Two years after the launch of the GSMA's Personal Instant Messaging initiative, Mobile Europe talks to two of the key players in the instant messaging market to discover what progress has been made, and how operators are addressing the IM opportunity
The participants:
Ana Tavares – Director of Strategic Initiatives, GSMA.
Tavares is responsible for delivering and managing key strategic initiatives within the GSMA. Currently these include the "Personal Instant Messaging" initiative that was launched globally at the 2006 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona.
Allen Scott – General Manager of NeuStar's Next Generation Messaging Services.
With over eighteen years experience working in software, media, the Internet and telecommunications, Scott has worked for several start-ups and held senior executive positions at companies such as Emblaze, Ecom, Vivao, Vodafone Global, AT&T and Novell.
Since the PIM Initiative was launched, what progress have we seen? What countries can we point to where operators are offering interconnection between groups of IM communities?
Tavares:
The official launch was in February 2006, and since then we've had a lot of things to learn on how you can reach actual interoperability on a brand new service. You don't have handsets that are prepared for it from day one, operators have to connect to each other, it takes some time. There are a lot of agreements to conclude, the commercial business model has to be discussed. All these things take a long time, more than we probably thought in the beginning. So they take a long time to reach a stage where you can say we have live services and they are all interoperable and it‘s working.
Scott:
When the initiative was first announced there were already operators that were interoperable. If you look at France there were three operators that were interoperable in Orange, SFR and Bouygues. At the time the Wireless Village standards were not very clearly defined so it meant the handset vendors were creating different user experiences on the handset. Also there were few IM capable handsets and the branding, pricing and the positioning were unclear. So from the consumer perspective it wasn't very easy. So we saw some early adopters but we also saw some stayers. Telecom Italia was one of the very first in Europe, branded as Alice Messenger, and it stayed the course, and the reason it stayed the course is that TIM believes there is a space for an SMS version 2, that is much more interactive than SMS. And IM from the operators' point of view was very much about an extension of SMS.
Tavares:
Europe, apart from China Mobile, was the first to start, after that the initiative started to grow in other regions. Asia was a big area of growth in 2007. In Asia we have 18 operators with live services, interoperability already in India and a lot of interoperability is being progressed in other Asian countries. Malaysia and India are probably the only two countries which have at least two operators interconnected with live services, but there are more to come.
From there the initiative started to focus on all the continents. We have launches in Latin America, and in Brazil all the operators have got together to launch one service for everyone. They are doing one single RFP to the market to select one single platform. That makes it easier in terms of interoperability, but of course a process like that requires a lot of operators to agree on things like features, and what the service looks like, but also leave some space for customization. They think this is the best way to get a service working for all Brazil in a short time frame.
With IM already so established in the ISP communities, how have operators responded to the call to create their own IM communities?
Tavares:
What is important to understand is that when we started in 2006 there was a view that what we were doing was being in competition to MSN, Yahoo! and ICQ. And a lot of times we were asked, "Why don't we interconnect with them?" Actually what we were trying to achieve in the market is a bit more than that.
SMS is a very successful but a very simple service. For youth and more advanced users it's not enough. As you have more capable handsets and higher speeds on the phone, it's important that operators start to think in terms of evolving their messaging suite and the services to their customers. IM is not just a window of conversation; it's much more than that. It's a convergence of different services that you can have in one single service. So it's much more integrated, and to achieve that and to achieve interoperability, which is what makes SMS successful, there is a lot of work to be done. And we have a lot of lessons to learn in how long it takes to get intero-perability. It's not the technical tests. The technical part is easy. It's how you get it to the phone, how you market it.
Scott:
The operators see the benefit in offering multiple IM services and consumers are comfortable with more than one IM community. We see operators like Optimus, and Telecom Italia, having a very similar approach, engaging with the ISPs to drive ISP IM adoption and they are also driving SMS version two. The reason they are doing that is they see two different services for two quite distinct reasons. An operator, if you think about their skills, it is all about the network. So what they are doing is supporting the brands such as Microsoft, Yahoo!, ICQ and Google and at the same time utilising their core brand and network assets. Thus they are offering multiple branded services as well as chat like services of their own.
