Vodafone’s service announcements with Ebay, MySpace, Google and Yahoo are evidence that the ability to effectively harness web services is becoming critical to telcos – according to web services giant Microsoft.
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Michel Burger, cto of Microsoft’s telecoms sector, said that web mash up services have no quality of service, no control. So when they get aggregated, they tend not to work very well, or at all, for that matter.
What Microsoft is keen to push through its Connected Services Framework and its Soundbox programme, in which developers can experiment with services in a managed way, is a concept of managed network mash ups. It calls this Telco 2.0.
The idea here is that the mobile operators can exploit web services but in a way which doesn’t leave them exposed either on quality of customer experience or on revenue leakage. But we’re not there yet. “We are on the edge of that,” Burger said. “The point is not that they run the services themselves, but that they control the aggregation and if you control the aggregation you are still in control. BT, for example, understands this very well.”
Michael O’Hara, general manager of the service provider business, said that we were now on the downside of the IMS bubble. “We think IMS is a great way of uniting wireline and wireless networks, but what it isn’t is the best way to deliver services. BT committed to IMS in its 21CN, and then it said, ‘Where are the services?’”
O’ Hara added that yesterday’s Vodafone announcement to co-brand and deliver Windows Live and Yahoo IM showed that the operator is now buying into Microsoft’s view of mobile enabled web services – as opposed to SIP-based IMS services built out in an operator network centric way. This was generous of him, as Vodafone is not actually a Microsoft CSF customer. But the point is made. A year ago Vodafone embarked on building out its own IM community. Now it is tapping into the established web services of that application.
Meanwhile Microsoft has launched a hosted push email service aimed at small business users and individuals. Carphone Warehouse and Swedish retailer ONOFF will sell the hosted solution to end users. SmartHost is hosting the servers whilst distributor Dangaard will also sell the product through to the trade. Microsoft is selling the servers at a knock-down price and will recoup through revenue share.
O’Hara said the subs share would be in the order of hundreds of millions of dollars, “So this is a significant piece of business for us.”
Users will also need a Windows Mobile handset, so that will also be a significant piece of business for the Embedded Devices division, one assumes.