Several telecom operators to run into financial problems in the next three years…

In 2017 several telecom operators will run into financial problems, with Vodafone being the most known, unless they start changing today. Why?

The telecom business is a very capital intensive business. Buying spectrum, rolling out the next-generation mobile networks and bringing fiber connections to each home and business is extremely capital intensive. Traditionally operators were the main users of their networks and got large margins on the services that ran on top of them. The truth today is that telecom operators have been completely sidetracked. They no longer have any control of the mobile devices that are used on their networks and neither the services. Data is growing exponentially and is already clogging their networks. A data tsunami is on the horizon. Operators see costs ballooning and ARPU shrinking. There is no way they can start asking substantially more for broadband access. Obama just killed any hope of adding a speed tax on the Internet. The EU wants to kill juicy roaming charges. However the future will be even worse.

New disruptive competitors have entered the market in recent years. Google Fiber is offering gigabit speeds both for uploading and downloading. Youtube and Netflix are generating the majority of Internet traffic in most countries.  Most streaming videos are broadcasted in SD quality. However Netflix is already broadcasting in 4K or ultra high-definition quality on Google Fiber. This means traffic volumes of between 7 to 19GB per hour depending on the codec that is used. Take into account that often different family members can be looking at two or more programmes at the same time. The end result is that today’s networks and spectrum are completely insufficient. Now add the nascent IoT revolution. Every machine on earth will get an IP address and be able to “share its feelings with the world”. Every vital sign of each person in the richer parts of the world will be collected by smart watches and tweeted about on social networks. 90% of the communication that is running inside Facebook’s data centre is machine to machine communication, not user-related communication. Facebook hasn’t even introduced IoT or wearables yet. You can easily imagine them helping even the biggest geek with suggestions on which girl to talk to and what to talk about via augmented reality goggles and with the help of smart watches. Yes it is a crazy example but which telecom marketing department would have given even $1 to Zuckerberg if he would have pitched Facebook to them when it was still known as TheFacebook. It is the perfect example of how “crazy entrepreneurs” make telecom executives look like dinosaurs.

This brings us to the internals on how telecom operators are ran. Marketing departments decide what customers MUST like. Often based on more than doubtful market studies and business plans. In contrast the mobile app stores of this world just let customers decide. Angry Bird might not be the most intelligent app but it sure is a money maker. Procurement departments decide which network and IT infrastructure is best for the company. Ask them what NFV or SDN means and the only thing they can sensibly response is an RFP identifier. Do you really think any procurement department can make a sensible decision on what network technology will be able to compete with Google? More importantly make sure these solutions are deployed at Google speed, integrated at Google speed and scale out at Google speed? If they pick a “Telecom-Grade Feature Monster” that takes years to integrate, then they have killed any chance of that operator being innovative. With all the telecom-grade solutions operators have, why is it that Google’s solutions are more responsive, offer better quality of service and are always available? Vittorio Colao, the Vodafone CEO, was quoted in a financial newspaper yesterday saying Vodafone is going to have to participate in the crazy price war around digital content because BT has moved into mobile. So one of the biggest telecom operators in the world has executive strategies like launching new tariff plans [think RED in 2013], pay crazy money to broadcast football matches, bundle mobile with fixed to be able to discount overall monthly tariffs and erode ARPU even more, etc. If you can get paid millions to just look at what competitors are doing and just badly copy them and dotcoms [the list is long: hosted email, portals, mobile portals, social networks, virtual desktops, IaaS, streaming video, etc.] then please allow me to put your long term viability into question.

So can it actually be done differently. YES, for sure. What if operators would enable customers to customise communication solutions towards their needs. Communication needs have not gone away, if any they augmented. Whatsapp, Google Hangout, etc. are clear examples of how SMS and phone calls can be improved. However they are just the tip of the iceberg of what is possible and what should be done. Network integrated apps via Telco App Stores would give innovators a chance to launch services that customers really like. Hands up who would pay to get rid of their current voicemail? Hands up who really loves their operator’s conference bridge and thinks it is state of the art? Hands up who is of the opinion a bakery is absolute not interested in knowing what its customers think about its products after they have left the shop?

