The Device Blog

Call to Action

ChrisB13 — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:35:00 GMT

(This post is an excerpt from an article I wrote that appeared in this month’s Pipeline, check out the full version here.)

As the new digital media commerce and service applications chains emerge, there is an explosion of isolated solutions. There are lots of new devices in the value chain and many more are coming. The devices are of many different types and employ a variety of methods to connect to each other and to applications to deliver the services needed by their users. There are also multiple protocols that have evolved to manage the devices. Enterprise customers, service providers, consumers, network infrastructure providers, retailers and resellers, and device manufacturers all have a stake in simplifying the management of large numbers of existing and newly arriving devices. Key innovations from device players (such as the Apple iPhone store, Google’s Android, Nokia’s Sybian outsourcing and the war for the home gateway market by gaming companies) place welcome but difficult demands on the business.

Consumers lose time and become frustrated trying to use and connect a quickly increasing number of new devices at home and on the move. They also encounter an upward spiraling of unexpected charges when using and connecting the devices.

Device manufacturers experience cost increases and squeezed margins due to product returns and user support costs. Their brand credibility can be damaged due to gaps in customer support that lead to consumer dissatisfaction.

Service providers find that their customers expect exponentially increasing bandwidth, but there is little elasticity on the price they are willing to pay. Further, the costs to deliver customer care are difficult to contain due to lack of user support in the device offerings.

Enterprise customers need to deploy their IT staff to fill the gaps in device management, increasing their total cost of ownership.

The price of inaction by the industry to master device management will be high!

For consumers, “time and money fatigue” will result in loss of enthusiasm to buy newer devices, resulting over time in relative dampening on the appearance of new and interesting devices and applications.

For device manufacturers, plummeting sales will result in industry consolidation and loss of resources to innovate. The costs of user support and the losses due to returns will be unacceptable.

For service providers, there will be a loss of new revenue opportunities as well as existing revenues and an unending proliferation of staff associated with managing devices.

For enterprise customers, there will be a loss of agility due to lockdown of highly skilled staff on work not associated with core business needs.

Leading members of TM Forum have started to collaborate to define areas not yet fully addressed by the device management solutions and standards currently available, across a variety of devices and connection technologies. These members include: T-Mobile Netherlands, Korea Telecom, Telecom Italia, Ericsson, Nokia-Siemens Networks, Siemens, Telcordia, Cisco, HP, Square Hoop and Peak8 Solutions. Agreeing on the requirements that need to be addressed will lead to further work to specify standards, either within TM Forum, or in other relevant partner industry organizations that will be identified and recommended as best suited for a particular requirement.

Deliverables planned by the TM Forum include a common roadmap for digital commerce enablers -- encompassing device management, the content encounter vehicle, and new programs to address value chains and end-to-end customer experience management. A key aspect of this will be a device management framework – an architecture to describe how a device integrates into an overall end-to-end managed service delivery, with a base set of requirements that must include aspects such as location, presence, on/off status, screen aspect ratio, network types supported (e.g. 3G, GPRS), and advanced security features.

The TM Forum is well positioned to address these challenges. A critical mass of stakeholders is already engaged to address the end-end aspects across the entire value chain. The Forum’s service provider and enterprise focus enable correct business requirements to be known and prioritized for managing devices. The Forum has a successful track record and infrastructure in place to manage collaboration programs. Faster delivery of solutions and better integration is possible due to expertise and resources in related business operations frameworks (for business processes, information, and applications) as well as product lifecycle management and service delivery.

For device manufacturers and consumers, education may be needed to overcome resistance to paying for management support in devices. Device manufacturers are not a monolithic group – concise subgroup identifications and targeted value propositions are needed. A highly competitive device market may create resistance to collaboration.

For service providers, it will be critical to fund participation to develop and deploy the device management framework and the key projects.

For enterprises, a key element will be recruiting other enterprises to come join the effort to create common procurement guidelines to simplify the process and save resources.

Delivering results on these ambitious device management projects will require committed investment and perseverance. But the industry has little alternative. The time has come to address these challenges in the TM Forum.

