application is Web-based messaging and navigation. Products such as Boston Technology's AccessWeb and Centigram's OneView Web, available this summer, give users another layer of messaging platform flexibility.

Prepaid calling, a huge star at last year's wireless shows, showed further proof of emerging as a very viable application. "1997 and 1998 are going to be very big years for prepaid calling," said Colin Boone, director of marketing and business development at Centigram.

Many companies launched prepaid services last year, but carriers are now beginning to deploy these services, even on an international basis.

Conferencing capabilities may be another star of the future, as the concept of the mobile office becomes more credible. Conferencing, in fact, is the newest application on Centigram's MobileManager platform. Users can add up to eight parties to a conference and can also mute lines for private side conferences at any time during a call, said Caroline Pappajohn, director of product marketing at Centigram.

The outlook for growth in enhanced services appears stronger than ever, driven to a hard pace by competition not only deep within the wireless industry but more so in the converging wireline/wireless network environment.

As witnessed by AT&T's recent surprise announcement about its wireless local loop plans, carriers are facing mounting challenges from many directions. A variety of flexible new services could be the key tools in climbing this mountain. It's obvious from Wireless '97 that vendors are quickly integrating new services into already rich platforms, giving carriers good hints about how to market these fresh capabilities.