Social networks represent the next wave opportunity for mobile services
Craig Richards of SLA Mobile argues why Alacrity plays a critical role in enabling the mobile future
It’s clear that the mobile market is expanding and changing at a remarkable pace. Increasingly, mobility is the driving force behind cloud computing. Cloud-based resources – such as social media, media sharing, and search engines – are, more and more, being accessed from mobile devices rather than traditional desktops. The estimates vary but it’s probably fair to say that about 50% of Facebook ‘interactions’ are via mobile devices. And a significant industry has sprung up – app stores, mobile advertising and location-specific sales promotion – around the pervasive consumer mobile phenomenon. Soon a similar phenomenon will hit the enterprise too.
However, network operators are often being left behind in the scramble to create the ‘new mobility’. So-called over-the-top (OTT) players such as Google and Apple are winning the publicity war (and lucrative customer relationships). Network customers often have much deeper and richer relationships with the big app stores or social media sites than the underlying network providers.
This doesn’t have to be the case. Operators have the opportunity to take advantage of their customer relationships and network assets to build new hybrid propositions that engage customers – right at the heart of the social networks that are the driving force of consumer interaction and connectivity. That’s why we see the emergence of a new type of mobility that also embraces the richness of the mobile network itself.
Our Alacrity platform enables three categories of customer focused solution – utilizing core network assets. These hybrid solutions deliver rich, revenue-enhancing customer experience focused on mobile commerce (enabled by direct operator billing), customer loyalty & sales promotion. But the key thing is that the services are delivered right within Facebook or other social media sites. But this is just the start. Over time operators will also want to support the development of M2M cloud applications, enterprise applications and other services – and Alacrity will provide a supportive and enabling platform for future growth on public cloud networks (such as Facebook) as well as virtual private clouds.
Alacrity allows innovative propositions to be developed in-house or via external aggregators and partners – and achieves this through what we call enablers:
- Direct operator billing and m-Commerce
- Extensions to social network assets
- Mobile and fixed APIs
- Revenue settlement
- Customer analytics
- Application Developer On-Boarding
The SLA Mobile Alacrity platform has been utilised by a leading operator here in the Asia Pacific region to allow value added services to be promoted and shared among Facebook users.
The operator’s Facebook application, based on a social shopfront application framework, delivers a Caller Tones solution as a fresh channel to subscribers. It turned a ‘Fan page’ environment into a revenue earning service. The fan page allowed subscribers to engage with and provision mobile services – from within their favourite social media environment. Similarly, a European tier one carrier wanted to create a partner ecosystem that would drive e-commerce activity – expanding the use of their often underutilized network capabilities. SLA Mobile worked to “on-board” a series of partner aggregators to integrate new mobile network APIs into their development plans. The result is a host of new cutting-edge ‘mobile cloud’ services enabled by an active community of developers. Moreover, the operator now has a clear opportunity to develop new service propositions that take further advantage of the mobile web and underlying network assets.
Craig Richards is Director of Operations & Engineering at SLA Mobile
