Convergence: The New Service Manifesto

Telecom industry worldwide is undergoing a metamorphosis. The single biggest
phenomenon that is driving this industry is convergence. Convergence of
services, ideologies and cross industry cultures is redefining the customer
expectations. Complexities in hosting, switching, routing and transport
platforms on which these services are delivered and managed, have increased.
These are making both the network control environment and the service visions
more IT based and oriented. Enterprise customers now put stringent demands for a
flexible and dynamic service support. To support these trends, telcom operators
worldwide are becoming increasingly reliant on the provision of high quality IT
services.

Moreover, as the communication needs of the common man evolve, aided by
Internet revolution, the stakeholders of the telecom pie are increasing by each
passing minute. Each one of them brings in not only a value add for the end
user, but also a baggage of systems and processes that were henceforth alien to
the communication industry. The new direction is leading to an overlapped and
complicated juxtaposition of process engineering based challenges in both IT and
telecom space. The future service order will be to define and operate business
processes, which facilitate the new service management and delivery. The
business process thus derived would address issues like service delivery models,
costing and revenue sharing and service support mechanisms.

Service Delivery Models

Internet users are now exposed to different modes of communication as
against the telephony. A more loosely bound but immensely more affordable world
of web. And this communication is not just voice or text. It includes pictures,
videos and is not limited to person-to-person communication. Communities and
user groups are being created on the fly and information exchange is not limited
to and from the people known to each other. Content is driving the service
subscription on Internet, both paid and free. And delivering the content is name
of the game here. Identifying the right content, in the right format at the
right cost and delivering it in a secure manner is fundamental to any kind of
business model for the communication industry. The service centric models now
take a top down approach to define the network needs, which would carry them.
Today's service models aspire to be network agnostic so that they can deliver
services on any type of network. We have come a long way from older network
based services to network agnostic services and this transformation is not only
impacting the service delivery models but the basic business rules in telecom.

Historically, telecom services have been network centric. This means that the
service bouquet, which a telecom service provider can offer depends primarily on
the network that the user has deployed. Since voice was one and only service
which a telephone company used to offer for a long time, the network from its
reach and reliability perspective was the only driver. Technology evolution was
more on higher efficiencies, lower failure rates and better reliabilities.
Evolving over a long period of time, focusing on the 'how' of delivering
voice to the customer, telecom networks have become a benchmark in service level
reliabilities. Phrases like 'telco grade architecture' have germinated out
of such high redundancy, high reliability requirements with near zero downtime
on service.

With unprecedented growth in speed and subsequent digital revolution, the
migration from analog networks to electronic network and then to digital
networks is history now. The adoption of Internet is the driving force that has
fuelled this revolution. Adoption has come from all kinds of sectors be it
education, medicine, commerce or retail. The number of Internet users has
surpassed all maximums thus achieving a paradigm shift in the perspective of
users, service providers and entrepreneurs. This started with free e-mail and
chat engines, which revolutionized personal communication. For the first time in
the world, we saw international boundaries being blurred and communication
happen seamlessly across geographies, time zones and countries. What has given
this penetration an added impetus was the fact that these services were offered
for free. From school-going children to housewives at home, from elderly parents
to research scholars, the use of Internet has been immense and for a plethora of
personal needs.

Changing Cost Points

This marriage is not limited to Internet and existing telco networks. The
third important player here is the entertainment industry. Fundamentally,
different from the telecom and IT infrastructure industries, entertainment
industry consists of a huge set of small and big players, both organized and
un-organized. With subjects like copyrights and digital rights management
evolving to meet today's challenge of content piracy, entertainment industry
is also gearing up to address the content hosting, distribution and management
issues. However, these three major stakeholders react to the service costing
concepts in three clearly different approaches.

Telco's in their best outfit as network owners derive the cost points from
a 'cost of effort' or a aproportioned cost model, fully allocated or an
incremental one. In fact, this is the way telecom regulators worldwide define a
top down or a bottom up approach to define the cost components that are then
used to derive inter-operator settlements or to benchmark tariffs. These models
work on the principle of identifying tangible cost components in the network and
assign a weight to each one of them depending on its role in overall delivery of
service.

IT industry has brought in the value add of more sophisticated OSS layer, of
open and more adoptive interfaces and most of all, of a remarkably flexibly
service layer concept which totally alienates the network layer from the
services layer. An isolation of this kind is heavenly for both network equipment
vendors and application providers. Network equipment vendors do not need to
change the network core, which can now be service agnostic and can serve as
'digital infrastructure' that enables these services. Application providers
on the other hand are happy, as they can now create network agnostic services,
which can be delivered over any network thus enhancing the spectrum of service
delivery. From a cost point perspective, the model is interface based or license
based.

Telco's in their best outfit as network owners derive the cost points from a 'cost of effort' or a aproportioned cost model, fully allocated or an incremental one

Finally, the payload that rides over the vehicles thus created by the telco/IT
combine decides the cost of services. The variance depends on issues like type
of content, availability, copyrights for original and digital rights and most of
all market needs.

With B2B and B2C transactions on the rise, there is an increasing awareness
and willingness of a big customer segment to start using the 'anytime
anywhere' kind of services for Internet access, m-commerce and content
delivery. Migrating to such a service centric model from a network centric model
would not only need change in network architectures but would involve a much
more significant transformation of business processes in the organization.
Models like TOM (telecom operations management) are serving as a framework for
the newer, service centric business processes.

The path forward is clear henceforth, this unique trilogy has the capability
to deliver delight to the customer. However, the transformation has its set of
teething problems, and while the forces take their time to synergize, there is a
waiting period for the customer before he gets his anytime, anywhere set of
services.

Shyam Mardikar, VP, Network
Services, Bharti Airtel

vadmail@cybermedia.co.in