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Direct to Consumer and IMS Whitepaper For more…

Tags: airwide solutions, ims, orchestration, provisions, service challenge, value added service, whitepaper,
Pages: 18
Language: english
Created: Fri Mar 7 12:28:49 2008

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Direct to Consumer and IMS
Whitepaper
For more information on Airwide Solutions, visit our web site:

http://www.airwidesolutions.com/

Every reasonable effort has been made to ensure the information and procedures detailed in this
document are complete and accurate at the time of printing. However, information contained in this
document is subject to change without notice.

The copyright in this work is vested in Airwide Solutions and the information contained herein is
confidential. This work (either in whole or in part) must not be modified, reproduced, disclosed or
disseminated to others or used for purposes other than that for which it is supplied, without the prior
written permission of Airwide Solutions. If this work (or any part of it) is provided to a party ("Other Party")
under a contract between Airwide Solutions and the Other Party, then the use of the work by the Other
Party shall be governed by the provisions of the contract.
Direct to Consumer and IMS Whitepaper

Contents
1 The Value Added Service Challenge..................................................................................................... 1
2 The Direct to Consumer Opportunity ..................................................................................................... 4
3 Migrating towards IMS ........................................................................................................................... 6
4 The Need for Service Orchestration ...................................................................................................... 8
5 User Examples..................................................................................................................................... 10
5.1 Scenario 1: IMS-based marketing campaigns.............................................................................. 10
5.2 Scenario 2: Context sensitive services......................................................................................... 12
6 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................... 14

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1 The Value Added Service Challenge
As mobile penetration is beginning to reach its limits in developed countries, and voice-
related revenue generating services are slowing in growth with increasing price
pressure through intensifying competition, mobile operators and service providers are
currently focusing on wireless data as a key source of new revenue growth. Strategy
Analytics recently estimated that the wireless data services market will grow from 46
billion in 2003 to 114 billion in 2008. Consequently, implementing an infrastructure
that supports the delivery of wireless data services to end users has become critical for
mobile operators to compete effectively.

While the importance of mobile value added services is growing, the landscape of
these services is also becoming increasingly complex. As end user demands become
more focused and segmented, this in turn leads to rapidly expanding portfolios of niche
services with increasingly shorter service lifetimes. According to the Mobile Multimedia
company Minick, in 2004 about 35% of European mobile operators' content related
revenues were generated from the their own content offerings, 16% from big media
companies offerings and as much as 65% from independent, direct-to-consumer
offerings. In a similar tone, Nokia recently estimated that 50-60% of data traffic from
smart phones is generated from browsing and of this only about 25% goes to operator
portals.

While it is clear that the so-called direct to consumer (D2C) business model is gaining
more and more support amongst the content provider community, the operator
community at large has only recently started to wake up to the opportunity. Obviously
this trend in revenue split generates a challenge in managing the growing number of
smaller players who may well be able to supply services that are very interesting to
certain key customer segments. The fragmentation of target markets into smaller niche
segments will also require operators to be able to adjust their pricing dynamically to
meet segment price sensitivity and price model preferences. Simultaneously, operators
are faced with an increasing cost pressure in the service management area, prompting
them to look for alternative approaches - such as the use of aggregators - to provide
the muscle to manage large numbers of content partners while keeping the cost of
operation at bay.

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In order to stay ahead of the ever-changing user demands, network operators and
service providers will need to develop their position as a strategic point of control within
the browser-based WAP/HTTP and download services in addition to traditional
messaging based services. From an end-user point-of-view browsing, messaging and
download services form part of a combined portfolio and hence should follow common
design and business logic guidelines. However, these new types of services require a
very different set of capabilities, not only from service and usability design but also
from the service delivery platforms used in producing them.

In practice, all this means is that operators and service providers need to (1) handle the
complex integrated SMS, MMS, download, and WAP/HTTP traffic and service
management requirements, (2) provide an integrated service look and feel with
common business logic, as well as (3) gracefully integrate new capabilities into existing
legacy infrastructure without unnecessary redundant investments. Maintaining such a
dynamic service bundle will introduce completely new middleware requirements on
value added services (VAS) delivery platform management, rapid service enrolment,
multi-channel traffic flow, billing, service and content provider management, and
business reporting.

One of today's key competitive advantages for many operators is providing superior
service experience with their services. In the present environment, this is most often
achieved either through tightly controlled walled portals or through client-based
implementations in the handset. While both approaches allow excellent usability to be
designed and implemented in a limited service portfolio, they will both break down
under an extensive management overhead when the number of services and service
providers starts to grow. To enable provisioning with an excellent user experience for
very large service portfolios, context-aware service concepts must be developed. In
practice this means that an operator will use all available information from sources like
the network itself, terminal capability databases, presence systems, as well as
customer personalization information to find out how to best render the requested
service in the current context of the subscriber. With a carefully designed context
management concept combined with a content and service metadata management
system, service delivery and rendering can be automated for very large service
portfolios without a significant increase in management overhead.