Last week the TAD Summit in Turkey had a very special presentation from Truphone, one of the few disruptive mobile operators in the world. No wonder it won the best presentation award. Truphone, with the help of partners, deployed a telecom solution in minutes that included key components like IMS, SDP, HLR integration, one hundred numbers, dashboards, interactive voice responses, etc. Once deployed, the audience could immediately start calling and participate. All numbers of the people in the audience, their home operator, the operator that sold them their SIM initially, their age and responses to interactive questions were registered and results shown on a real-time dashboard. If the audience would have been in different locations, they could have been put on an interactive map as well. The whole solution took only a few weeks to build with a team of people that all had day jobs. The surprising thing is that it was all build with open source software. It is technically possible to innovate big time in telecom and bring to market new services daily. All at a fraction of today’s cost. The technology is no longer a limiting factor. Old-school thinking, bureaucracy and incompetence are the only things that hold back operators from changing their destiny. Whatever they do, they shouldn’t act like former-Nokia executives in some years and tell the world that Android and the iPhone took them by surprise. Dear mister operator, you have been warned. You have been giving good advise and examples of how to do it better. Now it is time to act upon them…

The Cloud Winners and Losers?

The cloud is revolutionising IT. However there are two sides to every story: the winners and the losers. Who are they going to be and why? If you can’t wait here are the losers: HP, Oracle, Dell, SAP, RedHat, Infosys, VMWare, EMC, Cisco, etc. Survivors: IBM, Accenture, Intel, Apple, etc. Winners: Amazon, Salesforce, Google, CSC, Workday, Canonical, Metaswitch, Microsoft, ARM, ODMs.

Now the question is why and is this list written in stone?

What has cloud changed?
If you are working in a hardware business (storage, networking, etc. is also included) then cloud computing is a value destroyer. You have an organisation that is assuming small, medium and large enterprises have and always will run their own data centre. As such you have been blown out of the water by the fact that cloud has changed this fundamental rule. All of a sudden Amazon, Google and Facebook go and buy specialised webscale hardware from your suppliers, the ODMs. Facebook all of a sudden open sources hardware, networking, rack and data centre designs and makes it that anybody can compete with you. Cloud is all about scale out and open source hence commodity storage, software defined networks and network virtualisation functions are converting your portfolio in commodity products. If you are an enterprise software vendor then you always assumed that companies will buy an instance of your product, customise it and manage it themselves. You did not expect that software can be offered as a service and that one platform can offer individual solutions to millions of enterprises. You also did not expect that software can be sold by the hour instead of licensed forever. If you are an outsourcing company then you assume that companies that have invested in customising Siebel will want you to run this forever and not move to Salesforce.

Reviewing the losers
HP’s Cloud Strategy
HP has been living from printers and hardware. Meg rightfully has taken the decision to separate the cashcow, stop subsidising other less profitable divisions and let it be milked till it dies. The other group will focus on Cloud, Big Data, etc. However HP Cloud is more expensive and slower moving than any of the big three so economies of scale will push it into niche areas or make it die. HP’s OpenStack is a product that came 2-3 years late to the market. A market as we will see later that is about to be commoditised. HP’s Big Data strategy? Overpay for Vertica and Autonomy and focus your marketing around the lawsuits with former owners, not any unique selling proposition. Also Big Data can only be sold if you have an open source solution that people can test. Big Data customers are small startups that quickly have become large dotcoms. Most enterprises would not know what to do with Hadoop even if they could download it for free [YES you can actually download it for free!!!].
Oracle’s Cloud Strategy
Oracle has been denying Cloud existed until their most laggard customer started asking questions. Until very recently you could only buy Oracle databases by the hour from Amazon. Oracle has been milking the enterprise software market for years and paying surprise visits to audit your usage of their database and send you an unexpected bill. Recently they have started to cloud-wash [and Big Data wash] their software portfolio but Salesforce and Workday already are too far ahead to catch them. A good Christmas book Larry could buy from Amazon would be “The Innovator’s Dilemma“.
Dell’s Cloud Strategy
Go to the main Dell page and you will not find the word Big Data or Cloud. I rest my case.
SAP’s Cloud Strategy
Workday is working hard on making SAP irrelevant. Salesforce overtook Siebel. Workday is likely to do the same with SAP. People don’t want to manage their ERP themselves.
RedHat’s Cloud Strategy
[I work for their biggest competitor] RedHat salesperson to its customers: There are three versions. Fedora if you need innovation but don’t want support. CentOS if you want free but no security updates. RHEL is expensive and old but with support. Compare this to Canonical. There is only one Ubuntu, it is innovative, free to use and if you want support you can buy it extra.
For Cloud the story is that RedHat is three times cheaper than VMWare and your old stuff can be made to work as long as you want it according to a prescribed recipe. Compare this with an innovator that wants to completely commoditise OpenStack [ten times cheaper] and bring the most innovative and flexible solution [any SDN, any storage, any hypervisor, etc.] that instantly solves your problems [deploy different flavours of OpenStack in minutes without needing any help].
Infosys or any outsourcing company
If the data centre is going away then the first thing that will go away is that CRM solution we bought in the 90’s from a company that no longer exists.
VMWare
For the company that brought virtualisation into the enterprise it is hard to admit that by putting a rest API in front of it, you don’t need their solution in each enterprise any more.
EMC
Commodity storage means that scale out storage can be offered at a fraction of the price of a regular EMC SAN solution. However the big killer is Amazon’s S3 that can give you unlimited storage in minutes without worries.
Cisco
A Cisco router is an extremely expensive device that is hard to manage and build on top of proprietary hardware, a proprietary OS and proprietary software. What do you think will happen in a world where cheap ASIC + commodity CPU, general purpose OS and many thousands of network apps from an app store become available? Or worse, a network will no longer need many physical boxes because most of it is virtualised.
What does a cloud loser mean?
A cloud loser means that their existing cash cows will be crunched by disruptive innovations. Does this mean that losers will disappear or can not recuperate? Some might disappear. However if smart executives in these losing companies would be given the freedom to bring to market new solutions that build on top of the new reality then they might come out stronger. IBM has shown they were able to do so many times.

