Teenager years, as we all remember even if we don’t acknowledge, are considered the epitome of the “me” phase in our life before we grow into adulthood. However, recent behavior suggests that we may not “outgrow” this phase when it comes to our communications needs.

The impact can be seen in the explosion of social networking and other user-driven sites such as MySpace, Facebook and YouTube that scream “it’s all about me AND my network of friends.” While the majority of active participants in the most widely known sites are skewed toward teens and the 20-somethings, more and more people in their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s+ are joining this rapidly expanding networking user base. Acording to COM Score Media Matrix, 7.2 billion videos were streamed in July 2006 by nearly 107 million people. Google spoke for the communications industry about the marketing value of these communities when it announced plans to acquire YouTube for $1.6 billion.

Many of these people undoubtedly are also in roles to influence technology adoption and decision-making at enterprises. A recent poll of Chief Information Officers found that Instant Messaging is the fastest growing enterprise application despite the fact that in most cases it was not on the official company list of approved applications. This means that the answer to the search for the next generation communications “killer app” might lie in an understanding that “app” may be short for “approach” instead of “application.” It’s an approach to customers that focuses on creating a personal or “me” network that delivers the community or “we” experience.

This approach is anchored in people’s desire for an easy-to-use, seamless and personalized communications experience that puts them at the controls. Independent “sessions” set-up from a desktop PC, or a phone, or a mobile device, will soon become a thing of the past. Users want and expect the “we” experience over the “me” network; one-to-one and one-to-many communication interactions that deliver timely, relevant information through one personal profile where they are in control, rather than through a device-driven profile, where the provider holds sole control. This demand translates to an enterprise. For example, a network that enables workers to tap into the “we” experience – in the form of collaboration and virtual white boarding – improves job productivity and business bottom-line results.

Lucent Technologies’ market research has found the “me” network pull to be so strong that 59 percent of consumer and enterprise respondents in five Western European countries would be willing to switch service providers to one which can provide them with blended lifestyle services, and which can be personalized to enable a “we” experience. To create the network and experience users seek, communications service providers will need to draw upon a range of resources including their own and third-party applications. Hence, a crucial element for communications services providers is having a flexible service delivery environment that can be leveraged across multiple service offerings, thereby meeting the users’ needs, decreasing operating costs and creating greater efficiencies to expedite the introduction of new services. They must be in a position to quickly conduct market trials and make service adjustments based on the trial results. Lucent has had great success providing new go-to-market options for rapid applications introduction and trialing through the hosted applications center and applications incubator in our network operations centers. The revenue opportunity cuts across the enterprise and consumer markets. In the U.S. the market for real-time enterprise and consumer communications and collaboration capabilities that span both wire-line and wireless networks is estimated to be almost $10B a year to service providers. In Western Europe, communications operators’ potential market for blended lifestyle services in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK combined could reach a cumulative total of €14.0B by 2011.

Creating a Next-Generation Service Delivery Framework

To capture the “me network/we experience” opportunity, communications service providers require a business- or carrier-grade service delivery framework (SDF). This next-generation SDF is a framework that provides the capability to create, provision, locate, deliver, personalize, charge/bill real time and manage services experiences across network technologies and devices. The SDF ensures the delivery of five-nines Quality of Experience (QoE) orchestrating third party relationships both inside and outside the network while seamlessly managing the back office environment. A critical function in the carrier-grade SDF must be the ability to more readily-retrieve and make use of subscriber data to create dynamic new personalized service offers based on our “me” preferences shared with our “we” network of friends and colleagues. The next generation SDF elements include enablers such as real-time charging, location and presence services, web services gateways and content management solutions.

An SDF is usually implemented in two phases. Phase one is the initial deployment of IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) elements. This is the critical foundation for delivering real-time blending of legacy and next gen SIP-based services. Phase two enhances IMS capabilities through the integration of SOA to create a real-time, integrated IT and telephony services environment.

A next-generation SDF encompasses the services capabilities of traditional telecom vendors and traditional IT vendors and integrates them. A carrier-grade SDF releases new capability to the Services Orientated Architecture (SOA) that is otherwise not optimized to deliver real-time services. The SDF (IMS-SOA) supports faster, often distributed, processing that allows for service blending, content, and personalization, even across multiple domains, networks and devices to deliver real-time, highly reliable services (e.g., voice and video conferencing) required for the dynamic “we” experience.

Figure 1

A next-generation SDF delivers more immediate value to users and providers by bridging the gap between today’s point solutions; the best from the legacy TDM and IT worlds, with next generation presence aware blended lifestyle services. Going forward, the SDF enables the IMS architecture to reach its full potential.

The SDF provides the service coordination and abstraction layer for all underlying network technologies including IMS. When an SDF supports both legacy networks and IMS, the service brokerage must have the intelligence to handle actions from an IMS user that cannot be delivered in the same way to a legacy customer (e.g., sending/receiving pictures while talking). The next-generation carrier-grade SDF produces a “me” network -- delivering the basic elements service provider’s need to efficiently and effectively create, deliver, personalize, bill, and manage the “we” experience based on new blended lifestyle services whether from an IMS or non-IMS network.

Me, We and SDF Add Up To Opportunity In Increasingly Competitive Market

The growing user interest in a “me network for the we experience” makes the transformation to a carrier grade SDF an imperative for any communication services provider who wants to compete successfully in a rapidly evolving competitive landscape.

"Increasing competition demands that communications service providers evolve their existing business models and service delivery architectures to take a holistic approach to revenue generation which can involve multiple service delivery elements and platforms. Choosing a service delivery framework will be among the most strategic technology decisions communications service providers will make over the next 24 months," according to Brian Partridge, Senior Analyst, Enabling Technologies, Yankee Group.

In a recent research report, Yankee Group cited the ability of Google, Yahoo!, AOL and MSN to threaten the business of the traditional communications services providers. The four portals grew their businesses rapidly by providing core functions such as search, content (primarily Yahoo!), email and instant messaging, and adding non-core functions, such as communications services, to continue to attract large numbers of individuals and advertising revenue (and also content revenue in the case of Yahoo!). Mostly “me” focused functions are now complemented by some “we” functions. Yet, the four quickly found their businesses facing stiff competition for audience/users from the YouTubes and MySpaces of the industry that exploit the full possibilities of the me/we phenomenon to create a next generation networking experience.

Their success signals that the axiom, we are all teenagers at heart, should not be forgotten when it comes to creating the next generation communications experience. Through deploying a next-generation service delivery framework, the service providers will be in the best position to market to the teenager in all of us while capturing the communication spend of our adult years.

John Giere is chief marketing officer for Alcatel-Lucent.