VIVEK GUPTA discusses the critical role of OSS/BSS players to shore up the ecosystem for Next Generation Applications and the challenges in supporting such applications in an interview with PALLAB DUTTA...

Vivek Gupta is Director, Communication Sector, IBM India/South Asia. He is responsible for IBM's business with Telecom, Energy & Utilities and Media & Entertainment industries in India. IBM under his leadership launched On Demand Transformational Strategic Outsourcing and got into long term strategic relationships with some of the large telcos in India. Gupta is an engineer with post graduation in management. He has been working with the Indian telecom industry for the last 17 years. Before IBM, Vivek worked with Ericsson as Director of Sales and was responsible for Business Development & Fulfillment for Ericsson's GSM business in India. Gupta is focused on Innovative Business Strategies and Operational Plans in the dynamic environment of exponential growth.

Which are some of the most significant trends that will revitalize and influence the mobile telephony space in the next three to five years and accordingly fast-forward the acceptance of Next Generation Applications (NGA)? Which trends are expected to be "real" and will continue?

Vivek Gupta: With digital convergence blurring the boundaries of telecom and media, telecom providers can pursue media and advertising markets that were once beyond their reach. The most promising areas are television and video. Many telcos worldwide have already launched IPTV and VoD, and the number is growing fast. The telecom industry has some unique capabilities to satisfy today's consumer demands for flexibility, choice and control, namely: extending the scope and scale of the services; delivering a convenient user experience; and empowering individual users and communities.

Mobile advertising is the hottest topic in the wireless industry right now. Revenues from in-game, mobile, online and interactive TV promotions are forecast to reach US$60 billion a year - or 45 percent of the entire digital content market - by 2010 (see figure 14). ABI Research predicts that worldwide spend of mobile advertising will be worth. US$19 billion by 2011. The bulk of the revenue will be generated by advertising through mobile search and video. The firm estimates that advertising on broadcast mobile video alone will reach about US$9 billion. Moreover, both IPTV and mobile advertising represent great opportunities for telcos to make advertising an important source of revenue.

IPTV provides the means with which to deliver highly targeted, localized, differentiated and interactive advertising. It is possible to place advertisements during a program schedule; tailor them to the viewing habits of specific consumer segments; provide interactive "red-button" functionality so that anyone who is interested in an offer can respond immediately; and measure precisely how many people have seen a particular advertisement. As experience with the Internet shows, personalization and localization are becoming the norm in the advertising world; search engines like Google already deliver language and location-specific content and advertising based on a user's location. Mobile advertising is still an unexploited opportunity for telecom operators. It is one that telcos are particularly well-positioned to capture since they have control over what is delivered to the device.

Everyone from marketers to big media companies to handset makers to Internet players to telecom operators are fighting for mobile advertising revenue. But mobile operators have the best assets to deliver marketing and advertising that meets the consumer need for relevant advertising. Operators are now at the point where they should exploit their unique technical advantages to secure their part of the pie.

Operations support, business support and billing systems have to evolve and gear up to support optimized provisioning of all the wide array of next generation applications. How will major OSS/BSS solution providers address integration with many different network and attendant technology elements and thereby help the proliferation of Next Generation Applications?

Vivek Gupta: IBM provides the business and IT services, hardware and middleware needed for telecom service providers to capitalize on the promise of convergence. IBM is the only vendor with the breadth to supply all the infrastructure, implementation services and partner relationships combined with extensive telecommunications industry knowledge and "hands-on" experience. In addition, IBM offers proven success in business and IT transformation and superior systems integration capabilities.