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In parallel, while managing the services that are currently available, operators and
service providers also need to prepare for future opportunities. In addition to the
current messaging and browsing services, the importance of music and video services
is growing. We are also seeing the emergence of new bearer channels. As an
example, digital TV technology can be used to deliver entertainment and other services
to mobile handsets using DVB protocols. To be a competitive player in the future
wireless market, an operator or service provider also needs to combine their current
capabilities with these future enhancements.

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2 The Direct to Consumer Opportunity
While challenging to manage, the direct to consumer (D2C) model of offering value
added services provides some distinct advantages over the walled garden model.
Harnessing the innovative power of potentially hundreds of content providers must
surely produce more services that consumers are ready to adopt than the efforts of a
few operator-employed engineers.

As witnessed by the Japanese, and to a degree Northern Europe, the D2C business
model provides multiple incentives for independent content providers. The first of
these, obviously, is the more content provider-friendly revenue share model. The other
being the potential to create new consumer brands, something that has actually taken
place in both Japan and Europe.

From an operator's point of view, the initial effect of D2C is obviously the reduction in
transaction value via decreasing revenue share. In the long term, however, this should
be more than compensated for by increasing the number of transactions. And herein
lies the greatest opportunity of them all: Once the D2C model is established and true
competition reigns in the markets between content providers, the operators have a
prime opportunity to increase the value of the transaction by building additional value
into the network. This time, the paying party is not the consumer directly but the
content provider competing against their peers.

As outlined above, the added value in this case consists of capabilities that allow the
content provider to add value to their own service. Such capabilities include not only
technical things like location, terminal type, roaming status, etc., but also the customer-
expressed preferences that include presence information, muting periods for push
services, and content-related preferences (no video feeds while roaming, etc.). By
offering facilities through which the content providers can easily integrate these
capabilities into their own services, an operator can significantly increase their share of
transaction revenues and at the same time ensure they remain a benchmark against
which all the other operators in the region are compared.

While all of this is technically already available today, there is one problem: The
content providers, and especially the smaller ones, are not typically very technology-

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oriented. For the majority of them, development of systems capable of integrating to
multiple interfaces with multiple operators is simply too complicated. Therefore, the
operators must offer simple interfaces that abstract the actual networks and the
systems related to them from the outside world and provide a service-centric approach
for service delivery � as opposed to the network-centric approach that is widely
employed today.

Finally, in light of the imminent migration to IMS and other new technologies, the
content providers should be isolated from the network evolution. The interfaces in use
today should evolve separately from the underlying networks. After all, a content
provider may not be very excited about the various new protocols used to extract for
example location information from the network, but are very interested that the
information is available to them at all times � without any changes to their own
applications.

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3 Migrating towards IMS
During recent research, Airwide discussed the future role of IMS with a number of
leading operators in Europe who have already deployed IMS for pilot use. The general
topic in these discussions was around the uncertainty about the actual IMS
applications to be deployed in the short term.

With that said, Airwide believes that making rich multimedia applications available for
subscribers and providing a controlled access to various network capabilities for the
general developer community will drive innovation and act as a booster for the
development of new business models across a wide range of different application
areas. Also, this kind of an open approach will provide a good testing ground to all the
different concepts proposed by various vendors, application developers, and other
industry players, driving the entire industry forward through a truly evolutional process.
Airwide believes that given enough time, new and revolutionary services delivering new
business opportunities will emerge. In the meantime the existing service technologies
must evolve to provide more value to end users and therefore to the operators and
service providers.

Another common theme in discussions on migration towards IMS is the presence of a
multitude of proprietary approaches to problems belonging firmly to the domain of IMS.
It has even been claimed that everything IMS can do tomorrow, can be done today with
the application of one proprietary solution or another. Clearly, any approach to IMS
must therefore account for the transparent migration of existing service portfolios using
today's technologies to the future architecture supporting full-fledged IMS standards.

To get started on this migration path, Airwide sees enhanced service management
capabilities representing a clear starting point for operators by acting as a bridge from
today's service portfolios towards the future by abstracting the service concepts from
the underlying technical implementation. By such abstraction, the content and service
providers, as well as the operating personnel, are relieved from the need to know about
the exact technical details of the underlying service network. The capabilities provided
by this Service Management layer include support for context-aware service
development, business reporting, audit trails, and settlement. Airwide sees that easy to
use tools are also required for service creation and orchestration in multi-product node

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operations across various technologies and even across different vendors' equipment.
These tools should be available for various operator roles, and also those of an
operator's partner, e.g. third-party service providers, MVNOs and content aggregators.

