Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.” Lucky are those few who work in telecom, for they work in a perpetual state of next: the next release, the next generation and the next killer app.

Now that the next-generation network has become current, the focus turns to the applications for which it was built. In doing so, it also highlights one of the dangers of rising above Emerson's muddled masses in lofty pursuit of the next: What happens when the vision is realized, the network stands ready and still the next killer app remains a mystery?

Not to worry. It seems the technologists who designed this next-generation network thought more along the lines of French author and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery, who said, “As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.”

For that is what they have done. Now the trick is to bring value to their technological endeavor — the packet network. The following are ideas on how to do that from various players that have undertaken a role in that endeavor, including Lucent Technologies, BroadSoft and Sonus Networks. Others that develop their own applications, such as CallWave and Xten Networks, have a few ideas of their own.

“There used to be a well-understood value chain around how voice services were delivered, how value was brought to a network and how people made money,” said Sandip Mukerjee, vice president of applications, strategy and business development for Lucent's mobility group.

With the advent of data on the fixed network, he added, that value chain changed. It changed again with 2.5G, then again with 3G.

“Now with the advent of VoIP, we need to understand how the value chain changes again,” Mukerjee said.

He suggests that the value is not in the technology.

“What we fail to see in our market research is anyone waving their hands and saying, ‘I want VoIP,’” Mukerjee said. “What we do find is people saying they want cheaper voice. And VoIP is one way to deliver cheaper voice.”

Lucent folks don't like to think in terms of VoIP but instead in value over IP. They are working on delivering the infrastructure and some of the applications that offer “lifestyle services.” These are services for both the business user and the consumer that enhance the former's productivity and the latter's lifestyle. They are designed with the goal of increasing the user's willingness to pay. Without that willingness, the value chain falls apart, Mukerjee said.

This scenario already has been played out, for example, in the life cycle of short message service (SMS). In such instances, an operator would take the lead in introducing the service, then a competitor would quickly replicate it. And soon the only thing setting their services apart would be price.

“Sooner or later, the whole value goes out of any innovation or first-mover advantage an operator may have had,” Mukerjee said.

He gave the example of a service Lucent created called Active Phonebook as one that had value, or true utility, because it fit the mold of a lifestyle service. Active Phonebook consolidates and presence-enables a user's various contact lists across technologies — such as a mobile phone, a PC and a laptop — so that the user can see if his contacts are available. The service has value both in a work and home environment, but its real value is that the user is less likely to churn if his contacts also don't churn.

“The true utility of this service is not that you subscribe to it, but that you can take advantage of your contacts' presence information,” Mukerjee said. “Therefore, your propensity to churn based on price is drastically reduced.”

Active Phonebook meets the criteria for a lifestyle service that is sticky and a service for which people are likely to pay — a little. But it is just one application. As Mukerjee said, the promise of IP was to create a separate service layer that permitted large volumes of services. So what are those services?

Instead of waiting for its hosted voice applications to peak, BroadSoft is looking to a future in multimedia. For Scott Wharton, vice president of marketing at BroadSoft, multimedia encompasses video, collaboration, presence, voice, instant messaging, conferencing and more. However, the video conferencing Wharton envisions is not your traditional videoconference service.

“People envision video conferencing as a bunch of people in a room waving at each other,” Wharton said. “But when it comes to multimedia, that's not what's interesting.”

Walking into a $400 per night hotel and not waiting in line to check in because you used the video and VoIP-enabled customer service kiosk to check in is interesting. Ordering a Big Mac through the drive-thru and not knowing that your outsourced, beanie-wearing order-taker is miles away at some remote location is interesting. “After all, do you really care if the person who is going to mess up your order is right there at the store or at a call center?”asked Wharton.

These are applications already being tested in live environments. And they are likely the future of VoIP, provided the price of videophones and other VoIP endpoints continues to plummet.

Multimedia applications such as these need something else to become part of the future: marketing. Many VoIP applications will need what early wireless data applications didn't have — the marketing campaigns that make their audience aware of them. Granted, VoIP and multimedia applications are far beyond cellular digital packet data in performance, functionality and features, but even the best application is a dog if those who would use it don't know it exists.

“It's not really a technical issue anymore. We've got the bandwidth. We've got VoIP. We've got the customers,” Wharton said. “All we need to do is figure out how to explain to people why they should want to use these features.”

Another major difference between VoIP applications today and early wireless data efforts — and one that may make the marketing easier — is that there is organic growth.

“It's not just vendors and service providers pushing technology,” Wharton said.

There is particularly strong demand coming from the wireless sector, which is providing a new target market for BroadSoft as mobile operators expand their enterprise strategies with VoIP and multimedia applications.

A third new opportunity for BroadSoft and for application developers of all sorts is the vertical market. Wharton said his company alone works with about 20 third-party developers that are moving away from mass-market horizontal application development and looking more at developing VoIP applications for specific vertical enterprise markets such as health care and the legal profession.

“Most vendors are never going to have the deep knowledge necessary to develop applications for every vertical, so that falls to the developers,” Wharton said.

However, not everyone — including other developers — is enamored with the vertical market opportunity. Xten, whose customers use its software development kit (SDK) to develop standards-based VoIP applications, doesn't see developers jumping on that bandwagon.