A “Billion Dollar Opportunity”

ChrisB13 — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:07:00 GMT

There is a strong demand by consumers for more direct assistance and automation in managing the devices they buy and use. The time and expertise required to manage the increasing number and complexity of devices (affordable due to ever lower prices) must be lowered if the penetration of those devices into homes (and office for that matter) is not to be compromised.

Some of the new offerings around Device User Support, anticipated by the device management focus area demo on the topic by Peak8 Solutions at Management World in May, and again in June at the Device Management Summit in Santa Clara, are starting to accelerate now and are making waves in the industry.

Peter Svensson of AP reports here on some new offerings by service providers to help consumers manage their home gadgets. In particular, AT&T has announced ConnecTech which is independent of communications services and has a value proposition that commands a price of $99 per month and up.

This is a huge opportunity and the TM Forum can help the players better position their offerings and capture more of the market, through finding common approaches to device user support that facilitate wider partnering.

We will be discussing these topics and more at the joint CABA/TM Forum workshop (see here) on “Service Providers and the Connected Home” next week in Santa Clara, hosted by Cisco. This will include a demo of TelePresence in the Cisco labs. I hope that you can attend.

Your thoughts?

Coming together to learn and collaborate

ChrisB13 — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:21:00 GMT

The Device Management Summit held in the heart of the Silicon Valley this week was a success, not only as a meeting of minds, but as an opportunity to explore new related technologies.

A significant new step forward was also taken by the TM Forum. Chuck Trent, VP of Information Technology from Cisco, described the need to leverage the TM Forum collaboration program to consolidate Enterprise IT requirements for device management, in order to reference them in the procurement process to service providers and device manufacturers. He offered to help us document these for review and to help engage his peers (CIOs) in other large enterprises across other industry verticals (e.g. banks, real estate) to participate. Chuck wants to redeploy many people on his staff who are currently engaged in activities managing devices that are not part of his core business, since he prefers to outsource these activities to his service provider and device manufacturer suppliers.

Chris Albano of Comcast, together with Jim Thomsen of Westell and Jim Hunter of 4HomeMedia, participated in a lively discussion of device management in the home networking context, that included Matt Herdlein of Telcordia and Uwe Alkemper of Detecon. The requirements and business drivers for device management were introduced by Abraham Joseph of the Device Management Forum, who also led the panel.

Architecture implications of these business requirements were addressed in a second panel, with Jaime Fink of 2Wire (representing the DSL Forum, which is now has a new name – the Broadband Forum), Frank Den Hartog of the Home Gateway Initiative, and Stan Moyer who is President of the OSGi Alliance. Jim Hunter offered another perspective from his experience in CableLabs. The TM Forum will be contributing to the understanding and definition of device management requirements across the industry.

Following the summit were two days of sessions and interactions at Connections 2008 with its 1000 attendees and exhibitors, which also included the TM Forum demonstrations of zero-touch deployment, integrated CPE testing, and delivery of device user support. TM Forum members attending commented that this was a very important opportunity -- they were able to engage new companies to work with them in their businesses, and with us in the TM Forum. Even though the event was much smaller than Management World, they were able to gather an equal number of quality contacts.

Another comment was that they attended not so much to participate in TM Forum work or to meet customers (which they are able to well accomplish at Management World) but to explore a part of the industry that is innovating in ways they do not normally see and ensure their capability to address these requirements. And that this event delivered on that expectation.

Perhaps the most gratifying comment of all was that the TM Forum activities in device management have come a long way since we launched them last year. They need to – the industry is moving very fast!

Comments?

Momentum is building for the TM Forum's role in Device Management

ChrisB13 — Fri, 30 May 2008 03:09:00 GMT

Last week saw a watershed for the collaboration efforts on device management in the TM Forum. Following a new draft of the Guidebook being developed by the TM Forum members working in the collaboration team, we met at Management World 2008 in Nice. There was a lot of traffic and interest at the Device Management Focus Area demonstrations, being shown for the first time by Cisco, Square Hoop, Telcordia and Peak8 Solutions.