After this necessary layer of abstraction is in place, the underlying service delivery
platforms can evolve to suit the particular demands of the current service portfolio and
use case. Primarily, in the field of mobile VAS where Airwide platforms are widely
deployed, Airwide sees the primary driving force towards IMS to be capability brokering
that facilitates the development of context-aware service portfolios. Accessing network
capabilities in today's environment is very much a systems integration effort involving
numerous proprietary interfaces to the various systems involved. While very much an
incremental approach allowing demand-based development, this approach soon leads
to very complex and rigid system architectures. Therefore, the need for standardized
interfaces to access the required capabilities is very real.

Airwide� infrastructure will fit into this picture by acting as a capability broker between
the resources residing in the operator domain and the services consuming these
resources � in effect implementing the SCIM functionality of the IMS architecture. The
resources can be anything from a simple user personalization database or prepaid
balance query to information about the available bandwidth in the user's current
network. The consuming entities can be either operator internal services or services
provided by external parties like content providers, banks, corporations, etc.

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4 The Need for Service Orchestration
In order to drive revenues in a highly competitive market heading towards decreasing
messaging prices and flat-rate data traffic, operators can compete by ensuring an
excellent user experience and gain new revenue by monetizing their most valuable
assets � their customer relationships and network. This is done by exposing a rich set
of functionalities to their partners, such as third-party service providers, MVNOs, and
content aggregators; all of whom require very different levels of support in their
operations. At the same time, the operator infrastructure will grow more complicated
and operators must be able to manage their service portfolios in an environment with a
wide variety of different access technologies, handsets, VAS delivery technologies,
network capabilities and partners.

In such a heterogeneous environment, operators will only be able to manage and grow
their VAS business effectively if they deploy an efficient service business orchestration
capability. Operators who have easy to use tools for provisioning and managing access
rights, business models and policies across their whole park of platforms effectively for
the third-party partner value chain are able to tap into new revenue streams by
leveraging the innovative power of a very large service developer base. In practice this
means that the underlying service delivery platform must be in full control through a
unified service orchestration system, and all related systems must be tightly integrated
to the existing operator business processes through work flow support tools. In
addition, the same work flow support tools are available for an operator's partners. For
example, an operator may host a VAS platform for an MVNO, allowing the MVNO to
provision services and policies for its content providers and partners. All the activities
are performed through integrated management systems. A change made in the
management system automatically cascades down to specific configurations in specific
system components, and all of this is done so that the person provisioning the system
does not need to worry about the details of underlying network implementation.
Automating the service provisioning and management workflows not only speeds up
service creation and fault finding, but also reduces errors in the process through the
enforcement of the integrity of the management transactions. In practice this could
mean, for example, that the system automatically assigns available short codes for an

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SMS-based service and locks the assigned codes from being used by another service
at the same time.

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5 User Examples
There are clearly two different kinds of use cases that can be implemented by using
Airwide infrastructure:

A "pure" Capability Broker example where the capability queries are carried out
without transmitting any payload in the process. Payload may or may not follow in a
separate session depending on the attached business logic.

A scenario where capability information is used in conjunction with payload
transmission.

The first model is especially relevant in cases where the content provider is the active
party in initiating the transmission, as described below in example 1. The second
model is typically used when the subscriber is the active party as described below in
example 2.

In addition to all the well-established legacy protocols for message and browsing
transport, the Airwide infrastructure will also support routing interconnection of SIP
traffic and add capability information into this traffic. In practice, this will be realized by
enabling SIP session establishment between IMS compliant UE and IMS session-
capable applications and then triggering the relevant capability queries and business
logics as defined by the service in question.

5.1 Scenario 1: IMS-based marketing campaigns
In this example an operator allows a service provider to send IMS-based marketing
campaigns. In practice the marketing content is an interactive session based
application. The session is initiated using a push message.

From the end user perspective, the format is as follows:

1. End user accepts to receive multi-media marketing messages through their self-
provisioning portal. They also accept that their presence information is forwarded to
a specific service provider.

2. End user knows that when they accept the marketing campaign, they will get a free
mobile service as a reward.

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3. In practice, the end user gets a request for opening the session from the application
server. If the end user accepts that request, a session is opened between the
application server and the terminal. End user consumes the marketing message
that may be deployed as e.g. a simple game. The marketing application may ask
quiz questions and those who know all the answers get a prize. After the session,
the end user gets a benefit, free access to a service site.

The operator (here the VAS service representative) carries out the following actions
through Service Manager user-interface:

4. Operator creates an account for a new service provider (multi-media marketing
agency) who concentrates in creating and delivering interactive multi-media
marketing messages over IMS.

5. Operator allows SIP capabilities for the service provider.

6. Operator does not allow the service provider to charge for their services, but allows
the service provider to bundle their services with other services.