“The enterprise isn't that exciting for us now because there aren't enough endpoints in any deal that comes to the table,” said Erik Lagerway, president, chief operating officer and acting director of sales at Xten.

Granted, Xten's table has only been set since 2002, when the company was formed, and its SDK just came to market in the third quarter of 2004. However, the company did manage to get three-quarters of a million of its softphones deployed, sign up Deutsche Telekom, EarthLink and Vonage as customers and go public in that time.

The service providers and developers buying Xten's SDK are looking at mass-market applications. Lagerway can't give away the secrets of customers whose applications will be appearing in the market over the coming months, but he said one thing stands out about his customers — and by virtue his SDK — they are all creating applications meant for an open architecture.

“Whether they choose to actually open them up to the public I can't say, but at least they'll have the opportunity,” Lagerway said.

That is because Xten's SDKs adhere to the standards for VoIP.

“Anyone can build a proprietary application that sits on an island, but that makes it very difficult to interoperate. The open standards approach to building a product is what makes the difference,” he said. “It leaves the door open to peering with competitors and partners.”

It also leaves the door open to various models of delivery, or what Mike Cooper, director of global marketing and strategy for Lucent's convergence solutions group, calls a cottage industry of application vendors, where new businesses are focused solely on the distribution of applications.

“Not every service provider would buy every application, but they would have their pick of many,” Cooper said.

Both Cooper and his colleague Mukerjee also see the re-emergence of the application service provider (ASP). And they're not the only ones. Sonus Networks CEO Hassan Ahmed said that while the jury is still out on whether it can be a real business model this time, he, too, expects to see the re-emergence of the ASP as a means of delivering VoIP applications.

“It needs to be able to scale for there to be a long-term, sustainable pure application provider play,” Ahmed said. “But there will be a competitive environment for it.”

The difference, he said, between the failed ASP model of the past and a potential future model based on voice-enabled applications is that the ASP no longer needs a last-mile connection.

“For the first time, you can separate the two,” Ahmed said.

Whether CallWave could be called an ASP is questionable. However, it could be called unique. It provides services directly to the consumer, yet it has no last-mile connection. By Ahmed's definition, that's an ASP.

But by CallWave president and CEO David Hofstatter's definition, it is more of a “network independent applications provider.” Its applications are enabled by VoIP, yet they aren't necessarily VoIP applications — at least not to CallWave's consumer customers who wouldn't know a VoIP application from a Volkswagen.

CallWave takes more advantage of VoIP in the core — in this case Level 3 Communications' — than it does the VoIP capabilities of its end users. The twist to CallWave's solution is that it inserts its softswitch into each customer's call for the duration of the call so that applications can be used or activated at any point during the call. It's a model that may or may not catch on, but CallWave currently puts about 1 billion calls per year through its softswitch. And like Xten, the company quickly went public.

Their motto? “We want to make VoIP solve mass-market problems and be simple enough to use so that people without the patience to tinker with technology are able to adopt it,” Hofstatter said.

With a CallWave phone number, a subscriber can take advantage of more than one feature at any point during the call rather than using today's Star-code features such as *69, which have to be initiated for one-time use before a call is placed.

For example: When a call is made to a CallWave user's landline phone, it is routed through Level 3's IP network to CallWave's centralized softswitch in Nevada. From there, it can be re-routed to the user's cell phone while CallWave's softswitch remains in the call path. Because the softswitch remains part of the call, the user can listen to the caller before hitting a single button to take the call. During the call, using another single-button command, the user can transfer the call to a landline phone within milliseconds.

“Customers don't know this is VoIP. VoIP is just the glue that patches our softswitch into the call and adds value to the call,” Hofstatter said.

He says his model is the opposite of other VoIP models. “We are using inexpensive VoIP minutes not to sell cheaper long-distance to the end user, but using cheaper long-distance to enable us to centralize our platform,” Hofstatter said.

CallWave is seeing enough interest in its network-independent model to stick with it. However, the company also is pursuing partnership arrangements with carriers. Hofstatter said it might be awhile before service providers deploy a service based on a hosting partners platform, particularly wireless operators.

“They tend to have a bias toward owning the infrastructure, but we are seeing that break down a little in the way they are deploying ringtones and games,” he said.

The advantage of a centralized services architecture, Hofstatter said, is that he and his 40 software engineers can conceptualize, develop and deploy services in about 60 to 90 days.

“If we were a licensed architecture on a distributed platform in a carrier network, that would take two to three years,” he said.

However, the main idea behind the carrier network of the near future is to have that same capability. By most accounts, that will be enabled by the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS), which is a standards-based architecture that creates a separation between the call control — or session control — and the application layers of the network that allows for a multitude of VoIP services. But it doesn't stop with VoIP.

“You could build an IMS just to do VoIP, but that's not where we believe the world ends up,” said Lucent's Mukerjee.

And so the lucky few are off again, working on the next, but never quite reaching that place where their world ends up.

For more insight on VoIP, watch our Webcast, featuring Infonetics Research's Kevin Mitchell, available now at WWW.TELEPHONYONLINE.COM