Return of the New Economy Super hero?

Vendors Unite to Ignite Telco Topline Revenue

Standup comedian and sitcom actor D.L. Hugley tells of a time when the best Halloween Superman cape his mother could find for him was a dish towel. "It made my friends doubt my super powers," he says. So it goes these days with the once and future superhero of the new economy, telecom. The kids on Wall Street are doubting telecom's powers to turn a decade of intense infrastructure investment into money-making new services. Telecom, it seems, is stuck without a cape in its own phone booth.

Funny enough, it was at the industry's annual SUPERCOMM show this summer that a newly formed "community" of technology vendors appeared with the stated goal of stitching together a fabric designed to help service providers break out of their apparent innovation coma.

Unveiled June 4, the Service Creation Community called on four of 18 charter member evangelists to articulate its vision: system integrator Accenture, broadband access and service gateway company ADC Telecommunications Inc., applications development and operating software provider Microsoft Corp. and programmable, service-aware edge switch maker Network Equipment Technologies Inc., aka net.com.

"Gone are the days when service providers invest billions in anything before finding proof of pay-back," says Steve Roatch, partner, communications and high tech industry group for Accenture's Network Service Line. "Rapid innovations and trials will supply service providers with information on what works."

Toward that end, the Service Creation Community, or SCC (www.servicecreation.org), promises to define templates and to preassemble solutions for the creation, delivery and management of advanced services. Member companies will fill in all the hardware, software, support and integration components of the template associated with each type of service, then seek service provider partners with which to develop pilot projects and commercial offerings.

Accenture will lead the task of outlining the taxonomy of necessary pieces. Microsoft will supply its software, of course, but also a 40,000-square-foot Partner Solutions Center to demonstrate rapid creation and launch of new services and return on investment.

"With the demonstration center, we have a number of service providers involved where we'll be able to prove out these services live, before the service provider risks money," says Michael Sandoval, general manager of Microsoft's Partner Solutions Center. On the content and applications creation front, he adds, "no one has a deeper or broader relationship with developers."

In a statement, Christopher Parsons, senior vice president of strategic marketing and business development for Bellsouth Corp., endorses the effort. "Service providers are under more pressure than ever to roll out new services yet ever more constrained in the resources necessary to do so," he says. "The presence of an independent community to facilitate the development of new services could help capitalize on the broadband promise."

Separately, IBM Corp. used SUPERCOMM in part to showcase its Service Provider Delivery Environment, or SPDE (pronounced 'speedy'), as an "open, scalable and flexible reference architecture for the delivery of revenue-generating services" now being demonstrated in IBM Network Innovation Labs worldwide. "It's a framework with hardware, middleware for data flow among operations support systems, consulting and integration," says Rich Stomp, vice president of solutions for IBM's global telecommunications industry unit. "We're helping service providers do what IBM did to itself: optimize operations through e-business techniques."

At the same time, Atreus Systems Inc. unveiled the first of seven "volumes" in its new Services Library, driving what marketing director Brenda Toonders calls "dynamic, template-driven service fulfillment." Comprising definitions of the structure and processes needed to market and provision security, messaging, storage, commerce, IP Centrex and other managed services, the volume approach "is designed to help service providers and their customers form organizational cases and road maps," she says.

"Creating and launching new services is fundamentally a business problem, [and] providers are handcuffed until the business case process propels the service development process forward," adds Andrea Baptiste, executive vice president of business development for Atreus, which praised the SCC mission. "Based on initial business case assessments, providers have scarce resources and little incentive to devote to the development of the marketing and business plans, the end-to-end processes and system enhancements required to speculate on next-gen service deployments. The vendor, analyst and research communities need to help providers wrestle with basics, such as what will make this service so compelling that customers need to buy it, how to get the service to customers and how to attain the required volume and cost points."

In a Single Bound

SCC sought to put flesh on its "comprehensive" template approach through SUPERCOMM demonstrations of user-controlled video-on-demand and enhanced IP telephony service "concepts" developed by Service Creation Community members.

In addition to Microsoft Windows technology, the concept demos employed:

• A cable modem terminating system and cable modems from Com21 Inc.;

• A DSL access multiplexer from Paradyne Corp.;

• PC-based session initiation protocol (SIP) software from Pingtel Corp.;

• SIP phones from Siemens AG;

• Interactive video communication systems from Polycom Inc.;

• A service creation environment platform from Eureka e-Solutions Inc.;

• Broadband service creation manager and IP telephony platforms from net.com;

• Web traffic management from Array Networks;

• A business accelerator and infrastructure server from Kabira Technologies Inc.; and

• A billing system from AMS Inc. running over a Hewlett-Packard Co. server.

So far, the community has drawn 18 companies to the tasks of identifying markets and fleshing out and preintegrating these and more service templates, and it is open to any number of further volunteers, including HP and Oracle Corp., which at press time were expected to formalize their participation.

Other members announced at SUPERCOMM include broadband wireless access system provider AirFiber Inc.; Web traffic management system provider Array Networks; service activation and performance management system provider CPLANE Inc.; IP media management system provider Convedia Corp.; communications industry consultancies Infonautics Consulting and TeleChoice Inc.; application storage networking system provider Maranti Networks Inc.; and next-gen telephony applications provider StarVox Inc.

"We are a community of equipment, technology, infrastructure providers, analysts, service and content providers, billing, management -- the whole supply chain required to create new services for the network service provider," says net.com president and CEO Bert Whyte. "Watch this space to see some major U.S. and international carriers joining SCC."

Asked for his response to the SCC announcement, David Abrahamson, senior vice president of business applications services for BellSouth -- which itself unveiled a raft of managed hosting, business continuity, content delivery, security and connectivity services at SUPERCOMM -- suggested this reporter "Ask them if they can sort out which services customers will really pay for."

According to Accenture's Roatch, SCC hopes to do just that with the combined know-how of its breadth of members. "Service providers have come up short on the revenue side of the equation, but not for lack of trying," Roatch says. "Every service provider has its killer app guy, so there must be barriers and a lack of technology enablers and business enablers. In fact, we're trying in part to fill a void by defining an architectural equivalent for SS7 [telephone call-control signaling] in the converged services environment."

At its inaugural meeting at SUPERCOMM, the SCC drew up a list of initial tasks. While Accenture takes on overall architectures and identification of gaps, the group will seek to define its overall function, as well define 'service creation' itself; identify markets and pilots to pursue; profile each member's potential contributions; and organize for scale around more members and pilots.

If some or all of these approaches pan out, say these advocates, service providers finally may be able to get beyond the necessary but less than awe-inspiring operational efficiencies refrain it has been singing since last fall, and that may just impress some valuable friends.

Service Networks at the Edge

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