Huge benefits to come from LTE, but only with the right approach

Welcome to the winter edition of Evolve. So what are the big mobile developments expected next year? The two key ones that spring to mind involve smartphones (many more on the way) and LTE (Long Term Evolution)...

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Multi-gadgeted users are complex users

Welcome to this Autumn 2009 edition of Evolve. It's an easy prediction to make: policy management is going to become much more important in the mobile world. Back in the old days it was very different. You took a mobile phone, sold it to an individual and there was your user.

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More smartphones please - then we’ll have a level playing field

The mobile apps stores are becoming an obsession for the mobile industry and a huge amount of money and effort is being expended by players wanting to get involved. It’s not hard to see why - where the app store works well it seems to work very well. Apple’s AppStore has famously overseen its one billionth download and that level of customer engagement (not to say revenue potential) is enough to both frighten and/or inspire the rest of the mobile industry.

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Holding on to your prepaid customers

Once upon a time a prepaid customer was either a postpaid who hadn’t yet been up-sold, or someone who, for various reasons, wasn’t worthy of being up-sold at all. But no more. The days of the prepaid customer being tended with rudimentary CRM are over. In developed markets winning and keeping prepaid clients by offering improved service bundles drives a parallel requirement to capture additional information on prepaid customers and to work on ways to communicate with them - in other words to manage and engage with at least the same level of enthusiasm shown to postpaids.

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At last: a comprehensive framework for prepaid-postpaid convergence

Prepaid-postpaid convergence has been rumbling on as an issue for years and we think the reason it's not been adequately addressed up to now has much to do with the lack of a comprehensive, high level applications framework. In other words, where the results of convergence projects have been less than brilliant it's often been because operators and software developers have been trying to knit together the postpaid and prepaid software stacks instead of stepping back and knitting together the business processes first.

With the development of a layered BSS/OSS architecture, as pursued by the TM Forum with its Telecoms Application Map (TAM) and other initiatives, comes the chance to address this crucial convergence in a comprehensive way.

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Going for Value

Welcome to the Winter edition of Evolve. In this issue we’re wrestling with the value concept and we’re asking: why do some politicians and regulators seem obsessed with turning telecoms into a commodity? We think that’s the direction of travel indicated by the detailed meddling in telecoms tariffs currently being pursued by the EU Telecoms Commissioner, Viviane Reding, in her quest to reduce roaming and termination rates across Europe.

We say, instead of applying the dead hand of ‘cost-plus’ accounting to the highly successful European mobile industry, we think the Commission should recognise how important value-based pricing has been in establishing innovations like seamless roaming. It’s a telecoms miracle and is one of the reasons GSM is a world-beater. We don’t think the industry’s value-based approach should be thrown away and we explain why in this issue.

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Get ready for the femtocell

The Femtocell Welcome to the Autumn (that's Fall for you North Americans) edition of Evolve. Femtocells are something we'll have to start thinking hard about over the next year. The femto movement has a forum, it has operators in various stages of deployment including the expected first 3G Femtocell rollout at the beginning of 2009 (by Japan's Softbank) and it's also boosted by the underwhelming performance, so far, of alternative approaches to fixed/mobile convergence.

So why are Femtos being seen as another way forward for mobile operators? For a start they're a way of getting mobile operators right into the centre of the home on their own terms. So unlike WiFi, which just offers bare Internet, the femto can deliver full 3G (data and voice) - it just uses the Internet to get there. And it promises to slice into those frightening 3G deployment costs while solving part of the indoor coverage conundrum at the same time - a femto network scales with the customer base and that's worth it, even if you have to deliver price breaks to get those customers on-board. But we must admit we're concerned about the billing aspects - femto networks and their service pricing could get complicated. We go into more detail in our feature article.

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The Flat Rate Society adopts a rounder view

Welcome to the Summer edition of Evolve. Our theme, one way or the other, is all about pricing and billing. We turn the spotlight on the launch of Cerillion Express, a pre-configured and pre-integrated CRM & Billing solution which sets some new benchmarks on flexibility and speed to market. And we announce a multi-million dollar contract with The Bahamas Telecommunications Company Limited (BTC) to implement a fully convergent CRM and Billing solution.

In our reader poll last time we asked you about churn and one of the things we discovered was that pricing was the most important factor in whether you’d churn to another provider or not. So this time the poll asks about pricing - flat rate pricing to be specific, a theme also picked up by our main feature article.

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Welcome to the Spring edition of Evolve for 2008. In this issue we consider some of the Billing/BSS implications of regulator-driven functional separation for telcos now that this EU-driven policy direction looks more certain; and we report back from a thought-provoking Telecoms CRM and Billing Forum 2008, in Prague.

Few of us are keen on government regulation - especially when it’s aimed at us rather than the other guy and is stamped ‘Brussels’. As our main feature below shows, where functional separation between retail and wholesale operations is applied it will involve extra Billing/BSS investment - whether the change is driven and defined by a specific regulatory brief or is a pre-emptive move by an operator, designed to transform its business and to gain some regulatory relief.

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Mobile World Congress

Welcome to the first edition of Evolve of 2008. In this issue we examine the rise in popularity and benefits of outsourcing in today’s highly competitive telecoms environment.

These days, and increasingly, telecoms operators are either evaluating or actively embracing the possibilities of outsourcing their CRM and billing systems to third party solutions providers with proven expertise in the field. Here at Cerillion, we support and understand the notion that outsourced billing may not suit every business strategy, however there are clear signs that this approach can deliver many benefits over and above the obvious cost savings that can be achieved.