Optimus have gone one step further and created their own converged solution including a fixed PC client, based on SIP, as well as working with the ISPs. Telecom Italia has a very similar strategy, based on giving the consumer what they want.
Is that dual-approach a settled pattern, or are we still seeing operators finding their way?
Scott:
It's a long experiment, with perhaps four or five phases. Vodafone went on a big experiment that was "own community", and they've now gone with a second big experiment using Microsoft to drive adoption. When people say, PIM's dead, and I've heard that a lot, I see about 30% of our customers have their own community. Look at Russia, where all three operators will interconnect soon, because their market is driven more by mobile than by PC's.
Turkcell is another one that launched their own community and then launched Microsoft, but they are still branding and positioning their own community.
The evidence shows that services such as Windows Live Messenger can happily co-exist and be successful alongside operator branded communities.
So we're in an evolution phase, and I think there will be four or five more phases before we see what it will finally look like on mobile.
Tavares:
The way we position it is that we realise internet communities exist and operators will connect – and the best way perhaps is to aggregate that. The way we have been trying to work with operators is on the evolution of their own messaging suite – having presence, the internet, on the phone. The community already exists, what's missing is the interoperability and interconnect. That's where we've been trying to get engaged.
Sometimes I don't like the term own community because all the operators have their communities already, and a relationship with their users that is much stronger and broader than much of the internet sites. They really know their customers, and have much more information about their customers than the ISPs. The relationship between the operators and customers is of trust, and I think that's why they are reluctant to launch something that is not foolproof and of absolute quality of service. That's why operators are taking this stage by stage, thinking about adding presence on the contact list, maybe thinking about offering SMS-threaded, and evolving it into something that in the future can be the full communications suite.
Scott:
If consumers already have access to something on the internet, yes, make it available to them. The place of the operator is to take those services and turn it into a mobile consumer experience, make it very simple for them. The easiest thing to do is to take my contacts and show how someone is available, and then allow me to choose how to contact her. But it's not as simple as just extending it to the handset because you lose control of the user experience.
Does the PIM Initiative extend as far as the marketing of services – how operators position IM as a service, and within their brand identities?
Tavares:
I sometimes think the marketing side is underestimated. If two operators call an IM service different things within the same country, how can the customer know that the two services can talk to each other, even if it's technically possible? This sort of issue made the operators realise they have to engage in discussions at a level that before they have not had to.
Scott:
I would say it's been difficult when you've had interoperability guys talking to the marketing guys, who have other priorities. So there was a political situation, and one of the things that has happened now is the guy in the operator that owns SMS now owns IM, so he's got one bucket.
And without a doubt the branding is a tricky one. The market is still not quite sure what to call it. It's not easy to create a new service overnight, particularly where people are looking to the internet for their new services. Yet, Telecom Italia have had this vision for ten years, and now what they are launching is a presence-enabled address book, and the more interoperability there is, the more you are going to see it proceed like SMS did.
What we're also seeing now is more below the line marketing, building it into the boxes, the core communication channels. Optimus believe this is their future so they are going to be pushing it, saying, "let's get out there, let's provide Instant Messaging, let's do all of it together and get the consumer into our space with IM".
And alongside these issues, interoperability remains the key to true, mass market adoption? When do you think we might see that?
Tavares:
One example of how interoperability can drive the number of subscribers quite quickly is if you pick an operator which has enough critical mass to demonstrate that. China Mobile alone has more subscribers than many countries have people, and the last figures they exposed was 70 million subscribers for the service they launched last year, which is almost 25% of their subscriber base. That's what can happen when you have interoperability.
Scott:
This experiment is a lot harder than we thought, and adoption is hard. It's slow. But we are starting to see subscriber growth with the availability of IM enabled handsets and the support of the ISPs.
Tavares:
If you think about it, it's been two years and a couple of months since the first announcement. I haven't seen any launch that has come to market in less than 12 months where operators have discussed interoperability of a service. But there are already examples in Asia where at least two operators already have service. And Brazil is working in that regard as well. So there is progress everywhere.