Going beyond e-mail: Telcos have huge opportunity in enterprise IT support for knowledge workers

How much time do you spend on e-mail, information searches and other collaborations each week? 

According to a new report from McKinsey on the social economy, the average knowledge worker spends 28 hours a week on those tasks. That is an astounding number, and if we could reduce it by only a few percentage points, it would mean a massive rise in productivity for any enterprise, from the smallest to the largest.

As it turns out, these gains are possible today. McKinsey estimates up-to-date existing collaboration and communication tools could cut this time by as much as 20 percent.

But it’s not happening.  Why is that?

The IT industry has spent the last 30 years developing highly structured information repositories, designed for process workers in areas like invoicing, shipping, and HR forms processing.  Meanwhile, the knowledge workers in the middle of the organization – who rarely follow repeatable processes – have been essentially left with e-mail as their sole IT support system. 

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Yet to be able to communicate, coordinate and collaborate effectively between members in workgroups, as well as within and across the borders of companies, is now a fundamental piece of core enterprise processes. Megatrends such as outsourcing and globalization are creating ever more specialized enterprises that are ever more dependent on these same underserved knowledge workers.

Researchers claim that over 80 percent of corporate information today is locked away in the minds of employees. Knowledge workers produce and consume a great deal of unstructured content such as newsletters, research reports, e-mails, and PowerPoint presentations. This information gets scattered between hard drives on their computers, shared network drives, e-mail inboxes, and on miscellaneous Web servers, and the only way to unlock it is through communication, coordination and collaboration. 

For communication service providers, this is a greenfield opportunity of almost epic proportions: to provide enterprises of all sizes, around the globe, with integrated communication, coordination and collaboration systems. It’s a brand new market, currently with no clear market leaders.

This is going to be the quintessential battlefield in what some refer to as the convergence of telecom and IT. And the telecom industry already possesses vital components – infrastructure and the access network – that could completely change the dynamics of the Unified Communication & Collaboration (UCC) market. Furthermore, telcos have little to lose and everything to win, while most IT players are in more defensive positions, with much to lose. 

Yet nothing is for certain, and the situation of knowledge workers is only getting worse, not better. Now is the time for action, for standing still means getting  left behind. 

Mozilla takes WebRTC further at Mobile World Congress but just wait until it goes mobile

WebRTC was one of the big stories at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona a few weeks back.  We’ve been on top of this trend for a while, pushing the service and revenue possibilities for operators.

Mozilla – along with AT&T and Ericsson – made the biggest WebRTC splash with their proof-of-concept demonstration linking a Firefox browser with a user’s mobile contacts list and the underlying IMS network, with its find and connect functionality, allowing for direct calls to mobile phones from the browser.

Integrating the phone number is an especially nice touch, as it could solidify the number as the universal identifier of choice amidst a scattered OTT landscape of confusing and multiple sign-ins.

Analyst Dean Bubley writes that WebRTC is “one of the most exciting and pivotal technologies” he’s seen in a decade.  He also says WebRTC has the potential to benefit most players in communications business, including operators:

“The breadth of companies involved – including Google, Ericsson, Cisco, Telefonica and AT&T – spans both traditional telecoms, enterprise communications and the web. We will see web access added by telcos, for example for IMS access from the browser. And we will also see realtime voice and video communications added by to the web inside social networks, or allowing informal “call centre” functions on normal websites.”

As hot as WebRTC and HTML5 – which WebRTC builds on – are now, we see the real revolution coming when it truly goes mobile. As a tool to encourage developers and highlight the possibilities of WebRTC, Ericsson released the first WebRTC-enabled mobile browser last year. And it looks like mobile WebRTC-enabled applications will disrupt OTT players (and native app builders) far more than they will disrupt established operators.

After all, who needs a standalone messaging or VoIP app when you can just make a call to anybody through the browser?  Of course, this means challenges for operators too, and they can use this opportunity for collaboration and competition to leverage in communication services.

Dancing VoLTE style with Psy to build an indispensable telco platform

In 2013, nothing says you’ve hit the commercial mainstream more than going Gagnam Style with Korean rapper Psy.  So it was fun to stumble across a commercial the superstar made for the South Korean operator LG U+.

What’s especially fascinating here is the fact that LG U+ is promoting VoLTE so explicitly.  There have been doubts in some quarters about whether VoLTE was anything but a replacement service.  We disagree with that, of course. We see VoLTE, in conjunction with RCS, as an indispensable platform to deliver HD voice, video and multimedia services across multiple devices and access technologies.

