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Using Cloud TAP to establish yourself as an expert in Telco Industry!

Telecom industry is one of the fastest growing industries in the market that looks for continuous innovation and a storm of developments. Operators need to keep a careful eye on these new developments in order to stay ahead of the critical battle to survive in ever shrinking markets.

The fast pace of developments in the Telco industry has increased the importance of service provider’s roles. When the content eco-system gets increasingly complex, subscribers expect service providers to be accountable to deliver innovative services and expect a great customer experience continuously. There could be any reason for a bad user experience, but the fact is that subscribers expect the operators to provide a great experience for the amount they pay for the service on their network.   

In the past when aiming for voice market was only the way of survival, Telecom operators were able to ensure a great quality in the services that are provided. However today, the challenge is considerably more complex. Telecom Operators are in search for Service Providers who can provide continuous innovation in the applications.

This can only be achieved if the service providers can tailor the delivery of services with quality for the right price that subscribers are willing to pay for the experience. This is a win-win situation both service providers and subscribers are looking forward to achieve. Operators are using the latest technologies and tools to ensure a great customer experience for their subscribers and to ensure that interesting services can be offered for the right price. Now it’s the era where operators have realized that it is important to have a solution that can provide a great customer experience with a set of attractive applications. The exciting part of it is, there are solutions that actually can achieve this, and Operators have identified that great innovations happen within Developer communities.      

mChoice™ Cloud TAP, the ‘First-of-its-kind’ in cutting edge technology is an innovative solution hSenid Mobile introduced to solve the problems that Telecom Operators are facing, by helping them to democratize the development of subscriber created applications. Through democratizing the development of applications with the use of this turn-key solution, Operators will be able build developer communities and a plethora of applications that keeps on growing each day which are pre-built and makes go-to-market faster.   

With this fascinating solution, Operators will be able to open the Telco infrastructure to any developer who is willing to develop a Telco application. This will help them to enlarge the potential of more service providers into the application eco-system while the competitive Operators are finding it hard to introduce new applications to the market due to the complexities that exist in the backend of Telcos in terms of developing Telco applications. Simply, mChoice™ Cloud TAP will eliminate all complexities of Telco application development which enables Operators to reduce the costs of developing and introducing new applications to the market. Since the basic applications can also be treated as killer applications when mChoice™ Cloud TAP is in use, operators will have the opportunity to offer these applications to subscribers at a price that subscribers are willing to spend for services. Additionally, the Open APIs of mChoice™ Cloud TAP that are also standardized as well as language independent permits the operators to open their network to a larger developer community, enabling developers from diverse programming expertise to develop applications using this solution.  

Further, Telecom Operators will be able to regain the lost ground in the Telco market with the help of the thousands of applications mChoice™ Cloud TAP introduces. These unlimited set of applications are able to enter the subscriber base irrespective of the phone model which highly varies from smart phones to featured phones. This attractive feature of mChoice™ Cloud TAP facilitates Operators to create recurring revenue opportunities and makes it possible for them to reach a larger subscriber base with their services.       

mChoice™ Cloud TAP will be hosted on the Cloud which makes it a managed service. The solution also takes advantages of Cloud’s scalability and extendibility features while enabling Operators to provide a more efficient and an attractive service to its subscribers while having the opportunity to customize the services based on end-user’s requirements. This Cloud based managed service will facilitate continuous innovation and helps to lower many risks. For example, the potential scaling up in hardware that is required when introducing new services to the market can be totally eliminated, as Cloud enables on demand usage which eliminates large upfront investments.    

Finally mChoice™ Cloud TAP provides great consultation and support for Operators and the strong communities it builds will facilitate the application developers with the issues faced when developing Telco applications.          

SDP - A Paradigm Shift

The Telecom Evolution

Turning a few pages back in the history of Telecommunications, in the 1980’s, telecom services were deployed on digital switches. In the 1990’s, the rise of Intelligent Network platforms supported the use of general purpose computers in the core network. With market saturation and voice revenue dwindling, the need for converged services coupled with the need for vendor abstraction, open standard programming models, high availability and scalability characteristics, gave rise to Service Delivery Platforms (SDPs). Hence, in the past decade emerged, next generation networks with Service Delivery Platforms at the edge of the network leveraging standard Information Technology platforms.

Every decade the telecom network has seemed to endure a significant transformation.

We are now at the beginning of yet another paradigm shift in the Telecommunications domain. A very competitive economic climate has resulted in Operators taking a hard look at how they manage and operate their network and services. They are focusing on reducing the CAPEX incurred in managing their business processes and services but at the same time, to provide differentiation and enhanced services to their subscriber base.

Coming is the era of “on demand” where Operators can use a SDP on the Cloud to reduce CAPEX and simultaneously open up their network to 3rd parties to develop and deploy applications. Thus, decrease time to market for new services, nurture innovation, and monetize and optimize network resource usage.

