With the June 24 TM Forum webinar and Team Action Week sessions (interest groups, SDF next phase), we’ve announced a direction and priority scope for the TM Forum’s Enabling New Services Initiative. Work remains to be done in tuning it and our execution plans, but it feels great to me to now be started. The initiative includes a dual focus: product trading between businesses (e.g., part of B2B space), and management of new enabling services.
On July 13, industry visionary Alan Quayle blogged about some of the same themes that lead the TM Forum Enabling New Services Initiative's focus. I was delighted to read Alan’s insights and strongly agree with his views in this post. Such resonating agreement includes most views found in other posts he links back to (e.g., developer needs). I especially support the point that Service Providers cannot effectively monetize enabling services by nickel and diming businesses and developers using the atomic enabling services ("dips"/usage). That's true now especially in a market phase of investing in market share/goodwill, developer relationships, and fostering third party innovation.
Digital product distribution solutions are also essential for getting apps and third-party services wired to--and hosted by--Service Provider’s enabling services in the cloud. Amazon and eBay-like distribution business models (like portals & app stores) are an important two-sided value-add for providers to win share of monetized business. IT customer buying decisions, from sole proprietor developers to the largest business corporations like banks, will be made during both build-time and run-time (across the lifecycle) of apps, content, and top-level services that rely on SP enabling services from hopefully interoperable platforms in the cloud.
I encourage everyone to read Alan’s blog post and most links in it. Alan has said very important things much better than I can again.
However, in adding to Alan’s closing example in his blog, many TM Forum member companies supply solid commercial parts of the enabling platform solution space. However, CSP executive leaders and all of us in the industry have collaborative and procurement work to do on realizing qualities of web-facing interoperability, simplicity, and unity. Reducing fragmentation facing third party developers on the web is absolutely critical for CSPs and their supply ecosystem to grow new industry share. I applaud the efforts of the Wholesale Apps Community (WAC) in this area. We must go further in the distribution and enabling services areas to address fragmentation for upstream businesses and tech developers. If we do not, new types of Service Providers doing distribution may get most of the new enabling services business share. These new SPs have advantages by having over 500,000,000 downstream users (including valuable user information) today on their proprietary platform.
Posted
07-30-2010 9:59 AM
by
Stephen Fleece