Let’s look at the cloud survivors.
IBM
IBM has shown over and over again that it can reinvent itself. It sold its x86 servers in order to show its employees and the world that the future is no longer there. In the past it bought PWC’s consultancy which will keep on reinventing new service offerings for customers that are lost in the cloud.
Accenture
Just like PWC’s consultancy arm within IBM, Accenture will have consultants that help people make the transition from data centre to the cloud. Accenture will not be leading the revolution but will be a “me-to” player that can put more people faster than others.
Intel
X86 is not going to die soon. The cloud just means others will be buying it. Intel will keep on trying to innovate in software and go nowhere [e.g. Intel’s Hadoop was going to eat the world] but at least its processors will keep it above the water.
Apple
Apple knows what consumers want but they still need to prove they understand enterprises. Having a locked-in world is fine for consumers but enterprises don’t like it. Either they come up with a creative solution or the billions will not keep on growing.
What does a cloud survivor mean?
A cloud survivor means that the key cash cows will not be killed by the cloud. It does not give a guarantee that the company will grow. It just means that in this revolution, the eye of the tornado rushed over your neighbours house, not yours. You can still have lots of collateral damage…

Amazon
IaaS = Amazon. No further words needed. Amazon will extend Gov Cloud into Health Cloud, Bank Cloud, Energy Cloud, etc. and remove the main laggard’s argument: “for legal & security reasons I can’t move to the cloud”. Amazon currently has 40-50 Anything-as-a-Service offerings in 36 months they will have 500.
Salesforce
PaaS & SaaS = Salesforce. Salesforce will become more than a CRM on steroids, it will be the world’s business solutions platform. If there is no business solution for it on Salesforce then it is not a business problem worth solving. They are likely to buy competitors like Workday.
Google
Google is the king of the consumer cloud. Google Apps has taken the SME market by storm. Enterprise cloud is not going anywhere soon however. Google was too late with IaaS and is not solving on-premise transitional problems unlike its competitors. With Kubernetes Google will re-educate the current star programmers and over time will revolutionise the way software is written and managed and might win in the long run. Google’s cloud future will be decided in 5-10 years. They invented most of it and showed the world 5 years later in a paper.
CSC
CSC has moved away from being a bodyshop to having several strategic important products for cloud orchestration and big data. They have a long-term future focus, employing cloud visionaries like Simon Wardley, that few others match. You don’t win a cloud war in the next quarter. It took Simon 4 years to take Ubuntu from 0% to 70% on public clouds.
Workday
What Salesforce did to Oracle’s Siebel, Workday is doing to SAP. Companies that have bought into Salesforce will easily switch to Workday in phase 2.
Canonical
Since RedHat is probably reading this blog post, I can’t be explicit. But a company of 600 people that controls up to 70% of the operating systems on public clouds, more than 50% of OpenStack, brings out a new server OS every 6 months, a phone OS in the next months, a desktop every 6 months, a complete cloud solution every 6 months, can convert bare-metal into virtual-like cloud resources in minutes, enables anybody to deploy/integrate/scale any software on any cloud or bare-metal server [Intel, IBM Power 8, ARM 64] and is on a mission to completely commoditise cloud infrastructure via open source solutions in 2015 deserves to make it to the list.
Metaswitch
Metaswitch has been developing network software for the big network guys for years. These big network guys would put it in a box and sell it extremely expensive. In a world of commodity hardware, open source and scale out, Clearwater and Calico have catapulted Metaswitch to the list of most innovative telecom supplier. Telecom providers will be like cloud providers, they will go to the ODM that really knows how things work and will ignore the OEM that just puts a brand on the box. The Cloud still needs WAN networks. Google Fibre will not rule the world in one day. Telecom operators will have to spend their billions with somebody.
Microsoft
If you are into Windows you will be on Azure and it will be business as usual for Microsoft.
ARM
In an ODM dominated world, ARM processors are likely to move from smart phones into network and into cloud.
ODM
Nobody knows them but they are the ones designing everybody’s hardware. Over time Amazon, Google and Microsoft might make their own hardware but for the foreseeable future they will keep on buying it “en masse” from ODMs.
What does a cloud winner mean?
Billions and fame for some, large take-overs or IPOs for others. But the cloud war is not over yet. It is not because the first battles were won that enemies can’t invent new weapons or join forces. So the war is not over, it is just beginning. History is written today…

