TM Forum: From IT big bang to global opportunity-hunting

It’s amazing how quickly the tune among telco back-office mavens has changed from big-picture frameworks and transformation projects to a laser focus on enabling opportunistic projects and deployments supporting new service and business models.

That was the big story out of this week’s TM Forum show here in Orlando, where in keynotes (Qwest talking about its future), announcements (enterprises giving telcos practical cloud advice) and in meeting rooms (HP touting a new policy server, a particularly hot area of focus at the show), the mood was largely upbeat and focused on massive business opportunities in play right now.

That compares to past years, when all the talk was of massive IT transformation projects – many of which have delivered mixed results, to be kind – and a year ago, when right in the midst of an economic and banking industry meltdown, TM Forum attendees (always at the mercy of their employer’s capex whims anyway) wandered the event halls in a daze, looking as if they’d just been hit in the face with a brick. Which of course they had.

But surprise: The industry emerging from this year’s downturn appears energized by new opportunities (mainly mobile) and new rivals (Google and Apple, no longer in theory but in reality), not to mention new products (policy servers, DPI boxes, more flexible charging platforms, more powerful provisioning systems – all driven by IP) and new delivery approaches (Web 2.0 and SOA finally fulfilling their promise).

So, for example, you had global operator Vodafone on stage talking not about five-year IT projects but the launch of Vodafone 360, its play to compete with Web and mobile app players. The service, launched this fall, moves Vodafone firmly into the areas of content and applications, including social networking (including Facebook integration and more), networked address books and other services delivered to a range of smartphone devices. Driving Vodafone 360 are concepts like “SOA and integrated billing, helping to bring together a true social experience on the device,” said Albert Hitchcock, CIO of Vodafone Group, who added that one of his major focus areas in 2010 is better leveraging business intelligence capabilities to find the best customers and deliver to them the services they really want. Via offerings like 360.“The core to a lot of these capabilities is the IT integration. We are taking a much more focused and directed approach.”

One of the consistent messages across the week was to look for innovation in out of the way places, not just among global tier-one carriers. Vodafone, for instance, plays in a variety of markets, experimenting across Europe and elsewhere. But the real action may be in emerging and not-yet-mature markets like China and India, where things like post-paid mobile billing and flat-rate usage plans simply don’t exist.

Instead, operators in those regions are balancing massive subscriber growth with paper-thin margins, utilizing real-time charging and subscriber and network management platforms to roll-out concepts – such as per-second billing or real-time promotional offers or hybrid pre- and post-paid charging approaches – that outstrip anything being done in so-called “mature” mobile markets like the US.

Again and again, vendors described how they were helping operators in developing regions implement such schemes – while also noting that in RFIs and behind the scenes, more established operators in the US (where flat-rate rules) and in Western Europe (where new “sticker shock” billing limits are coming into play next summer) are telling them, “I want that too,” said one vendor, adding he’s “up to his eyeballs in NDAs” from large operators evaluating the mobile landscape and ready to explore new mobile charging models. (Need proof? Just this week, AT&T said it is taking a hard look at usage-based pricing schemes for mobile data).

“The biggest issue that operators are having right now is fully understanding that billing systems are really data systems – there’s an absolute need in my mind for real-time charging for every customer, even post-paid customers,” said Tony Poulos, head of revenue management work at the TM Forum. “Every customer needs to be managed and able to be charged” whenever they want new services or more capabilities from or access to the network.

“Operators are really now much more into real-time decision-making at the edge of the network based on subscriber state,” said Openet CT Joe Hogan, noting that inputs to those decisions include a subscriber’s current pre-paid balance, the bundles they’ve subscribed to, usage caps or bands they are working under, their spending patterns and a variety of other policies that can be enforced on the fly by agile operators. All of those individual events can add up for some of its operator customers to 2000 to 3000 transactions being managed – per second. “There are just many more events to track and a lot more decisions to be made through a combination of real-time transaction charging and real-time transaction policy systems,” Hogan said.