Microsoft's next assault on telecoms market, via Telco 2.0

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 19 June 2007 03:09

Opinion and Analysis

The Connected Services Sandbox encourages independent software vendors, systems integrators and developers to collaborate with telecommunications providers in the development of managed network mashups. At the event, Microsoft and its partners will showcase examples of mashup services.

Microsoft's ambitions in the telco world are spelt out clearly by Michael O'Hara, general manager for the Communications Sector at Microsoft. "By taking an operator's core network assets and combining them with technologies and applications from the Web 2.0 world, the Sandbox brings operators closer to Telco 2.0. Operators have an opportunity to deliver hundreds, if not thousands, of new revenue-generating services to their customers in this new telecom order, and the Connected Services Sandbox is key in accelerating this process."

What makes Microsoft's initiative so interesting, and potentially disruptive to the telecoms industry and the fortunes of its established global suppliers like Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent, is a recent report from US telco research house Light Reading.

Light Reading has been comparing the prospects of the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and Web 2.0 as tools to help telcos generate the new services they must have as revenue and margins from legacy services such as PSTN voice plunge.

IMS is an entire architecture defining how services are created and delivered and managed across next generation all IP telco networks. It is a global standard that has been developed by 3GPPP, the global mobile telecoms standards body and widely endorsed my manufacturers who are building equipment to conform to it, and by telcos.

However, according to the Light Reading report - Telco Web 2.0 Mashups: A New Blueprint for Service Creation - "Service providers looking to create new revenue-driving applications will instead [of using IMS] have to adapt to the Web 2.0 world, using the concept of 'mashups' to quickly create new Web-based services."

According to the author, Caroline Chappell, using telecom-oriented standards such as IMS and SIP, just won't be fast enough. "To beat the Internet companies at their own game, a growing number of network operators believe they need to find a way to harness the service creation potential of Web 2.0 and steer it toward making money."

If that is true the vendor giants of the telecoms world could find themselves playing catch up to the vendor giants of the web world, none of which has a better track record of market dominance than Microsoft.