Software Defined Everything

The other day Taxis in London where on strike because Uber was setting up shop in London. Do you know a lot of people that still send paper letters? Book holiday flights via a travel agent?  Buy books in book stores? Rent DVD movies?

5 smart programmers can bring down a whole multi-billion industry and change people’s habits. It has long been known that any company that changes people habits becomes a multi-billion company. Cereals for breakfast, brown coloured sweet water, throw-away shaving equipment, online bookstore, online search & ads, etc. You probably figured out the name of the brand already.

Software Defined Everything is Accelerating

The Cloud, crowd funding, open source, open hardware, 3D printing, Big Data, machine learning, Internet of Things, mobile, wearables, nanotechnology, social networks, etc. all seem individual technology innovations. However things are changing.

Your Fitbit will send your vital signs via your mobile to the cloud where deep belief networks analyse it and find out that you are stressed. Your smart hub detects you are approaching your garage and your Arduino controller linked to your IP camera encased in a 3D printing housing detects that you brought a visitor. A LinkedIn and Facebook image scan finds that your visitor is your boss’s boss. Your Fitbit and Google Calendar have given away over the last months that whenever you have a meeting with your boss’s boss, you get stressed. Your boss’s boss music preferences are guesses based on public information available on social networks. Your smart watch gets a push notification with the personal profile data that could be gathered from your boss’s boss: he has two boys and a girl, got recently divorced, the girl recently won a chess award, a facebook tagged picture shows your boss in a golf tournament three weeks ago, an Amazon book review indicates that he likes Shakespeare but only the early work, etc. All of a sudden your house shows pictures of that one time you plaid golf. Music plays according to what 96.5% of Shakespeare lovers like from a crowd-funded bluetooth in-house speaker system…

It might be a bit farfetched but what used to be disjoint technologies and innovations are fast coming together. Those companies that can both understand the latest cutting-edge innovations and be able to apply them to improve their customer’s life or solve business problems will have a big competitive edge.

Software is fast defining more and more industries. Media, logistics, telecom, banking, retail, industrial, even agriculture will see major changes due to software (and hardware) innovations.

What should you do? If you are technology savvy?

You should look for customers that want faster horses and draw a picture of a car. Make a slide deck. Get feedback and adjust. Build a prototype. Get feedback and adjust. Create a minimum valuable product. Get feedback and adjust… Change the world.

If you have a business problem and money but are not technology savvy?  

Organise a competition in which you ask people to solve your problem and give prices to the best solution. You will be amazed by what can come out of these.

If you work in a traditional industry and think software is not going to redefine what you do?

Call your investment manager and ask them if you have enough money in the bank to retire in case you would get fired next year and wouldn’t be able to find a job any more. If the answer is no! Then start reading the top of the blog post again…

Juju: Deploy, Integrate and Scale Services Instantly on Multiple Clouds

It used to be hard to deploy hardware in a data centre. The Cloud changed all of this. You are literally minutes away from booting a 100 instances. This however has brought other problems. Applications, clusters, software stacks, etc. need to be able to work on many instances that are dynamically scaled up and down. All of them need to be integrated, even if IPs are changing continuously.

