service delivery innovation summit 2014 summary

SDIS2014 Service Delivery Innovation Summit Summary (previously known as the Global SDP Summit)

Agenda •  Telus: An SDP Journey. Cynthia Wong, Telus

•  Service Delivery Broker: Business, Governance and Security Architecture for Digital

Services. António Cruz, Portugal Telecom

•  Telecom Italia’s update on Network API Platform. Francesco Vadala and Vincenzo

Amorino

•  Using the OTT approach to drive innovation within operators. Karel Bourgois, Orange

•  Cross-Industry Business Development: IoT and Telco APIs for a Smart World. Dirk

Rejahl, BearingPoint; Sascha Wolter, Deutsche Telekom

•  Direct Carrier Billing – API Monetization Opportunity Using Partnership with OTT.

Martin Prosek, O2

•  Network of the future - Market need and its influence on services standards. Eshwar

Pittampalli, Ph.D., Market Development Director, OMA

•  Transforming the telco service portfolio through cloud delivery. Ivan Krevatin,

Hrvatski Telekom

•  Bringing Clouds, SDN and NFV Together. Dr. Adel Al-Hezmi, Dipl. Ing. Florian

Schreiner and Giuseppe Carella; Fraunhofer FOKUS

•  15.00 Afternoon Break

Cynthia gave a great overview of their API program, in some ways similar to Telenor and Telecom Italia with a focus on internal and partner consumption

of APIs.

This remains all too common the case for telcos. 9 months is ignoring the 12-18 months required to get the project off the ground.

SDF is essentially an API Management platform.

Premium SMS content providers account for a significant % of partner API transactions. Internal consumption, particularly by Telus web properties, is

currently the fastest growing segment.

With success came a hiccup and a focus on process, governance and best practices. This is also a focus from Antonio Cruz and Francesco Vadala’s

presentations.

API platforms need to enable many APIs, most of which are not standardized and have no need of being standardized.

Service orientation is not an option, API is how services are expressed and consumed. Telus have a strong focus on internal API consumption, which is the low hanging fruit. This ‘eating own dog food’ enables a mature platform and processes to be exposed to partners, rather than the other way around.

Antonio Cruz’s presentation is simply a SOA migration case study, that is common to many enterprises. Its just focused on a telco situation. Most of the platforms are off the shelf IT or open source. This is a great example of the IT-

ization of telecoms.

SOA is a well understood IT paradigm. Interestingly Antonio expanded this model to how the network is adopting a SOA model with NFV.

APIs are solidly BAU (Business as Usual) in PT. With a focus on internal and partner (not long tail) consumption.

This is an important IT trend with the Hybrid Enterprise. This enables telcos to offer and package white-labeled services quickly with much less pain and

integration of the past.

Identity is not limited to the telcos Id, which most people forget.

Process is not unique, it it common in most enterprises

Management and Functional APIs are required. Focus has been Functional. While for end to end visibility management APIs are critical.

This process is where I come across most problems. Internal consumption is getting there, Telus and Telecom Italia are good case studies. Its when external partners are involved it becomes challenging. Often its because the processes

for internal API consumption are immature.

Portugal Telecom is achieving significant market success in bundling a range of cloud based services for customers, particularly the SMB segment.

This is the same IT architecture as most leading enterprise. IT skills are essential in today’s Telecom employees.

Telecom Italia remains a leading example of API consumption for internal and partners applications. Their focus over the past 2 years has been on the

processes of making API consumption easy.

See common concepts to Portugal Telecom. Note 3rd parties means other groups in TI as well as external partners like MVNOs and Fiat. Not the long tail

– that in my opinion requires an ecosystem partner.

Documentation (as we saw from Telefonica last year) and Flexibility in business model (which I run into many times).

Very similar approach to Portugal Telecom.

Collaboration comes through education across Telecom Italia, and demonstrating success time and time again.

Libon is an alternative to RCS, and it uses RCS to interoperate with other carriers and the RCS device API when its available.

As mentioned in my weblog, they need to move faster, but the usage figures compared to Joyn speak for themselves (time spent with Libon is >100 times

that of RCS)

Working across devices is important, it’s a weakness in Whatsapp and many of the apps that believe mobile first means mobile only – it does not. This will

give Libon a much broader market appeal.

The numbers speak for

themselves.

We have to be responsive, waiting

for standards bodies to horse

trade and generated a

comprise is not a viable model for

services.

We need to JFDI, learn, adapt, and

grow.

Dirk and Sascha gave a nice review of how to engage customers and partners on the potential of Telecom APIs, through innovation workshops.

This is the process behind embedding telecoms everywhere.

Martin as usual gave a great presentation on the DCB opportunity and the challenges we face and must overcome.

Google treats mobile payment like every other payment mechanism, it uses its card payment platform. It remains perplexed why telcos could not follow

existing proven payment standards and processes – example of unnecessary Telco Standardization by people who did not understand the business. DCB

has benefits for micro in-app purchases, but its lost in the fat and difficulty of DCB integration.

Payment card industry has solved these problems years ago.

Payment card industry has solved these problems years ago. Using an aggregator reduces already thin margins, and shows what currently is

implemented in not a viable payment platform.

Payment card industry has solved these problems years ago.

DCB opportunity is stifled by adherence to telco standards. Copy what works in the market. Telco is too insular and self focused. If you want to offer

payment services, then offer what the customer wants, not what you want.

Standards are necessary, but appropriateness is key. And defined by people have have the necessary skills, not just happen to be standards people. The air interface (hose connection) is critical. However, specifying internal standards of the engine used to pump the water by people with limited engine experience

has negative value – and that is what’s happening too often in telco.

Ivan gave a great presentation on the practical first steps being made in virtualization of network elements.

This is a FTTH scenario. Data Center run by IT is virtualized.

First step was running the WebRTC gateway on a virtualized data center. Business case was – “that’s how IT group run their data center”.

LRF (N.B. fixed network) simply runs in virtualized data center and different instances can be created for different business needs.

Even just sharing application servers has a raft of issues. This is currently where Hrvatski is in their thinking.

Adel gave a good review of the virtualization / NFV implementation options. Highlighting the latency challenges which will limit data path virtualization for

many years.

Its likely we’ll see an evolution through these options. All these practical considerations limit the savings and to some extent claimed agility.

Its quite likely the data plane will be kept un-virtualized to meet the delay requirements. Which again limits some of the claimed benefits. Its not that virtualization has benefits, its simply the current NFV marketing is naïve and distracting the industry from more important issues like service innovation