SDP in the Cloud

The elasticity of the Cloud will eliminate hardware CAPEX where Operators can resort to a cost

effective ‘scalable OPEX’ model, where they pay for the resource usage “on demand” (e.g. during traffic peak seasons, increase resources). Such flexibility will allow Operators to invest in a small scalable SDP and grow with the needs and infrastructural changes of the future.

This paradigm shift of SDP to the Cloud brings about a Platform as a Service (PaaS) model where application development is simplified with the storage space, run-time environments, partner management and application provisioning easily available in a central location. Additionally, such conventional requirements as charging which traditional applications had to implement, are simplified by SDP leveraging the billing infrastructure.

mChoiceTM SDP, raised to the Cloud

mChoiceTM SDP, a Cloud SDP is a timely solution from hSenid Mobile which has a proven track record of optimizing Operator networks, minimizing CAPEX, increasing time-to-market and providing all the services inherent in a PaaS solution. mChoiceTM SDP is a modular product, where Operators are at liberty to “pick-n-choose” components to suite the immediate need, allowing them to start small and grow progressively.

From service creation, management and monitoring to service delivery, mChoiceTM SDP is a robust, highly integrated platform which not only proves to be a cost-effective solution to the Operator, but it is a business intelligence tool. It will provide information on application usage, subscriber usage, access patterns, demographic data and a host of information that will be key in making business decisions.

With all the assets of a next generation SDP, mChoiceTM SDP, the SDP in the Cloud is a platform of collaboration for Operators, Application/Content Providers and Subscribers to gain and optimally utilize the Telco Network.

Harnessing Developer Communities on the Cloud

The success of a mobile application is based upon innovation and relevance to its intended audience. Furthermore the uniqueness of the application, its functionalities and time-to-market add on to the foundations which contribute to its success. In the mobile applications industry, innovation can be derived from an average high school kid to the likes of Mobiquest, all of which contribute to this rapidly growing industry. Every mobile application developer dreams of building the next cutting edge application and monetising it.

A major challenge for the telecom operators is therefore to channel the creation of these applications, which undoubtedly adds value to their service offering. This creates a need for telecom operators to have a platform that can entice innovation starting from idea generation, necessary tools, best practices and also a test bed where mobile application developers can endeavor their brainchild with utmost freedom.

Easing the Developer Task

Mobile application developers who thrive to unleash their creativity in the form of novel applications crave for a simple and streamlined application development process. They want to create applications with minimal intervention and understanding of the need to connect to the telecom operator’s backend, as well as their underlying protocols.

Platforms aiming for “developer-friendliness” will be successful in harnessing abundant creative talent amongst those who possess ground-breaking ideas but are inhibited by the technical obstacles involved in materialising these ideas.

In addition to the “developer-friendliness” initiative, the availability of useful resources that enhance the applications during the development process in the form of sample applications, development tool kits and guides will help inspire budding developers and boost the development process from rapid creation, deployment and commercialisation of their mobile applications.

Birth of a Vibrant Developer Community

In a day and age where mash-ups are enriching consumer experience, the best-of-breed mobile applications are sometimes born out of collaborative ideas from many people from all walks of life. Fierce competition has led individual developers to be on the lookout for partnerships with larger communities of developers that can bring out better applications.

This can be enabled with interactive online forums that are supported by technical counseling, developer workshops & networking sessions for idea generation, knowledge sharing & potential business partnerships, thus creating a vibrant developer community.

hSenid Mobile recently launched mChoice Aventura, its Cloud Enabled Telco Platform with a State of the art Mobile Application Developer Portal that is set to pave the way for a vibrant Developer Community with a simplified Development Path resulting in a Plethora of “Telco” Applications for Mobile Operators to provide its diverse subscriber base.

Trying to make Cloud a bit less Cloudy...

Cloud computing can simply be referred to as a metaphor for the Internet.

Actually Cloud computing is the convergence of three major trends, which are:

• Virtualization- which means the applications are separated from the infrastructure
• Utility computing- where is it available as a shared priced service
• Software as a Service- applications are available on the web on a subscription basis

It is a known fact that after the development of the internet, broadband was very cheap.

But people realized that everyone didn’t have a building house data center, so the computer running the application can be pretty far away from the person who is using it.

As a result a fast internet connection was needed between them to solve this problem.

So this is what lead to ‘Software as a Service’, where a fast machine and someone else’s data centers runs the applications, and we use it through our web browsers.

Basically someone else owns the applications and we pay a fixed subscription fee.

This had lot of advantages that time. The main advantage was, people didn’t have to worry about the machines running the applications, because they didn’t own them and they were someone else’s. And the people using the application do not have to devote time and resources in developing and maintaining the applications.

Just like the advantages, there were some disadvantages as well. Main disadvantage was that SaaS did not work with large organizations which had complex requirements. And some companies did not like the idea of keeping the important information outside their firewall. Most importantly the SaaS model did not align the cost to the usage.

What organizations really expected was a combination. They wanted the convenience and simplicity of SaaS and the flexibility of traditional computing.

