By John Giere, President & CEO,
Indranil Chatterjee, VP Product
Sales & Marketing,
Openwave Mobility.
Developments across virtualization, secure content and monetizing subscriber data will be top of the coming year’s agenda
#1: GENERATING REVENUES THROUGH MOBILE VIDEO OPTIMIZATION
Mobile video soared in 2014, and this is only set to continue during the next year, with social media outlets such as Facebook allowing auto-play for adverts. Because of this mobile video optimization will come to the fore. There will be increased interest from operators to use optimization not just to reduce cost of ownership but to generate new revenues. By re-deploying the bandwidth saved, operators will create new service packages around video, which has now firmly established itself in the mindset of consumers worldwide.
Video optimization as a cloud proposition is now deployed by several operators. It will very quickly become a popular deployment option. This will especially be the case as operators invest in private cloud infrastructure and leverage virtual resources for use cases such as roaming traffic optimization or cloudburst during one off events that drive peak traffic.
John Giere,
CEO & President,
Openwave Mobility
#2: OPERATORS LOOK TO MINING SUBSCRIBER DATA TO SECURE NEW REVENUES
As mobile operators look to secure new revenue streams in 2015, thanks to the hype surrounding Big Data and Analytics, attention will focus more on mining subscriber data. However, analyzing that data is easier said than done. At the end of 2015 most subscriber data will still inevitably reside in deep silos within the operator network. SDM is a long-haul technology trend!
The mobile operators that are leading in SDM will break out of just being data aggregation and federation – SDM will be used to expose data to trusted third parties and Identity Management will begin to gain momentum. Operators will begin to deploy SDM solutions that are virtualized and that can be easily deployed on an operator’s private cloud. They will strive towards further consolidation of the disparate data stores that cause significant data duplication challenges.
#3: MOBILE OPERATORS TAKE STRATEGIC ACTION TO AVOID BECOMING DUMB DARK PIPES
In 2015 secure (encrypted) traffic will continue to grow, and will account for more than 30 percent of all mobile data traffic – putting mobile operators in dire risk of becoming dumb, dark pipes. As a result operators will begin to trial ways to manage / optimize secure video content in order to reduce congestion on their networks. These trials will mainly consist of “shallow inspection” approaches which are less intrusive and have a faster time to market but allow only limited traffic management.
In parallel, operators will also trial trusted proxy models whereby they get end user consent to mediate secure traffic so that users can get valuable services such as adult content filtering for their kid’s phone, better quality of experience for video, especially during peak times when users often face video stalling.
Indranil Chatterjee,
VP Product Sales & Marketing,
Openwave Mobility
#4: NETWORK VIRTUALIZATION STILL ON THE AGENDA
2014 saw NFV move from lab trials to field trials and this trend will continue. In 2015 operators will need to take a more pro-active role in the development of NFV to safe-guard it from becoming a vendor-silo'd technology. As applications move to NFV they will start with simple virtualization, followed by integration with orchestration platforms for dynamic elasticity. The latter will still be in PoC stage as large domain vendors will enter an intense battle to establish their solution as the orchestration platform of choice. Operators will need to tread carefully to maintain the core value proposition of NFV, which is freedom from vendor lock in.
We will see more applications transition to the private and in some cases to the public cloud – which will bring security and privacy issues to the top of the agenda as vendors and operators look to address this. The move to NFV and dynamic orchestration is transformational; moving from a fixed, dedicated appliance infrastructure requires new operational techniques, new ways of defining vendor SLAs and in fact new ways of thinking of network operations.
The migration of services from static in-network to the Cloud will be a major disruptor for operator staff in the next few years. But there is a significant first mover advantage –the operator who gets programmability and flexibility in their network planning will develop new pricing options, new service delivery options and better quality of delivery.
About John Giere:
John Giere has over 20 years of wireless industry management experience in sales, product management, marketing and business development. Prior to his role as President and CEO of Openwave Mobility, John served as GM of the mediation business unit for Openwave Systems. Before Openwave Systems, John served as CMO for Alcatel-Lucent and CMO at Lucent Technologies. Before joining Lucent in 2003, John worked for Ericsson in various strategic marketing and business development roles. John currently serves on the Board of Sonim Technologies. He holds a MBA from the University of Maryland and a Bachelor of Science degree from Georgetown University.
About Indranil Chatterjee:
Indranil Chatterjee has over 15 years of experience in product management, marketing, strategy and software development in the mobile communications and IT industries. Prior to joining Openwave Mobility, Indranil was director of product management at Syniverse Technologies, responsible for new product development for wireless applications and mobile analytics. Before joining Syniverse, he served as Director of Wireless Solutions for Alcatel-Lucent. Indranil is a member of the Board of Governors of 4G Americas. He holds a bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) – BHU, India, and an MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