For those that opt not to take this increasingly common route, and decide to continue to manage their billing and CRM systems in-house, there is always an inherent risk that they end up concentrating rather more on the technology than they do on their customers. As many have discovered, bells, whistles and go-faster stripes do not necessarily a compelling business case make. In the competitive market that we all work in, operators should, and must, always put the customer first. And if you don't, someone else will.

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Welcome to the last edition of Evolve for this year. Here we are as tired old 2007 totters to the end of its life and the lusty babe that is 2008 clambers out of its cradle eager to take on anything that the world can throw at it.

2007 has been quite a year but one in which the global comms industry has continued to shrug off the very last vestiges of the recession that began way back in 2000. Overall this year has been one of optimism and controlled, planned and sustainable rather than runaway, ad hoc growth.

And all the indications are that, despite the sub-prime rate crisis in the US that is now beginning to have an effect on the financial and credit sectors in other parts of the world as well, telecoms looks to be well-placed to weather the storm. Most industry observers believe that investment in major infrastructure projects will be uninterrupted and that the global mobile industry will continue to prosper as India, China, South America and Africa provide the growth as mature markets begin to plateau. That surely augurs well for us all and should be the basis of confidence, optimism and hope going forward.

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Well, that was the summer, that was. In much of Northern Europe it was the worst since meteorological record-keeping began, and whether the, (for some, the all too literal) washout was the result of El Nino, a recalcitrant jet stream, global warming or just sod’s law, it was a summer we should all remember to try and forget.

So, instead of looking back, let’s look forward to autumn hopefully being a quiet and warm season of mist and mellow fruitfulness. And, to help ease you into fall, here’s the latest Evolve newsletter. There have been a number of changes here since our last edition and I take great pleasure in sharing them with you.

To begin with, Cerillion is reaching out to the estimated 300million+ global Spanish speakers by launching a Spanish language version of our website. We have also enhanced our internet presence to include RSS feeds, providing an alternative method of receiving the latest company news direct to your computer.

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Welcome to Summer, the season of warmth, sun, straw hats, strawberries and the June 2007 edition of Evolve!

Since our last issue, Cerillion has continued going from strength-to-strength. We have just opened our Global Solutions Centre (GSC) in the Indian city of Pune and the big increase in investment in our core products, together with the augmented capacity the new site will confer, will allow us quickly, and more competitively, to meet the unique demands of each and every one of our customers. We talk to Mark Nicholls, Cerillion CTO, to find out more about the opening of the GSC and another new chapter for Cerillion.

Elsewhere, we all know by now that the global climate is threatened and we all know that the weather is changing all over the world. And, while weather certainly isn't climate – and it is a gross mistake to confuse the two or to imagine that they are interchangeable – a simple glance out of the nearest window can often be enough to confirm that weather-wise, things ain't what they used to be.

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3GSM 2007

Well, the Winter is at last behind us and the joys of Spring are just over the horizon. It's the time of year when the sap rises and the thoughts of young men in the telecoms industry lightly turn to thoughts of new billing systems!

One of the delights of mid-Winter for those of us in northern climes is the annual trip down south, these days to balmy Barcelona, for the GSM Association's 3GSM World Congress. The yearly conference and exhibition has been a February fixture for many years now and since the event outgrew the facilities of Cannes, on the French Riviera, and moved down the coast to Spain and Catalonia it has even got bigger and better.

The event is now an absolute must visit for those with any real interest in the development of the mobile comms industry; and that's not just those who work in and with the globally-dominant GSM technology but also for people who, whilst owing allegiance to other mobile standards, want to get a good look at the roadmap leading to convergence and worldwide 3G services.

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No sooner have we all finished celebrating the New Year, than we have another major event to look forward to. It is only a month until the 3GSM World Congress opens its doors to a glittering array of exhibition stands and vast crowds of visitors. The World Congress has become so pre-eminent that it sometimes seems that the year consists of either talking about the last event or preparing for the next. As ever, Cerillion will be in Barcelona, seeing customers and partners old and new. We would be delighted to meet you at our booth in Hall 2, Stand 2D65 where you can also pick up your invite to the Cerillion Tapas Bar!

In this issue our lead story looks at IPTV and Triple Play, which have been very much the telecom industry’s ‘big things’ in 2006. This is a potentially huge market opportunity which has attracted a number of new players. However, succeeding in this market will not be easy and the new players will need to implement the right business and network strategies if they are to win customers from the incumbent operators.

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So, that’s it then. Summer 2006 is almost over and now work and winter beckon. And a strange summer it has been here in the UK. In July temperatures were more like what we would normally expect to experience when holidaying in Luxor, Egypt whilst August has been cool, damp and blustery, just the sort of thing you’d get if you’d taken a trip to the Faeroe Isles. No wonder we Brits are so obsessed with the subject!

However, a new season, one of mists and mellow fruitfulness, (if you believe the words of John Keats) is upon us and with it comes this latest edition of Evolve. Our lead story is about IMS, otherwise known as the IP Multimedia Subsystem, widely regarded as the “next big thing” in communications

IMS is an evolutionary technological step that effectively straddles the circuit-switched and packet-switched worlds and provides consumers, the ones who pay all our salaries, with compelling new communications services. However, this transformation will take time and we will have to live through a period when mediation and billing systems will be hybrid beasts; a melange of IMS and the remnants of the traditional fixed and mobile networks we are used to today.

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Only those living in caves (and we don't count many of them amongst the Evolve readership) will be unaware that the publication of the latest Cerillion e-zine coincides with the final exciting stages of the World Cup in Germany.

And while national football teams will leave Germany as they are knocked out of the tournament, Cerillion Technologies will be staying put. That's because we have just opened our brand new regional sales office in the German city of Dusseldorf.

In this issue of Evolve we talk with Frank van Gumpel, Cerillion's new Vice President of European Sales about his plans to drive forward our presence in mainland Europe.

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