Voice. An Opinion.

I had some interesting discussions at the IMS Conference earlier this week. Many of them grew from a topic that was common across the show: Web 2.x and IMS – what could they do for each other and is there a relevant link between them?

The panel we were on covered some of this. I got quite a few laughs when I suggested to one questioner (who asked about security of new mobile apps and how they could be certified) that the players needed to “relax”. Seriously! My point was: the new consumer for apps/services of all kinds is more sophisticated than you might think. On Facebook, they install three new apps per day and promptly remove two of them the same day. It’s a rapid Darwinian environment where good things get shared, recommended and promulgate. And Bad things, or things that really annoy users get bitched about, flamed and unceremeniously dumped. Look at the Palm Folio. It’s the platform construction that let’s them do this, and rewards the overall community with a rich and varied set of things to doodle with.

Anyway, one of the areas we talked about was what I call the “headless Telco” ™, or the Telco player with no subscribers. Ribbit could be described as being in this category. To some extent, so are Jaduka. And of course, coming this way are many of the Internet players including Google.

By “headless” I mean: if you own some nice Telecom gear (carrier class switch or switches), add some web services layers and APIs on top, get yourself some interconnect deals, and release it to the world, you’re kind of a Telecom Company, but without your own customers. Instead, you’re in the business of enabling rich applications that may incorporate Voice, or SMS Messaging, or some other telecom features, as an element of them. Your message to the developer is “relax, we’ll do the telecom plumbing stuff, you just focus on apps”. Look at Zong for another play that’s focused on messaging right now.

Jajah for example, while being known for low-cost calls, is really building-out a truly global “headless” Telecom Operator, imho. Google, looking st spectrum alliances, buying GrandCentral and Jaiku, and adding various telecom APIs to its offerings is doing something similar. Skype, having lost time and group post-eBay acquisition, is getting back in to gear on this.

As usual, the boffins at Telco2.0 put it better:

When we think about the future of telcos, we think about not trying to divine what services the public wants but instead providing the enabling APIs for people who think they know to experiment with. We think about providing services that all kinds of businesses can use as part of their internal processes. Thomas Howe made the point at the Telco 2.0 event last week that these communications-enabled business processes aren’t even specifically “voice”; voice is a condiment, not the meat. The meat is the very specific information the people involved want to exchange; Howe makes his money creating small tailored applications to match very specific needs, and you can’t write an average of less than 100 lines of code per application without the support of an advanced developer environment.

The real danger to the incumbent operators here is, that these new arrivals come along with no existing set of subscribers to worry about, and no associated addiction to their current ARPUs. It’s all gravy to them. They attach the incumbents from “underneath” – nibbling at their message business, their voice business, and in some cases, stealing whole communication segments away from them. Remember, Google’s ARPU is $1 – that’s a lot of headroom for growth as they stretch it to the Telecom-industry recent averages of $40-50!

Platforms my dear boy, platforms!