Summary Bullets:
- Recent consumer service innovations point to the renewed importance of carrier billing and operations infrastructures.
- New carrier competition will only serve to grow this importance.
This week, I will be in Riga, Latvia speaking at the ETIS Community Gathering on a few topics, including the impact of service innovation on OSS/BSS infrastructures along with a framework for making telco operations and billing procurement decisions. If you’re not familiar with ETIS, it is an organization focused on telecom IT. As we built out our new ‘Service Enablement Ecosystem’ coverage, it only seemed natural to work more closely with ETIS.
If you have any questions about why we’ve spent the last year building up our OSS/BSS coverage, you need look no further than our ‘Consumer Services’ and ‘Consumer Platforms and Devices’ coverage. Consider some recent industry innovations:
- T-Mobile Takes a Hatchet to International Data Roaming Charges and Continues with Solid LTE Rollout Progress
- Facebook’s Plan to Leverage User Analytics Pushes WiFi Beyond a Connectivity Service
- Google Finally Makes Tablet Apps Easier to Find, Just in Time for the Holiday Selling Season
- Samsung Galaxy Round Has a Curved Screen for No Apparent Reason
Device innovation may be revolving around strange new display capabilities and a battle of the platforms (iOS vs. Android vs. everyone else), but service innovation is alive and well and pointing to ever more complex challenges from a billing and operations standpoint. T-Mobile will doubtless look like a hero to its customers who don’t need to worry about turning data off on their phones when they travel abroad. The upside for partners, of course, is a potential revenue bump from users who are willing to spend a few dollars to get more than 2G speeds. It’s a win-win-win situation, but the billing and fulfillment aspects are not trivial. Yet, as carriers find themselves increasingly up against the services of non-traditional competitors such as Facebook, this level of innovation (and complexity) will need to become the ‘new normal.’