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Today’s VoIP – Part III
Hosted Applications Model Fuels New Multi-Service, Multi-Market Expansion Opportunities
By Ken Osowski |
Over the course of this three part review, we’ve looked at VoIP’s earliest business models and pioneers. We’ve explored the service expansion limits, differentiation challenges and high costs of unique services infrastructures such as those built by VoIP services pioneers, and we’ve tracked the various service delivery business models that evolved.
We’ll now wrap up this series by looking at the new business models and expansion possibilities made possible by the evolution to hosted VoIP, and how you can keep your VoIP options open to enable innovation and growth.
Many telecom services have been built as ‘stovepipes’ that rigidly tie the service provider to a single particular business model and/or target market, due in large part to the limits of some past technologies and even some current services infrastructures. This stovepipe service model also rigidly ties the network architecture to a single service, which unfortunately means that any market or service expansions require significant incremental investments and sometimes fully redundant infrastructures.
Today, the market is evolving beyond the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to business models and underlying VoIP resources, coinciding with the relatively recent separation of the voice service infrastructure and IP service applications from the underlying transport software.
This shift takes a more open-ended approach to infrastructures, and as a result, VoIP Service Delivery Platforms (SDPs) are emerging as a common platform that allow a single set of technologies which can support multiple services. This flexible, efficient and innovation-friendly infrastructure model is a sharp departure from the monolithic stovepipe model, and provides much greater opportunities; it enables and simplifies service application adaptations, customizations and extensions, and lets the service infrastructure simultaneously and economically support multiple services and markets. An industry analyst at market research company, Heavy Reading, recently noted, “The basic principle of an SDP is reuse. It aims to provide a consistent, highly automated service support environment that can be reused for multiple services.”
The advantages of a Multi-Service, Multi-Market SDP-based solution are obvious. Service providers can customize their service to better capture and serve their target markets. They can readily leverage existing investments to expand their services and overall business model, freeing them to embrace new opportunities and scale as needed based on actual demand and revenues, rather than on speculation.
Here are a few real-life examples:
• Teliuvo, a subsidiary of Pathway Communications, uses an SDP to drive both its wholesale and retail prepaid and post-paid calling services, and to continually expand its global reach. The reusability and service expansion of its SDP fully support Teliuvo’s dual direct/wholesale business model, with advanced service partitioning and flexible configuration that allows its retail service providers to individually brand, tailor and market their service products to their specific business models and subscriber markets. Its SDP solution also supports its direct retail services, through which it offers prepaid and postpaid international calling with compelling rates.
• The Group of Gold Line began as a prepaid retailer, and wanted to bring better service quality and economics to its domestic and international routes. Its SDP supports ongoing customization and expansion of its service suite, subscriber feature set innovations, the integration of new language supports and routes, provisioning, customer service capabilities, etc. Moreover, the SDP approach has similarly fueled Gold Line’s expansion as a wholesale service provider.
• A provider of prepaid services throughout the US and Latin America similarly focused initially on a single prepaid service product and a tightly-defined set of routes, language and currency supports. Achieving considerable success in its preliminary market, this prepaid service provider has organically expanded into post-paid residential and business broadband, and global of its routes and terminations, emerging as a significant success story.
Perhaps you’re seeking to become a retailer that initially serves specific demographics, or envision a customized solution targeting cell phone-only users with specific usability features. Or maybe you’ll market your first services to international travelers who aren’t willing to turn in expense reports with dollar-a-minute calls. Regardless of your initial model, two things are clear. You’re an entrepreneur actively and intelligently seeking opportunity, and your investments need to serve your current and future business strategies, not limit them.
In that case, you’re in the right place, at the right point in time. Multi-service, multi-market VoIP infrastructure solutions are ready, and will let you economically enter the market, innovate and grow.
Ken Osowski is the VP of Marketing & Product Management at Pactolus Communications Software. He can be reached at Keno@pactolus.com.
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