Then we followed that up with a half-day speaking and panel session - Accenture kicked it off and then the leaders of the Guidebook team - Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Siemens, HP, T-Mobile Netherlands, Ericsson, Nokia-Siemens Networks and Telcordia - engaged in lively questions with the large audience, with no interruption at the break, capably orchestrated by Abraham Joseph of the Device Management Forum (DMF).

With hardly any time to rest - on June 23rd we will kick off a set of meetings of the TM Forum member companies in Santa Clara to review the next Guidebook draft - including some new member companies.

The next day (June 24) we will hold the TM Forum Device Management Summit there (more info here). This time, in addition to senior executives from the DMF, Cisco, Detecon (Deutsche Telekom consulting), Telcordia, and Peak8 Solutions, we will add welcome new inputs from companies new to the TM Forum: Comcast, tier-1 device manufacturer Westell, 4HomeMedia, and 2Wire (representing the DSL Forum). And we will wrap it up with standards discussion including also senior executives from the Home Gateway Initiative and OSGi.

On June 25-26, in addition to continuing our collaboration meetings, we will be able to network with and learn from device companies at Connections 2008, and demonstrate our work and offerings to them.

As if that weren't enough, we hear that Sony - that has been, together with the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), one of the main proponents of DCR Plus - has just announced support for rival protocol tru2way (which happens to use the TM Forum's IPDR/SP protocol for high-speed exchange of massive amounts of structured data). (See an excellent article on this here on the CNET's Crave blog.) It will be interesting to hear what the attendees at Connections in Santa Clara have to say about that - many of the attendees are members of the CEA, which is sponsoring the event.

Comments?

CTIA Wireless - a regional afterglow of the Mobile World Congress

ChrisB13 — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Seven weeks is a short time between major wireless tradeshows, and the US focus of the CTIA Wireless show in Las Vegas reduces further the volume of news one can expect, but nevertheless some interesting thoughts and reports came from those who attended.

I have compiled some major observations from the trade press and want to share them with you. Please do comment on them – we hope to encourage reader interaction in our blogs!

The iPhone has revolutionized web browsing using wireless access, and although Apple's presence at the show was hardly overt, this has stimulated other manufacturers to meet the challenge, as Jan Dawson of Ovum describes here.

Antoine Wright, posted in Mobile Computing, discusses how the iPhone has created greater expectations in general for device usability.

The emergence of true internet browsing over wireless (with the iPhone and other devices that will be coming out) and the demand for it from the advertising business is creating pressure on the wireless internet - see this interesting piece by Paul Grim of VC firm Sunbridge Partners.

The Chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Kevin Martin, announcing the FCC ruling against SKYPE, complimented the new "openness" of carriers - read Brad Reed's article in ComputerWorld.

Chetan Sharma (reporting to the French website of Service Mobiles) points out that, however, openness depends on the point of view of the industry stakeholders involved.

Your thoughts? Conflicting views?

Barcelona report, and anticipating Nice and Santa Clara

ChrisB13 — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 19:41:00 GMT

It has been too long without a blog entry, I know, but my excuse is that too much was happening (and I am sticking to it!). Maybe you will find this more believable if you just read on.

First off, the predicted trip to Barcelona – Nola Balas of T-Mobile Netherlands accompanied me to the speaker's podium at the pre-show Business Operations Symposium to talk about the work recently concluded by our team in Lisbon, and more specifically the fixed and mobile operator requirements for device management she experiences in the daily operations of a major national network with many devices of different access types. One tier 1 telco CTO commented on assuming his chair in a panel session that followed, "I liked the part about 'Zero-Touch Deployment!!'. We later heard rumors that John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco (who is the company that will lead the catalyst in our program that bears this name) presented something similar but on a grander scale, in a decidedly bigger room than ours, introducing his "Chief Demonstration Officer" to show it (to sympathetic groans from the crowd).

Abraham Joseph, who leads the marketing efforts of our collaboration team and is also the Founder and CEO of the Device Management Forum, www.devicemanagement.org, had a booth at MWC and helped us meet several device manufacturers and interact on their requirements for the TM Forum program.

