iain gillott

Iain Gillott, founder of iGillottResearch, is launching an e-newsletter initiative focused on delivering information about mobile content to a targeted audience of mobile service provider sales forces. He recently talked to Wireless Review about his new effort, IMS and the future of mobile metrics.

On the mobile content conundrum: There's a big disconnect between the applications developers and the sales forces within the carriers. I asked the VP of sales at one of the big carriers how they find applications for corporate customers, and he said about 50% of the time, the sales guy finds the application, then goes to the carrier marketing department and says they just did a deal. So we compiled a list of the sales people at the carriers, and we have a newsletter that goes directly to them and highlights different applications for them from different vendors. I want to reach the sales guy on the street who's calling on enterprises and can say, “Have you seen this?”

On mobile's struggle in the enterprise: We have IT managers who are wired-centric. They didn't grow up with cell phones, they grew up with Ethernet and LANs and all that. Then you have the carriers, who are still very voice-centric and are measured on ARPU and churn, which are basically voice-driven models. I'd love to see some Wall Street guy say “Buy Sprint stock because they have the best data strategy.” But that's not how they're measured.

On the MVNO sector: It's going to be interesting, particularly in how things are measured. Companies like Sprint are going to have to say, “Here's how many subs we control ourselves, and here's how many are MVNO.” I think Wall Street looks at MVNOs and says carriers are selling themselves short — that they failed to penetrate the market, so they had to give it away to somebody. They don't look at it and say, “Oh, they're using the excess assets on the network with-out actually incurring half of the costs.” I'm not sure Wall Street really understands it.

On IMS: If you'd have asked me six months ago, I would have said there's some work to do, and it's an uphill struggle on both fronts. In the last two or three months, suddenly IMS has come to the front. Everyone's talking about IMS, including the carriers. Some of them are doing it sooner than others, but I think they've realized that they can mix the broadband and wireless worlds and that IP does drive all this stuff. Voice over IP is not going away, and they have to compete. They have assets, but to put them all together needs something else, and the something else is IMS.