The Killer Application

I’ve come to the realization – a bit late in life you may think – that the killer application doesn’t exist. For many years, the Telco industry was obsessed with identifying the killer application that would justify the huge investments they were making in core and access bandwidth. Some thought it was video-conferencing, others thought video-on-demand, and there are some present-day advocates of IPTV. The thinking has always been that if only they could identify the killer application, then they could invest heavily in it and generate extraordinary profits.

But this sort of linear thinking is simply too slow-paced for the market we find ourselves in. The reality is that there probably is no killer application, no silver bullet that the Telcos can latch onto to carry them into a 21^st century that gives them similar levels of return to the 20^th century bonanza. Instead, there are probably hundreds - perhaps thousands - of niche applications, each of which will deliver a nice level of return. And the only way to find which of these work for you is to try out lots of them, ramp up the ones that work, and discontinue the ones that fail.  

All of which brings me back to one of my favorite topics – Service Delivery Platforms. This is the vision that underpins the investment in SDPs. Create a platform that gives Service Providers the flexibility to launch thousands of applications at low cost and the scalability to ramp up the five or 10 that generate some real return.

Typically, there are two sides to this equation, and a great SDP is only half of it. The other half is all about fine-tuning the rest of the Service Provider’s performance so that they can maximize customer satisfaction and profitability. In order to do this, Service Providers need to understand how good or bad their existing performance is. TM Forum has a Business Benchmarking program that enables Service Providers to benchmark their performance across a wide range of industry-agreed metrics. This allows them to see where they are doing well and where they need to invest to improve. In a couple of weeks, we will be releasing a free industry report on some of the industry benchmarks to date based on input from a wide range of Service Providers, so definitely watch this space!

Of course in the meantime if you know what the real Killer Application is then send your ideas on a postcard to Martin Creaner……..