The first generation of solutions focused on automating server provisioning. You wrote a receipt of how a web server needed to be provisioned. You then assigned a role to each instance and it would be automatically set-up.

The problem is that server provisioning is only part of managing a complete service stack. Different services need to be able to communicate with one another. Services need to be monitored, backed-up, asset managed, “syslogged”, performance analysed, etc. Each new element in your stack would need single sign-on and to be integrated with your Nagios, Ganglia, Logstash, etc. Each Service scales differently. Some need a shared file system. Others need a high-available proxy or database. Yet others rely on P2P broadcasting which does not natively work in the Cloud.

There is now a second generation solution that promises to deploy, integrate and scale instantly on all major Public Clouds as well as Private Cloud. Instead of focusing on the servers, it focuses on the services that run on top of these servers. Its name is Juju, which means magic. Juju’s magic is called a Charm. A Charm encapsulates a service. A Charm exposes standardized interfaces towards the embedded service allowing other Charms to easily integrate. A Charm also  scales the embedded service transparently.

To understand the difference between service orchestration and server provisioning let’s look at some Charms. Where service provisioning tools would be just installing WordPress on a virtual server, Juju also does integration. So when the WordPress Charm is integrated with MySQL, automatically all tables and data are created in the database. A Charm also knows about security, so when you expose WordPress to the world, automatically the right ports are opened. When scaling the MySQL Charm, the Charm knows the concept of Multi-Master Cluster and Read Slaves, so you are able to deploy a very complex MySQL cluster instantly.

The Juju basics

Using Juju is very easy. There are only a hand-full of commands that you actively use: deploy, add-relation, add-unit, expose.

# Bootstrap the Juju environment according to your preferred configuration, e.g. AWS,
# HP Cloud, Open Stack, Local, etc.
juju bootstrap
# Deploy mysql and wordpress
juju deploy mysql
juju deploy wordpress
# Create a relationship between wordpress and mysql and
# assures the wordpress schema is installed inside Mysql
juju add-relation wordpress mysql
# Open ports hence wordpress is publicly accessible
juju expose wordpress


Data Analytics as a Service

Every company is using Microsoft Office and especially Excel to do some sort of data analytics. However data volumes have grown exponentially and have outgrown Spreadsheets. You need experts in the business domain, in data analytics, in data migration/extraction/transformation/loading, in server management, etc. to get data analytics done on Big Data scale. This makes it expensive and only usable for the happy few.

Why? There must be easier ways to do it.

I think there are. For those unfamiliar with data analytics but eager to learn, you should take a look at a product called RapidMiner. It is close to amazing how a non-expert is able to use Neural Networks, Decision Trees, Support Vector Machines, Genetic Algorithms, etc. and get meaningful results in minutes. The amazing part is also that RapidMiner is open source hence for usage by 1 analyst it is free.

Rapid-i.com, the company behind RapidMiner, also offers server software to run data analytics remotely. It is here where big data opportunities meet easy data analytics. What if RapidMiner data analytics could be ran on hundreds of servers in parallel and you pay by usage just as you pay for any Cloud compute and storage instances?

RapidMiner as a Service

RapidMiner as a Service, RMaaS, would allow millions of business people to be able to analyse Big Data “without Big Investments”. This type of Data Analytics as a Service would provide any SME with the same data analytics tools as large corporations. Data could come from Amazon S3, Amazon’s DynamoDB, Hosted Hadoops, any webservices, any social network, etc.

Visual as a Service

RapidMiner as a Service is only one of the many domain specific tools that could be offered as a visual drag-and-drop Cloud service. VAS as a Service is another example in which complex telecom assets can be easily combined in a drag-and-drop manner. There are many more. These services will be the real revolution of Cloud Computing since they combine IaaS/PaaS/SaaS into a new generation of solutions that bring large savings for new users and potential large revenues for their providers…

MWC 2012 in Barcelona is not focusing on new revenue

MWC is supposed to show off the best innovations in the telecom industry. The telecom industry is desperately in need of a new business model to substitute falling revenues and pay for exploding data costs.

There were a lot of LTE innovations that were announced. However these will only generate new revenues for the solution providers and not for the telecom industry as a whole.

M2M was another major innovation area. However there was no announcement of any standardization whereby several large operators would push a common standard. Without this standard it will be hard for large scale M2M projects to deliver large profits. If the telecom industry wants to be seen as the leader in the M2M then they should take a leading role in its standardization.

