Earlier this month we had the pleasure of presenting and facilitating at the user conference of Martin Dawes Systems (Martin Dawes Systems), a provider of integrated billing and CRM systems, as well as analytics via their business unit Lavastorm, now rebranded as Martin Dawes Analytics.

Martin Dawes Systems’ history is in supplying both large and small operators who want an integrated BSS back office solution. These operators want to avoid the cost and integration headache of the “best of breed” approach. The integrated solution also brings its own benefits, such as enhancing the ability to manage business processes end-to-end. We’ve picked up in this article some highlights of their products, and some new ideas about how to run billing, CRM and analytics systems based on the debate with the senior execs who attended - from AOL, Vodafone, GSMA, Carphone Warehouse, BT, KPN, Orange, Telefonica O2, T-Mobile, DTAG, Thus…

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Just when I thought I was out, they drag me back in: Siemens shows a concept phone using the “big touchscreen” iPhone design meme to include a large solar panel in the device. Nice; but hasn’t Siemens given up making phones?

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In Today’s Issue: Crunch crunches Chinese corporate creativity; Nextel spinout shaky; Sprint execs “industry’s most overpaid”; WiMAX smartphone leaked; VZW starts charging for bulk SMS delivery; IfByPhone understands your call centre campaign; vendor-pays data is here; RIM’s AppStore for enterprises?; Comcast gets social TV; Vodafone buys more of Vodacom; IBM: still has money; Indian cellsites get fuel cells; MBNL-BT backhaul superdeal; xG shenanigans; yet another security nightmare at DTAG; GSMA without the GSM; mobile filmmaking to fight the Taliban. scary!

This week’s main theme was telcos calling off planned corporate action in the face of the financial crisis; Huawei, like so many other vendors, has been thinking of getting rid of its handsets business, a low-margin job better left to cheap Chinese ODMs…hold on, some of us remember when Huawei was a cheap Chinese ODM. But this week, the sale was put on indefnite hold for fear someone might bid one euro and get it.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 13th October 2008" »

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Continuing our series of interviews with major industry thinkers, Steve Zimba is Microsoft’s Managing Director, Global Telecoms Business. We interviewed Steve about their ‘Telco 2.0’ strategy. This integrates their PC, IPTV and mobile offerings with a combined software and services offering, supported by telecoms-specific capabilities and a third party ecosystem.

Steve Zimba

Microsoft is a particularly interesting company to us because they are in a unique position. They bridge the consumer and enterprise markets, which places them well to create technologies and operational businesses for two-sided markets. Their Internet competitors are consumer-centric, and don’t have channels into the enterprise. Rivals such as IBM don’t have the consumer brand or media properties to run experiments on the scale Microsoft can. Furthermore, Microsoft is active across all of the B2B value-added service areas we believe will drive future telco growth: identity, advertising & marketing services, e-commerce, order fulfilment, content delivery, billing & payments, and customer care/CRM. The difficult challenge is whether Microsoft can make the whole more than sum of its software conglomerate parts.

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Following the publication of the new Telco 2.0 Manifesto, we’ve refreshed our overall strategy research programme for the coming year. (Like the fashion industry, our products change with the seasons.) This new programme will address the key strategic challenges that lie at the heart of creating new value in Telecoms and adjacent markets. Here’s a quick preview.

5 x New “Research Practices”

We’ve organized our research into 5 Research Practices to address the key Telco 2.0™ strategic challenges.

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Billing within Telcos is often seen as a necessary evil — an overhead which frequently puts a brake on marketing visions of grand new services. Whereas, billing within the Telco 2.0 world is a great asset offering the capability of pricing nearly any transaction on any number of variables in real time in huge volumes.

One approach to leveraging the telco billing asset is for the telco itself to provide billing services to an upstream partner, and quite often also to collect the money on their behalf. In our recent report on ‘Sizing the Two-Sided Telecoms Business Model’ we estimated that there could be over US$26bn in new revenue for Telcos offering billing and payments services to vertical industries by 2017 (mature markets alone). A good example today is the mobile content industry which has already evolved into a multi-billion dollar industry.

This approach is best suited to two situations:

1. when the telco network is being used to deliver the goods, or
2. when the telco network is being used as a channel for purchasing the goods and the buyer is a customer of the telco.

Billing is a key enabler for a telco wanting to pursue a two-sided business model, together with a collection of related services: identity, authentication, advertising, business intelligence, e-commerce sales, content delivery, and customer care.

The Telco 2.0 team was therefore delighted to be invited to participate in a recent industry roundtable, organised by Highdeal. (Highdeal provides real-time rating systems that scale to high volumes at low cost using a clever technological approach akin to a compiler for rate plans.) The workshop was entitled “Stop Reinventing the Wheel: Comparing Cross-industry Pricing & Billing Strategies”. Telcos can learn lessons from other industries, both good and bad. Here are just three examples from the Transport Industry:

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