To successfully tackle the hot mobile and IPTV advertising market, IBM recommends that operators develop an end-to-end mobile advertising platform which meets all the needs of advertisers. This platform should not solely be focused on ad distribution, but must enable dynamic on demand ad insertion and placement, and targeted personalized advertising. It should also provide "red button" functionality for the customers and detailed and accurate statistics to the advertisers. Advertising on mobile devices can take many forms including banners, sponsored video content and messages sent to users, but telcos and advertisers still need to determine what works best in different circumstances

Telcos can give users tools to control the digital content experience themselves, allowing them to determine what they consume and when they consume it. The young and technologically savvy, in particular, do not want to be passive consumers; they want to control their own schedules, produce their own content and share it with their peers. Operators can empower such users by giving them a self-publishing platform. They can also use their location, presence and authentication capabilities to provide enhanced social networking; harness the collective intelligence of consumers to create innovative services and applications and apply their unique insights into the behavior and preferences of individual customers, as well as where they are located, to deliver content and advertising that is highly personalized and relevant to the moment.

What are the challenges in supporting such applications?
Vivek Gupta: Delivering all but the most basic digital content services over networks that were originally designed for voice communications and Web browsing is challenging, and telecom operators will, in all likelihood, have to upgrade their networks to compete. Even with higher compression technology like MPEG-4, delivering HDTV, multi-room TV and the like, as well as voice, gaming, Internet surfing and other communication services means that every home must have a bandwidth of 20 M/bits or more. As demand for high-definition television (HDTV), real-time video on demand (VoD) and other next-generation services increases, we are heading toward a bandwidth crunch in many countries with the possible exception of parts of south-east Asia including Singapore and Korea, where 95 - 100 percent of households can obtain very high speed access. To deliver bandwidthintensive content services and the experience that consumers demand, telecom providers will have to make major investments in upgrading their networks.

The IBM Institute for Business Value's model of the economic implications for investing in the two alternatives to ADSL - fiber-to-the-cabinet (FTTCab) and fiber-tothe- home (FTTH) - shows that additional revenue from content is critical to the business case. However, the investment case for upgrading existing networks is also critically dependent on achieving high penetration rates - in the range of 30 to 50 percent, depending on the option chosen.

What, in your opinion, is the role of other players in the eco-system, for those applications to be successful?
Vivek Gupta: In short, telcos must look to combine their investment in service delivery platforms and IMS with new digital content services; invest in service quality management to enhance the end-to-end user experience across multiple networks and devices and enable users to control their content experiences. Telecom providers would also benefit from collaboration with new platform aggregators, e.g. YouTube, MySpace and Second Life, by exposing and enabling the integration of network capabilities such as location, presence, voice and conferencing in Web 2.0 and virtual worlds.

What is the roadmap for the applications of your focus?
Vivek Gupta: One exciting IBM offering that we see making a key difference as telcos worldwide seek to introduce innovative new services quickly and cost-effectively is an integrated solution based on Web 2.0 tools and techniques. The IBM Innovation Factory for Telecom enables telecom service providers to organize a community of employees, strategic partners, software developers, and subscribers to foster innovation for new telecom services. Innovation Factory for Telecom is a new component of the IBM Service Delivery Platform (SDP). In general, Service Delivery Platform implementations provide tools for service creation, a service execution environment including portals for presentation, and integration with Operations Support Systems/Business Support Systems (OSS/BSS). The most common scenario for Innovation Factory for Telecom is the launch and management of trials for new services. Built on IT assets proven by use within IBM, Innovation Factory for Telecom includes IBM software products, open source offerings, and capabilities from third party vendors. Innovation Factory for Telecom provides:

• A robust collaborative environment to foster both internal and external collaboration for service innovation
• An open framework based on industry standards to maximize flexibility in the integration of Web 2.0 components based on client requirements
• A rich and consistent user interface through a common portal framework ?? Support for agile, iterative trialing of new service ideas
• A role-based design to appropriately support telecom employees, business partners, and subscribers.

In addition, by providing a solution independent of the specific service platform, Innovation Factory for Telecom also provides support for trialing new services that support multiple devices ("the three screens") as well as innovation in assembly through mashups that include network service capabilities. This process brings service providers closer to their subscribers by more accurately creating products that meet subscriber needs and spotting market trends through early and direct subscriber interaction. U.S. provider Sprint Nextel is among IBM's first clients to pilot a solution based on IBM Innovation Factory for Telecom.