Augmented reality is also pushing strong. However most players are over-the-top companies and not telecom solution providers or telecom operators.

Lots of new phones and tablets but this will also not generate new telecom revenues but will probably push operators into bit pipes sooner.

Cloud computing, big data, collective intelligence, gamification, etc. were under-represented. A lot of slides but few real mind-blowing products.

Operators are probably the once to blame most for this. There is no clear signal from them that they will be investing in revenue generating solutions in 2012-2013. The only thing you can hope for is revenue sharing. Why if you invest in making a stellar product would you want to go to endless RFPs and complex integration solutions if you could launch the product by yourself and become a successful over-the-top-player?

Enough virtualization and IaaS, let’s focus on business users now…

When the first television shows were made they used one camera to record a theatre play. It was only after some time that the real potential of the television became clear.

Virtualization and IaaS is like a one-camera-theatre-play-broadcast

Yes it is great to be able to put software on virtual hardware and as such save some money in hardware costs. But it will not change anybody’s life because renting a virtual server full-time is more expensive than renting a physical hosting server. Companies that focus too much on virtualization and IaaS are not seeing the full potential of Cloud Computing.

Multi-tenancy – a game changer

Cloud Computing without mult-tenant solutions is like a race car without an engine. Making one solution that fits many and installing it once and managing it in one place is the real game changer.

How much time and money is lost in a per customer install? Ordering and installing hardware (4-6 weeks); paying for base software (OS, Cluster, Database, etc.); installing the total software stack; integration with back-up, fault management, single sign-on, performance management, third-party systems, etc.; upgrading and bug fixing; data migrations; etc.

All this can be drastically reduced if the software is installed once and designed for multiple companies and customers.

Best-In-Class Solutions

Best-In-Class solutions used to be those solutions with most features from market-leading companies like SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, etc. However most of these solutions are unnecessarily complex. There is a simple rule to check if you will be overpaying for unnecessary features: Do my business users need training? The more, the worst.

Apple has demonstrated that simplicity and easy-of-use are real demand creators. The real revolution of Cloud Computing is starting now. The real revolution is that business users can ignore the legacy corporate IT systems and use alternative solutions to get things done faster and more efficiently. The Appstore concept of “There is an app for everything”, will now be translated into “There is a SaaS for everything”.

Project managers will stop asking the IT department to install a shared project management server to synchronize their MS-Projects. Instead they will simply use a SaaS solution for project management. The same will be happening for other disciplines.

IT departments can fight this trend, just like they can try to stop people from bringing smartphones and tablets to work. However smart IT departments see a clear opportunity.  Corporate systems are very expensive and often their implementation fails. This wastes a lot of time and money. By letting business users choose the SaaS solutions they want to use, IT departments will see the risk of project failures due to change management issues almost disappear. Using SaaS solutions however does not mean that IT departments are no longer necessary. Once users are over their honeymoon period they will want these SaaS solutions to use Single Sign-on and be integrated with corporate systems and other SaaS solutions.

The next steps in the Cloud Revolution

The next step in the Cloud revolution will be solutions that make easy integration between on-site systems and between different SaaS solutions possible. Project managers will love to manage projects via a best-in-class project management SaaS. However they will still need to get time reporting info, travel expenses, resource allocation, etc. The reality will be that some of these systems can be offered via other SaaS solutions and some will be local. All of them will need to be integrated if the enterprise wants to get real benefits. History has a tendency to repeat itself. Middleware  and EAIs are not death because of the Cloud. They just will become EAIaaS.

The other Cloud revolution is likely to give business users tools to create their own applications in the Cloud. This does not mean programming tools but instead drag-and-drop wizards and dynamic data storage solutions. There are millions of business critical applications stored in Excel and Access files. It is time that business users get the proper Cloud tools to convert these into social corporate solutions. Google Apps and Force.com are ahead of the rest but they are far from being the winner yet. The war has just started…

How Fon could become disruptive?

Recently I wrote an article about Ryancom. I received a comment that Fon.com was already doing certain things like making broadband access available for free globally.

I want to take the opportunity to make some suggestions that would make Fon a really disruptive player.

Fon has some really nice residential WiFi routers. A basic version, the Fonera Simpl with an optional antenna, Fontenna, to reach more distance. Additionally there is the Fonera 2.0 N which allows a community of developers to extend the product with new functionality. Finally they can embed their software into operator’s existing WiFi routers.

