TM Forum - Federated Services

With Google, Yahoo and others breathing down their necks, operators need to move beyond being bit carriers in order to stay in the game.
By Keith Willetts, Chairman, TM Forum

There’s nothing like a $44 billion bid to get the pulses of bankers racing, but what exactly does the offer from Microsoft to Yahoo really mean? I suppose the cynic in me looks at this move by Microsoft as their way of saying they have figured out Google’s strategy and have a cunning plan to outwit them.

All of Google’s investment in processing power, storage and now bandwidth and device resident software has to be going somewhere beyond just creating faster search tools that reach more people. I really think this is all about providing an end-to-end, managed platform on which Google or anyone else can mount applications and seamlessly get to most people in the world through a variety of devices, including PCs, televisions and mobile phones.

Although Google may want to dominate in this area, there are entities already in existence that do exactly all of this for a living today: the communications service providers of the world!

A Fragmented Market
Service providers are definitely keeping an eye on Google and will do whatever they can to push back into the space that Google is trying to get into and that potentially Microsoft is pushing into. But the problem they are facing is one of fragmentation, pure and simple.

Companies like Google, Yahoo, MySpace and Facebook have all figured out that providing services on a country-by-country basis just doesn’t make sense. The ideal situation is to make a regional, or even better, a global service play.

These companies have also figured out that consumers would prefer to pay absolutely zero, so the money has to come from businesses that want to reach these people. Advertising is the most obvious choice but there are others like e-government, e-health companies and so on that would also like to work directly with consumers.

This is where the traditional communications companies fall flat on their faces. They usually will only provide services where they have a network infrastructure, which is usually in a single country or a handful of countries at best. If there were a choice of going with a single global platform to get you to your customer, and the alternative was to work with several hundred different operators in different ways on different contracts under different terms and conditions, you’d want to go with the simplest and cheapest method.

But fragmentation gets in the way of service delivery, which is why mobile advertising hasn’t taken off at all and mobile content hasn’t gone far. On the network level, the telecom operators have gotten their networks to work together very well. Whether it’s an IP network or the traditional phone network, anyone can connect up and not even have to think about it. It just works.

To translate this to the service side of the equation, communications service providers have got to get their act together around a common set of standards if they are going to allow the people who are upstream (like a Coca-Cola or a Disney) who want to use their channels to market to customers with content-based or ad-based services.

The providers have to get a small number of service level standards together in a federated way, so if looked at from outside it looks like a single thing when in reality it’s different companies providing different capabilities to different countries and different parts of the world. But to the all-important provider of the content, it looks like a single cohesive thing.

Service Providers Think Global
TM Forum can step in here through our Content Encounter, a ground-breaking, interactive vehicle for forcing the pace of flushing out the management issues of converged content services, and our Service Delivery Framework, which addresses end-to-end management of next-generation services.

The ultimate goal is to help providers create a service delivery platform that would allow them to construct new services quickly, easily and cheaply from reusable components. These components can be shared and exposed so other companies can use components from outside their own company. And if you can do that, it ought to be possible for you to glue them together into a seamless federation. But that takes standards, and that’s exactly what TM Forum is working on.

The opportunity exists for companies like Google to move far beyond its primary role as a search company. It is now in the process of developing a unifying platform for other people to put their services on. Google has also started making a play for the current spectrum bids in the U.S., and it’s buying bandwidth around the world. The intent of this is so they can offer people who want to get to market a way to do that. Whether it’s advertising or content, if Google carries on the way its going, the natural place you’d go to launch a new service is Google.

There may be absolutely nothing wrong with this if the world’s communications companies are content to just be bit carriers. But if they want to be the service provider, especially the service delivery platform of choice, then they’ve got to do more than just getting their own infrastructure.

Choice is good for everyone, and the more competition the better. What the telecom and cable companies have to do is to think global from a service perspective and look at how they can team together to provide emerging ‘upstream’ customers, like advertisers, with a seamless, global footprint. All it will take is a bit of vision and a few standards.