After a number of years trying to break into the telco market with connected services with varying degrees of success, Microsoft’s investments and persistence are finally starting to yield dividends.
Jim Dietrich, Microsoft's managing director for telecoms, told Telecom Asia that in the BSS segment alone it has forged partnerships with four billing companies - most involving its CRM platform.
He said Microsoft has tried a variety of strategies to enable infrastructure elements. “At one point Microsoft was flirting with, from an infrastructure perspective, building out some of those components instead of a more partner-based strategy.”
“Our core heritage is around the partner ecosystem, which we are very committed to. So that initial foray was maybe ill advised at best. We have put that to the side after re-evaluating the strategy. We’ve done that in the last two years and as a result we’re starting to gain ground.”
Microsoft has been building a variety of services, such as customer experience, call-center and retailed-based offerings, targeted at network operators. He said it has spent a great deal of time over the past year and a half to re-architect internally how it thinks about network operators and how best to provide services to the providers.
Over the past year a number of Microsoft partners have committed to using its Dynamics CRM to build out their billing and customer care portfolios. These include Convergys, Ericsson, Metratech, Redknee, Tech Mahindra and Tribold.
The Microsoft CRM platform is a building block, not an out of-the-box solution, which according to Stratecast’s Karl Whitelock, is a generic platform that requires a good bit configuring to make it do what an operator needs it to do. “This means an BSS supplier can use the CRM platform to blend around its billing offering, and another can use it too but the result will be different,” Whitelock explained.
Thailand’s TOT announced in February it is replacing its billing and CRM system with one from Convergys that runs on Dynamics CRM. Convergys’ Smart Communications Suite will give TOT real-time charging capabilities, enabling it to improve revenue assurance. It expects to release the product this quarter.
Redknee has built out its portfolio using the Microsoft CRM tool. A year after forming an alliance with Microsoft to develop a real-time converged billing and customer care offerings, Redknee announced two wins at the Mobile World Congress. Brunei’s DST selected Redknee to lead its transformation project to introduce next-generation services.
Metratech also has announced plans to provide dynamic converged billing using Dynamics CRM. Tech Mahindra, a systems integrator, has started work building a Dynamics CRM lab in India to develop CRM offerings for telcos globally. The company is also investing in an Azure center of excellence in partnership with Microsoft to offer consulting, development and migration services to Mahindra Satyam’s enterprise customers.
The number of call-center technologies out this is fairly limited, noted Dietrich. “We’re providing another option at a better price point. We think it’s more agile and flexible than some of the established players.”
He said the offering is done in the context of a converged billing environment, which isn’t a requirement but is becoming one. The new services coming on board already provide a holistic customer experience, “so a converged billing environment is necessary.” This, he said, helps operators bring on new services more quickly than they were able to do in the current environment.
Dietrich said Microsoft is now doing some pre-integration work of the services to speed up the roll-out for service providers.
The company has only recently started to push the offering globally and plans to invest heavily in that space. Asia is one of two key markets. “We see tremendous opportunities in the region for both Microsoft and our partners.”
Dietrich noted that what’s interesting is that as it moves into these converged scenarios, it’s helpful having the SQL conversation as well. “We’re finding that we’re making traction for further deals in an organization based upon that. What that means to the network operators is more agile and cost-effective options. There’s an almost unintended consequence - operators are getting more value from their existing investments in Microsoft.”
With Azure the company is building a number of solutions with a variety of service providers. One example is with T-Mobile, which launched a “family room” service. He said in just a few weeks the operator was able to introduce the service, which they made available on Windows Phone 7, because they had access to Azure. T-Mobile commented on the flexibility of the Azure platform offered compared to what it would have taken to build within their own data center.
He also pointed to NTT’s public-private cloud platform in which customers can determine the information they want to keep within their own data center for privacy purposes. “At the same time they can use the Azure platform as a public cloud for other sorts of workload that may be complementary. By "mixing" they offered a sort of hybrid cloud.”
Microsoft is also looking to help telcos expose their valuable assets to tap the huge developer ecosystem. Given access to these differentiated assets, developers can create applications that can specifically leverage their assets. Operators could bundle, for example, SMS and LBS as part of their services coupled with their billings and other touch points they have with customers.
Richard Ang, the company’s CTO for the worldwide comms sector, said some of the more innovative telcos are working to expose these assets and then leverage Microsoft’s cloud offering. “We can come from many different angles helping them with the cloud, whether they want on-premise, hybrid or partner to use our public cloud with Azure.”
Portugal Telecom is working on a service delivery broker that runs in the Azure cloud. “The idea is for developers to be able to access the tools readily and be able to host them in the cloud,” he said. “They then can use these as a mechanism to connect to Portugal Telecom’s backend, such as its OSS/BSS network, to do SMS or any other specific work item that they would otherwise not be able to access if the operator didn’t do it this way.”
Ang said telcos have assets locked into their OSS/BSS network. “If they start opening these up and they start positioning these to help them, they will avoid churn.”
While telco are indeed looking at how they can be more efficient, Ang noted that they are also interested in how they can go out and package their services to the SMEs. “This is an area where we could build their own private cloud through our own backend technology as a hybrid or private cloud.”
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