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Telefónica demonstrated a seamless voice call handover from a 4G to a 3G mobile network, and they summed its strengths up nicely in a release:

“A key advantage of VoLTE is that it can be combined with several enhanced IP-based services such as High Definition Voice, presence, location, and Rich Communication Suite (RCS) additions like instant messaging, video share and enhanced phone books. Moreover, VoLTE enables prioritization over other data streams to deliver consistently high quality service levels.”

In short, VoLTE is a way for telcos to build on their historic strengths as they enter the all-IP age, so it’s nice to see LG U+ taking it up Gagnam Style. The company has competition in the Korean VoLTE market too.  SK Telecom launched VoLTE at the same time as LG U+ last year, and it is aggressively pushing both HD voice and the RCS-based service joyn, in conjunction with VoLTE. 

And now that we’ve brought up HD voice, we also see it gaining some traction with the public.  It might not be Psy-level, but GSMA made HD voice T-shirts that were distributed at the Mobile World Congress.

And that makes us want to dance “VoLTE style” with Psy once again.

Looking ahead to VoLTE, WebRTC, HD voice and Joyn - and so much more - in 2013

We are off on our winter holiday here at the Voice on Telecom, which means we are looking back at the past year and forward to 2013.  It’s amazing how far the telecom world has come since we started writing just a little more than a year ago.

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Back then, we wrote our first post about trillions of text messages and, soon after, wondered if Telefónica was “going too far” into digital.  And even earlier this year, when we wrote about things like WebRTC, it seemed like we were looking far into the future.

Well, the future has arrived.  We’re now talking about WebRTC as a transformational commercial reality, about the cutting edge services introduced fast and furious by Japanese operators, and about smart operators – like Telefónica, among others – that have committed themselves fully to digital services.

One thing that hasn’t changed is our belief that operators remain in an excellent strategic position, whether in billing or M2M or health care or, especially, messaging and voice services. We’ve highlighted these points in our posts looking at Joyn and RCS – which we believe will gain real traction in the market – and VoLTE, which is crucial not just for operators to move to all-IP but can serve as a platform for crucial services like HD voice and video calling.

So we hope to see you in the New Year, when we’ll all have to move faster just to keep up with the changes and innovations that get to the heart of how we all communicate. 

Glimpsing the future of telecom in a burst of innovation from DoCoMo and Softbank

A Japanese proverb says you can’t see the whole sky through a bamboo tube. It’s a message the country’s operators took to heart long ago in adopting a uniquely broad view of the possibilities of communication services.

Where else in the world can you find apps offering real-time voice translations? Or SMS-based earthquake early warning systems? These are just two examples of services launched by NTT DoCoMo, the country’s largest operator. A serial innovator who recognized the importance of a good software experience in differentiating handsets about a decade before Apple – check out this history of its i-mode platform – only last month DoCoMo launched a venture capital fund to keep the ideas flowing for years to come. Plus, a number of Japanese corporations have already expressed interest in the translation app.

But DoCoMo is not the only innovator in the Japanese market; Softbank has been equally creative in its own way. In February, for instance, it announced a partnership to provide subscribers with remote desktop access and multi-device content management services. Along with Vodafone, Verizon Wireless and China Mobile, Softbank is also a co-founder of the Joint Innovation Lab project to develop mobile services.

SoftBank also enjoyed exclusivity on the iPhone in Japan until very recently – a huge factor in SoftBank adding the most new subscribers of any Japanese operator in every year since 2007. Although a no-brainer in retrospect, this decision to commit so substantially to the iPhone represented a big risk back in 2008, when the Japanese handset market was still ruled by homegrown devices.

Either way, it’s clear that in the land of the katana, operators have long been firmly positioned at the cutting edge of communication services technology. And in many ways they have no choice. As of October 2012, Japan has no less than 127 million mobile subscribers and innovation is essential if operators are to keep them happy. South Korea deservedly gets a lot of press in this area, but paying attention to developments in Japan also seems a good idea.

After all – as Shabette-Concier, DoCoMo’s voice-command personal agent service that responds to queries by taking into account user attributes such as age and gender, is already showing – the phones there now pay attention to you.

Joyn and RCS 5.0 show off their potential in the US with MetroPCS

We wrote recently about how the timing might be right for Rich Communication Services (RCS) after all. And as if to reinforce the point, one of the leading operators in the US chose the same day as our post to announce the commercial launch of an RCS offering on its network.