Our "next big thing" (apart from our usual and much larger event in Nice, Management World 2008 in May) will be a Device Management Summit that we have announced and that is now open for registration – it will take place June 24 in Santa Clara, California and is in collaboration with one of our "pillar" organizations, the Consumer Electronics Association, and organized by Parks Associates. Check out the announcement on the www.tmforum.org homepage.

Welcome to Chris Ballard's Blog!

JoshG1 — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 14:44:00 GMT

Welcome to my blog! And welcome to the many new companies and new types of companies that will be joining us thanks to one of our new focus areas – end-user device management. I am delighted to have the opportunity to share some ideas with you and get some feedback in agile fashion to keep us on the right track. Things are moving too fast to take a waterfall approach!

My main sounding board up to now in the device arena has been my 8-year old son who can configure our own home devices in a twinkling of an eye. I could sure use him at the trade fairs I am attending but he is too young to get in and he is busy attending school.

So now I will turn to you too – please send your comments in to this blog.

These past four months have been a whirlwind of activity in the TM Forum in the Device Sector as we launched it – and I'd like to share my excitement by describing how it unfolded from my point of view.

We started with an open webinar on October 19th to the membership introducing some key thoughts on the topic from Deutsche Telekom and Motorola. Within only two weeks we had attracted some 31 more members to the new interest group, including 7 more service providers! This led to us to issue a press release in Dallas on November 5th describing the group and its goals and objectives. One of the objectives that I had set within the team of members and staff was to recruit a large corporate enterprise that needed to manage large numbers of end-user devices. I reasoned that this would help drive and prioritize the correct set of requirements to manage end-user devices to service providers and the entire business operations supply chain.

The morning of November 6th when I turned up to breakfast in Dallas, an energetic and enthusiastic young lady ran up behind me and called out, "Are you Chris Ballard?" I turned around and confirmed this. She said, "Good morning, I am from Cisco! I have never heard of the TM Forum, but I live in Dallas, and one of my suppliers advised me that there was a big conference in town. I checked out your website, saw the press release quoting you, and I really need your help!" As we started to talk, I realized that she was the person that I needed help from even more – she had the management responsibility, within the internal IT organization of Cisco, to deploy a set of wired and wireless end-user devices, and a home gateway, to the homes of several tens of thousands of teleworking Cisco employees. And her team was based in California – she herself was teleworking from her home in Dallas! So I had found my large corporate enterprise, or rather, she had found me, the same day that we issued the press release. I take this as an omen that the industry need is overwhelming and the time is right for the problems we are describing to be addressed.

This was the start of a collaboration that will culminate in a catalyst demonstration on "Zero-Touch Deployment" at Management World 2008 in Nice in May, led by Cisco IT. The requirements spinning off from this catalyst have been identified in a first pass in Lisbon at team action week, and fall in the areas of (at least) service delivery framework (SDF), product lifecycle management (PLM), and the shared information data (SID) model, as well as end-user device management.

Another company that spoke on a panel discussion during the spotlight session I chaired in Dallas, Peak8 Solutions, proposed a second catalyst demonstration that is also out to open call and will be demonstrated in Nice, "Delivering Device User Support". They invited me to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in early January, the huge annual extravaganza put on by the Consumer Electronics Association. We spoke there with several large tier-one device manufacturers and their consistent response to the question, "What is your main pain point?" turned out to be sure enough, "The cost of user support." One of these companies was the division of a large industrial conglomerate that manufactures automated home locks that can be controlled by the user when he is away from home using his home gateway. We are recruiting the conglomerate into the TM Forum as a new member and plan to demonstrate the support of their devices in the catalyst.

Please do have a look at these catalyst program open calls (under "Technical Programs") – several companies have joined the catalysts already and we welcome wider participation to broaden the requirements and increase the relevance of the outputs to the membership and the wider industry.

We had a record attendance last week in Lisbon at team action week, and a lively discussion in our team. In addition to the catalysts, we started a third project to write an overall strategy document on end-user device management. See our program webpage (under "Business Solutions") for a high-level description of the program and instructions to join the team that is writing this strategy.

Now I am off again tomorrow to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to speak at the Business Operations Symposium and to as many device manufacturers as I can – I'll give you an update next time!