Alcatel-Lucent began the week by launching its new CEM portfolio. This might just be the dullest opening sentence to a weekly newsletter ever, but there is some importance to it.
What we are seeing is the major network equipment vendors continue to reposition themselves not as, just that, equipment vendors, but as enablers of Customer Experience Management. The fact that you might buy a few base stations from them is incidental to the most important thing, helping you position yourself as the most proactive, responsive, intelligent goddam service provider out there.
How to do this, or how to be this, is something the NEPs profess enormous knowledge of, although, of course, that’s not new. They have been building up their managed services and consulting capability for years, and all that professional services capability needs something to be professionally serving. Alcatel-Lucent in particular has long had a long suit in BSS. I can remember seeing presentations about its end to end services capability years ago, drawing on convergent charging and billing capabilities, through OSS skills (really network element management), service creation and delivery, through to the actual network equipment itself. NSN bought subscriber data management specialist Apertio in 2008, and built a SDM and now CEM practice on that acquisition, adding it to its existing network data smarts. Ericsson too has had major presence in charging and billing type solutions through the likes of LHS and now it has added Telcordia, which gives it a big boost in OSS stuff like service assurance. All of them, of course, offer those network and systems integration capabilities.
So the vendors realised a while ago that all the data they have churning out of their switches, through their charging and billing systems, through their element management and monitoring systems could, if used in association with more customer-facing data,such as charging and billing info, be very useful stuff to an operator looking for an edge.
The battle is not so much in convincing operators the worth of this. They are on board, and have pushed off from the quayside already. Many operators, for example, have a Chief CEM Officer, or similar, who is in charge of making sure that right across the business, units are thinking about what they do in terms of how it affects the customer experience.
The battle is, why work with the NEPs? This is really about shifting data around business units, or rather making data available to business units in a way that makes sense to that unit. And the NEPS, even if they are accepted as being the sort of companies who could do this are (excepting NSN) late to this game. The major players like Amdocs, Oracle, HP, and a host of companies with more focussed, point solutions, are already out there. There have been some big investments in NEP CEM: they are not all going to pay off.
Now, here’s something that might put a dent in a few power point presentations at Mobile World Congress – evidence from Vodafone that is is seeing the annual doubling in data traffic volume start to look more like an annual 20% growth in volumes. For the second quarter in a row the operator said that it had matched data volumes to data revenues growth, at around 20%. I don’t know how many business cases are being built on projections of continuing “n” times growth in mobile data traffic, but it certainly spans everything from new antenna design to WiFi offload to content optimisation to network optimisation to the perceived need for operators to charge content providers for driving bandwidth demand.
It’s just one operator, of course, and a couple of quarters, and there are still many users out there yet to get on the smartphone train. But it will be interesting to see if a new orthodoxy builds around the view that policy, user controls and traffic management have done their job, and the networks are coping OK, thank you.
Indeed, perhaps we’ll go back to seeing demand for solutions that drive traffic across the network, as the operators look to up their data packages. Guaranteed HD video over mobile as a differentiator, anyone?