Just like the big five operators in Europe, MetroPCS will deliver RCS under the GSMA-licensed joyn brand. It offers more than the basic joyn, though: besides the usual mix of free, integrated instant messaging and chat and simplified content sharing, MetroPCS adds WiFi VoIP and Video calling. The timetable is also familiar from previous RCS unveilings, with the joyn app initially available for one high-end smartphone (in this case, Samsung’s Galaxy Attain) before roll-out of additional RCS-enabled devices next year and native support for joyn services to follow.

But there are more differences  this time – the MetroPCS deployment represents the world's first commercial launch of RCS on an LTE network. The operator will also be using as a baseline the GSMA RCS 5.0 standard, which offers a larger feature set than most existing joyn roll-outs. This makes us wonder whether MetroPCS will be looking to deliver differentiated services along with the base service interoperability that lies at the heart of joyn.

And something else is downright unusual. The industry response so far has been almost universally positive, with the normally sober Fierce Wireless even calling the technology “cutting edge”. Compared with the resigned sighs of “too little, too late” that echo around Europe following an RCS launch anywhere in the continent, the willingness of North America to judge RCS on its own merits – of which there are plenty – is really rather refreshing.

Of course, an RCS announcement just wouldn’t be the same without at least one dissenting voice, and in the case of MetroPCS it comes from an unexpected quarter. T-Mobile USA – who expect to close a merger with MetroPCS sometime in the first half of 2013 – remain distinctly lukewarm on the potential of RCS, to judge by recent comments from company CTO Neville Ray.

While Ray said “there are elements of the RCS offering that make sense,” he instead said he sees the rich application environment in the US already driving many of the services that RCS is aiming to populate.

That may be true.  But there is also little to suggest a lack of space in the market for a fully interoperable communications service that works on any device, on any network, with anyone in a subscriber’s mobile address book. Hopefully a post-merger MetroPCS will get a chance to show just why the industry in North America is right to be excited.

Sustained operator push is setting the stage for Joyn and RCSe success

Could RCSe work after all?

It represents the biggest counter-offensive from operators so far in their battle with OTT players. Yet critics want to know just how RCSe will compete with OTT services, whether it has the required reach, and most pointedly, if it can move fast enough.

Based on a specification put forward by some of the biggest operators in the business and backed up by the GSMA, it promises subscribers IM chat, video and file sharing services across any device, on any network, with anyone in their mobile address book.

Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, and Vodafone have all committed to rolling out RCSe under the joyn brandname. And if they get it right, the superior user experience served up by RCSe can help them start clawing back some of the traffic lost to OTT offerings.

That’s the theory, anyway. Opinions are split on whether it’ll actually work – detractors point to the enormous popularity of services like Skype, the daunting task of getting RCSe on as many devices as possible, and the fact that the GSMA has estimated it could take up to three years before the service is globally available.

Tough questions, certainly. But what if the operators have the answers?

Because it’s still early days for RCSe, with joyn only announced at Mobile World Congress in February. And there are already signs that momentum is slowly building in the operators’ favor. Faced with the prospect of being locked out of operator portfolios if they don’t cooperate, nine of the top ten handset manufacturers have stated their commitment to supporting RCSe on their products.

The single hold-out might be a big name – Apple, no less – but Deutsche Telekom’s Kobus Smit recently opined that as joyn is intended to be a core communications service, Apple’s continued non-participation may become a cause of dissatisfaction for iPhone users.

Roll-out hasn’t been slow, either. Telefonica and Vodafone Spain launched joyn in June, followed by Vodafone Germany in August. And when it comes to the all-important user experience, opinion might just be starting to swing away from the OTT competition. Only last week, one report described RCSe as the best of both worlds, combining the functionality of OTT services with the reliability of operator offerings, and Gabriel Brown of Heavy Reading told us recently that there is a need for reliable, secure, rich communication services – and that this is exactly what operators do well.

But perhaps the most telling indicator of RCSe’s potential comes from a familiar source. We’ve written before about South Korea as a bellweather for communication services trends, and the evidence suggests that interoperable, operator-based IM services have certainly shaken things up in the Land of the Morning Calm.

Network traffic increased a staggering 100 times following the launch of an IM service by the country’s three major operators in March 2009, while the number of users grew 54 times. The operators also discovered that heavy SMS users continued to text at the same levels, and simply used IM to communicate even more.

So there you go. RCSe may not be too little, too late. It may be just on time.