So this is when virtualization came in, which was better than SaaS. With virtualization the applications and infrastructure were independent. Virtualization allowed services to be easily shared by many applications and the virtualized applications to virtually run anywhere.

Virtualization simply means packaging the application with everything that it needs to run; including the databases, middleware, and operating systems.

And this unit of virtualized application has the ability to run pretty much everywhere. So this does not have to be running in your application provider’s data center or yours. It can simply run on the Cloud.

Cloud is simply the computing service that charges you based only on the amount of computing resources you use. This ‘pay as you go’ feature is the most famous feature of Cloud computing in today’s business market. And it is the main difference between SaaS and Cloud.

Why do companies like Cloud computing this much and why do they adopt?

The main reasons are the business goals which are to reduce costs while increasing sales.
 

But in today’s business world these are dependent on business applications and it’s the most effective way that they can achieve their goals.

However these business applications are too expensive. And most of the time there is a world of complexity behind each of these applications. Because they mostly need a data center with office space, power, cooling, bandwidth, network, servers and storage, complicated set of software and an expert team to run these software and etc. etc.

And when new upgrades or versions come, it will bring the whole system down most of the time. This is the situation for only one application but businesses need many applications like this for their success.

So Cloud computing is a better way to run your applications. This will help you to run applications on a shared data center instead of running them yourself. It is just simple like plugging in and using which makes it fast to get started and which costs less. And this does not need storage and servers, no technical team is needed to run it and no upgrades are needed.

Any application that runs on Cloud will only require logging in, customizing and starting to use it. This simply changes the way we think about software as well.

Businesses prefer running many types of applications on Cloud, due to many reasons. One of the reasons is because the application can be up and be running in just few days, which is impossible in traditional business software environments.

And they cost less because you don’t need to pay for all the people, products, and facilities to run them. They are more scalable, more secure and more reliable.

However Cloud computing has many disadvantages. The main is that it needs a constant internet connection and it will be impossible if you cannot connect to Internet. Also it will be impossible with low speed Internet connections such as dial-up connections. But web based applications usually require lot of bandwidth, so it might take ages just to go through pages in a document, if the user has a low-speed internet connection.

Cloud computing is secure, but the data will be stored on the Cloud and will be in the hands of an external provider, therefore the companies will be facing a security risk due to this reason.

From a research it was found that 45% of the people believe that the risks of Cloud computing overweigh the benefits, but Cloud computing has become a buzz word in today’s world and every company is trying to adopt this model in some way.

So this is how hSenid has done it, putting the SDP on the cloud. This brings many benefits to the operators and also to the developers.

Cloud SDP will basically reduce CAPEX and OPEX since there is no need for new hardware or people to run the cloud based applications. And also the operator doesn’t have to pay for an entire system, they only have to pay for what is needed and if it’s successful and if they want more computing power they can pay more or else not.

In traditional market it takes a huge time to put an application to the market as it needs to go through testing, integration etc. which is a bit of a difficult task. But with Cloud SDP, you can do the testing while developing and building the application and you will be able to put the applications to the market very fast.

And most importantly it’s highly scalable. When more computing power is needed Cloud enables you to scale up as much as you need and if the acceptance of your application reduces, you can reduce the servers and pay only for what you need.

      

Virtualization vs. Cloud computing

Virtualization and cloud computing are two different technologies. However both of them are considered as future saving technologies.

Virtualization is a technology which allows a single user to access multiple physical devices. In other words; it is a single computer controlling multiple machines, or one operating system utilizing multiple computers to analyze a database. Virtualization also enables to run multiple applications on each server, which reduces the number of servers a company needs to manage. This also allows consolidating the servers and doing more with less hardware. Other advantages of virtualization are, that is supports more users per a piece of hardware, deliver more application and to run applications faster.

Cloud computing offers scalable infrastructure and software off-site which helps to saves labor, hardware and reduce costs. Cloud’s virtual resources are usually cheaper than physical resources connected to a personal computer or network. And in cloud computing, the software programs will not be running in a personal computer, but rather will be stored on servers hosted elsewhere and which are accessed via the Internet. In simple terms, cloud is a collection of computers and servers that are publicly accessible via the Internet.

Simply, virtualization is one physical computer pretending to be many computing environments whereas cloud computing is many different computers pretending to be one computer environment. Virtualization provides flexibility which is a great match for cloud computing, and cloud computing can be defined based on the virtual machines created with virtualization. However virtualization is not always necessary in cloud computing, but it can be used as the basis. Cloud computing is an approach for the delivery of services and virtualization is one possible service that could be delivered. Virtualization provides more servers on the same hardware and cloud computing provides measured resources while paying for what is been used.

The key advantages of virtualization and cloud computing are the significant improvement in security, availability, and data protection. Cloud computing and virtualization are two evolving technologies in today’s world. However the decision that considers virtualization vs. cloud computing should not revolve around which technology is better since both are solid technologies that proved environmental and operational benefits.