7. Operator makes partial presence information available for the service provider
(handset status: on/off and coarse location information).

8. Operator allows the service provider to send session initiation push campaigns for
the end users who have accepted to receive the marketing campaign.

9. Operator activates the system for the service provider

10. Operator reviews the usage charts and trends through the reporting

The service provider carries out related actions and utilizes the Service Manager
extranet tools for provisioning their services and for launching the campaign. The
Service Provider views the business reporting and analyses which the end users
leverage to generate revenue after the marketing campaign.

When the service provider activates the campaign, it sends a capability request to the
Airwide infrastructure requesting the identities of all subscribers who have their
presence set to "handset on" and who are in a given location area. Upon receiving the
identities (which could be masked by the operator to hide the real customer identity but
to allow transmission of messages) the service provider activates a business logic

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application to construct the push messages transmitted to the subscribers. If terminal
information was made available in this use case, the content transmitted to the
subscribers could also be adapted to the available terminals individually.

In this example the capability query is performed without a payload attached and the
payload transmission is done later based on results of the service provider business
logic implementation.

5.2 Scenario 2: Context sensitive services
In this example, an operator aims to ensure user experience by combining network
capability and user preference information into a service transaction. This can already
be implemented in today's environment using Airwide infrastructure and the available
legacy protocols and suitable business logic scripts, but in the IMS-enabled
architecture, the interfaces can be standardized across the various operators in a given
country or area, thus simplifying the deployment from the service provider's standpoint.

From the end user perspective, the service works as follows:

The end user configures a news alert service as follows:

When a new news item appears, send an alert (via pushing a link) to my terminal
provided that my presence is not set to "silent"

When I click on the alert link, I render the news item as a video stream provided
that I'm
a) I am in a 3G or Wi-Fi network area in my home country
b) I am using a suitable terminal with the player installed

Otherwise, I render the item as a normal HTTP page

The operator (here the VAS service representative) carries out the following actions
through Service Manager user-interface:

1. Operator creates an account for a new service provider (News Service Provider)
who concentrates on creating and delivering breaking news services.

2. Operator enables the relevant bearers for the service provider.

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3. Operator enables the predefined charging models like pay-per-clip and HTTP
transaction charging.

4. Operator makes presence, terminal and network information available for the
service provider.

5. Operator activates the system for the service provider.

The Service Provider performs the following actions:

1. Creates the feed for the breaking news service.

2. Tags the news item with the relevant content metadata to describe the various
ways in which to render the service in different user contexts. This can be done by
e.g. creating a dynamic service instance pointing to different versions of the service
depending on the available user parameters.

When a breaking news item appears in the service, the service provider sends an alert
message to all subscribers in their database. The SDP checks the subscriber
preferences for muting periods and sends the alert as applicable. Upon receiving the
alert link, the user clicks the link and begins fetching content. The SDP intercepts the
download operation and attaches network and terminal information to a subscriber data
record and passes the request to the service provider who compares the available
customer parameters with the metadata description of the service and renders the
correct version of the news item.

In this instance the capability queries are performed in both directions in the service
transaction to ensure correct behavior of the service regardless of customer context.
Today the capability queries performed in the MO direction are typically implemented in
the Airwide infrastructure as a series of queries to the various capability databases
using a variety of legacy protocols. In the IMS-enabled service architecture, the
interfaces can be easily standardized allowing faster and more flexible generation of
services combining new capabilities in a plug and play fashion.

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6 Conclusion
IMS technology brings amazing technical advantages, however the business
fundamentals will remain the same. A sound business case for massive investment in
new equipment and software is hard to establish for IMS due to the ongoing
development of the standards and the small pool of applications and current demand
for them.

IMS is coming, and operators are looking for the smartest way to implement it. With
fewer resources, adding another silo organization to support the IMS technology (as is
in place for SMS, MMS, etc. for many operators) is virtually impossible. And even if it
were possible, it would only create a heavier burden on administration over several
separate networks. So what is the answer?

The answer is a solution that will separate the service from the technology/technical
implementation. This provides operators with multiple avenues to IMS, and keeps the
path open for future technologies. Additionally, this will allow operators to potentially
open their networks up to third-parties, and even D2C, to further feed revenues to meet
a more diverse set of consumer needs.

Examining the leading European operators, one can see that this solution is already a
reality in many global groups. In most cases however operators are changing
incrementally (versus a big bang, one-time overhaul replacement) to abstract the
service from the implementation. The process in this change is a lengthy one for
incumbents with established organizations; however the change is being steadily
driven by the business needs in any case.

IMS takes networks `three' steps forward towards finally converging. Managing the
services will indeed be a daunting but manageable task, however the operators who
are preparing for implementation will reap the most benefit by also implementing higher
level strategic initiatives to prepare for a more open garden approach.

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