Fon’s routers are based on OpenWrt, an open source Linux firmware distribution for embedded devices. Developers can create extra plugins / packages that can be deployed on the router.

How to make Fon more disruptive?

For many technical people having access to a global set of WiFi points all over the globe is a really good reason to buy a Fon WiFi. Unfortunately non-technical people might be lost in the technical details about how you can access somebody’s else Internet and might be scared of other people using their Internet. So for most people the Fon offering is like a vitamine and not really a painkiller.

By changing the value proposition of Fon towards becoming a painkiller for more people, Fon would be able to get more active demand for its products from consumers and also via telecom operators.

Fon painkiller example: Parental Control

Most parents would not care less which router is used to access the Internet. The only thing they know is that their offspring knows a hundred times more about Internet then they do. Additionally they know that Internet is full of dangers for kids and teenagers. Children always tell their parents they need Internet to do their home work. But reality is that most surfing is not done for homework 😉

So what if Fon would have an OpenFlow compatible WiFi router with FlowVisor combined with a Cloud solution. To spare the technical details, the summary is that parents would be able to partition their Internet access based on who is accessing. What would this bring?

Kids Internet – 3-8 year olds would only have access to a strict whitelist of Internet pages. Parents would not have to find this white page themselves. Instead people and companies could make white lists and parents could subscribe to them. Examples could be a Disney white list, a SuperNanny [the television show] whitelist. Parents would know that their young children could never go to pages that are unsuitable. Young children would have a start page with icons like the iPad in which they can click on the page and immediately go their favourite games or watch cartoons. Children could be limited in the time they can spend on Internet and special bonus points for good behaviour could buy them more time or bad behaviour could be punished with less time. Parents would need an “Apple” friendly interface to pick whitelists and set-up and manage Internet access times.

Pre-teens / Teens Internet – 9-17 years od – restrictions apply. Parents could define studying time slots in which only certain Internet content can be accessed, e.g. Wikipedia. Also here external entities could define whitelists. Time-based filters for open Internet access could also be set. Additionally special purpose filters are set-up, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, MSN, Skype, eMule, Google+ etc. This would allow teens to access Facebook and other sites but to have their behaviour screened. Teens could be prohibited to upload pictures of persons, share email/telephone or physical addresses, use F* words, access adult content, etc. There would be a dynamic firewall for each service. Parents could have a high-level reporting interface to see what their kids are doing.

Other painkillers

Parental control is just one example of how a generic router that is connected to a niche Cloud application could be a painkiller for parents. Operators could have other pain points, e.g. reduce botnets, spam, P2P content optimization, etc. Shop owners could have other pain points, e.g. social games for bars, etc.

A lot of possibilities are opening up if routers could be externally managed and very specific easy to use interfaces and solutions are build towards which communities and external companies can contribute and generate new revenue with.

The fact that every Fon router will give you access to a global free broadband network will be a nice add-on for most…

Changing from Telco Grade to Web 2.0 Grade by fighting telecom myths

Most telecom operators are still thinking that software should be upgraded at most twice a year. Oracle RAC is the only valid database solution. RFQ’s bring innovation. If you pay higher software licenses, the software will have more features and as such will be better.

All of these myths will have to be changed in the coming 12 months if operators want to be stay on top of the game.

Upgrade twice a year

For telecom network equipment, two upgrades a year are fine. However for everything related to services that are offered to consumers or businesses, that means that operators are 180 times less competitive then their direct competition. The large dotcoms like Facebook and Google make software upgrades on a daily basis. 50% of all the files that contain Google software code change every month. Even if “a revolution” would happen and software upgrades would come every month, it would still mean a 30 times lag.

Operators need to start using cloud computing, even if they are private clouds, to deploy their back-office systems. The business needs software solutions to move at market speed. That means that if a new social networking site is hot, then it should be integrated into telecom solution offerings in days. Not in months or a year.

There are many techniques to make deployments more predictable, more frequent and more reliable. Offering extra features or integrations quickly can be done via plugins. You can have a group of early adopters, give feedback. If they don’t survive this feedback, kill them. If they do, scale up quickly.

Oracle RAC

Nothing bad about the quality of Oracle RAC but it is a very expensive solution that needs a lot of man-power to keep on running smoothly. Operators often pay a premium for services that could run equally well on cheaper or Open Source alternatives. Also NOSQL should be embraced.

If the cost of deploying a new service is millions, then only a couple of them will be deployed. By lowering hardware and software costs, innovative projects are more likely to see daylight.

