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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