Service providers no longer are playing the CAPEX game to get ahead.They are trying to increase their top-line revenue growth by offering new communications applications that enable end-users to experience a new level of personalization and entertainment - from creating tailor-made video greetings through multiple devices, sending celebrity voice greeting cards to a friend's voice mailbox, to accessing voicemail via the Web to tracking a family member's location from anywhere.
Service providers are starting to offer these blended lifestyle solutions with a convenient, seamless and secure experience for the consumer.
Intense competition in the service provider market has made innovative, end-user applications critical to the success of service providers and telecommunications vendors like Lucent are to integrate end-user services focused on messaging, entertainment and other new applications spaces.Ultimately the goal is simple: To help service providers find new revenue streams, satisfy their customers and retain and grow their subscriber base.
Lucent, for example, sells a communications application called the Media Delivery Solution, which currently includes a variety of creative personalized voicemail greetings that can be loaded into a subscriber's outgoing voice mailboxes, to also include Video Greeting Cards that can be sent to another user's cell phone via Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS).
Offering service providers end-to-end services, from consulting to design, development and testing services, right through to application integration and hosting is also a key ingredient for top-line revenue growth.Vendors such as Lucent are listening to customers' challenges and finding creative ways to help them drive additional revenues from new services while minimizing their initial investments.
The sky is the limit on the future of communications applications. New trial messaging services such as Lucent's Message Delivery Gateway (MDGW) provides access to a company's directory via mobile phone, and convenient and simple mobile phone call forwarding and messaging.Simple said, MDGW offers end-users messaging and directory look-up services -- between devices and carriers -- with iron-clad spam protection and user authentication.
Lucent is staring to work with customers in the applications arena such as MobileOne Ltd. and LANA to provide content such as ringback services and customers are taking notice.
For example, Lucent recently signed a contract with Telcontar to provide location-based services, including mobile phone-accessible applications for maps, directions and points of interest. This partnership enables Lucent to integrate location-based services such as Fleet Manager, which allows businesses to monitor vehicle positions and routes by querying and monitoring the location information from a driver's mobile phone.
As service providers continue to find new streams, communications applications will be a key growth area for the industry, and many vendors such as Lucent are in the position to help define and shape the market.
Keith Chappell is Lucent Worldwide Services Communications Applications' Managing Vice President and Global Practice Leader