RFQ’s and Innovation

It takes 3 months from idea to finalizing an RFQ document. 1,5 month to get a reply. 1,5 month to do procurement. Half a year in total. Not counting the deployment time which is likely to be another 6 months. The result is that the operator takes 12 months for any “new” system.

Now the question is if that system is really new. Because if an operator was able to define in detail what they want and how they want it, then the technology was probably quite mature to begin with. So operators spend fortunes installing yesterday’s technology 12 months late. Can anybody explain what innovation this is going to bring?

First of all operators should not organize multi-million RFQs for business or end-user solutions. These are likely to come late to market and can only be focused on mass markets.

Instead operators should focus on letting the customer decide what they want by offering a large open eco-system of partners the possibility to offer a very large list of competing services to their customers. The operator should offer open APIs to key assets (charging, numbering plans, call control, network QoS, etc.). As well as offer revenue share and extra services like common marketplaces and support 2.0 (social CRM, helpdesk as a service, etc.). This is called Telecom Platform-as-a-Service or Telco PaaS.

High licenses, more features, better

More features does not mean better. Most people want simplicity, not a long list of features. Easy of use comes at a premium price. Look at Apple’s stock price if you don’t believe it.

It is better to have basic systems that are extremely easy to use with open APIs and plug-ins. A feature by feature comparison will make you choose the most expensive one. However it is hard to put as a feature that the system needs to be easy to use.

In telecom, there is a natural tendency to make things hard. In Web 2.0 the tendency is the opposite. You can see the difference between Nokia and Apple. The Nokia phone would win every feature on feature comparison but the iPhone is winning the market battle…

Instead of organizing an RFP, let end-users and employees play around with early betas or proof-of-concepts. No training, no documentation. Let’s see which solution makes them more productive, the feature rich or the more straight forward. Just ask open APIs and a plugin-mechanism and you will be set…

Separating the 3G/LTE bit-pipe and voice from data to survive

Large operators are focusing on building the fastest and most reliable networks; increasing call and SMS traffic; offering the best data plans for surfing; offering excellent business communication services; building a machine to machine business; offering impressive IPTV; etc. Management effort has to be divided between all these and other businesses. The quest to get departmental budget is long and hard.

So if you are a telecom CxO and you get three business cases, which one do you choose?
1) LTE business case – heavy investment but strategically key and very good ROI
2) IP PBX vs on-site equipment business case – low initial investment and clear business model
3) Telco PaaS business case – low initial investment but unclear business model

Any business leader would say 1 is best, then 2 and do not invest in 3. However there is something called “The Innovator Dilemma“.  LTE will make it easier for dotcoms to offer IP PBX as well as cannibalize voice and SMS revenues because over-the-top players will be able to offer mobile VoIP and IM. Even if a CxO would invest outside of LTE in disruptive technologies then it is still very likely that the best people will want to work in the LTE project and not in a disruptive technologies project.

Note: An operator that does not invest in LTE will be dead in 2 years so investment in new network technologies is crucial for operators to survive in the short-term. So the solution is not to invest only in disruptive technologies.

So what should operators do?

Create a holding company and three independent sub-companies:

1. The bit-pipe
2. The cash-cow manager
3. The future

The bit-pipe company is focusing on the network and its operations. Cost reductions, stability, network quality and new network technologies, e.g. LTE, are key for this company. This company should be able to work on low margins and even work together with competitors if it makes financial sense, e.g. share network resources or resell capacity to competitors.

The cash-cow manager should also be a company focused on maximizing profits and minimizing costs. The cash-cow manager gets to manage the circuits and deliver voice, SMS and traditional telco services. They have the liberty to provide these services on top of other networks if it makes financial sense.

The future is a company that will have the bulk of the people and some seed capital that will pay salaries for the next 18-24 months. The mission should be clear: “Focus on new revenues coming from data”. There will be no cross-charging between the other two companies. Either you get new revenues or your future is looking very bad. Why would you be so extreme? Look at McKinsey, Telco2Research, etc. they all say the same. Key telco assets will loose their value in the coming 2-3 years as has happened with location. Or operators start to work on new data revenues NOW or they will have to fire tens or hundreds of thousands of employees in 2-3 years. Telefonica already started a process to fire 20% of the workforce. Separating employees into a new company and giving them one mission will make everybody focus on success. Innovative revenue-generating data services is what the telecom industry needs. Without it everybody will start feeling the pain very soon…