UM to UC to CEBP

It isn't clear how much actually has changed except the semantics, but application providers finally are getting better at explaining the benefits to be gained from IP-based communications capabilities. Several years ago the buzzword was "unified messaging." Last year it was "unified communications." This year it is "communications-enabled business processes.

However meaningful the change, it seems fairly clear that the terrain now is shifting in a subtle way. In the old days "telephone service" "dial tone" or even "messaging" was a discrete point solution, not requiring understanding of what the end user actually was doing at the use site, Martin Suter, Objectword president says.

By definition, a supplier has to understand much more about what a user or organization actually has to accomplish at a site, and what software is used to support those tasks, to "communications enable" those processes.

Almost by definition, value added resellers and other technology support organizations have had to know more about what users wanted to accomplish, compared to retailers of "voice" services. And that probably will be telling over the next several years as the CEBP or "next acronym" business moves forward.

In the meantime, expect to hear lots more about how communications can affect everyday business or organizational processes, ranging from safety to inventory management and customer management. It isn't "old wine in new bottles," though some will rush to try that. It's a new role for communications: enabler of better software.

More Changes at Sprint Nextel

Sprint Nextel faces big problems. New CEO Dan Hesse is wasting no time "doing something." First Sprint announced significant headcount reductions (4,000) and closing of a number of retail operations (125 stores and 4,000 retail partners) Now Sprint says CFO Paul Saleh, Chief Marketing Officer Tim Kelly and Mark Angelino, president of sales and distribution, are leaving the company.

The executive changes involve officials most responsible for building the telecom company's brand and customer base, or more accurately, a declining customer base. The earlier set of moves will help Sprint reduce its overall and cost structure. The resignations allow Hesse to bring in a new team to change course. The issue now is what course Sprint Nextel will take.

IMS Realism

IP Multimedia Subsystem seems to be moving from concept to deployment, if recent observations by Manuel Vexler, IMS Forum VP, are any indication.

For starters, billing and operations support software firms are starting to be more active. That suggests their carrier customers finally are thinking about generating revenue from deploying IMS features (IMS is a platform allowing services providers to rapidly and cheaply create new services, test and then deploy them).

Carrier chief financial officers also seem to be asking tougher questions, which suggests carrier technologists are asking for authority to buy platforms. Many of the questions seem to be of the "you bought ATM 10 years ago, soft switches five years ago and now you want to buy IMS?"

IMS backers also now seem to be more aware that it really is infrastructure, and that the search for services will have to follow. "You don't have Google until you have the Internet," Vexler notes. Up to this point some have worried about identifying some "killer app" that would justify IMS deployment. Now there may be more awareness that until the platform is in place we won't really know what apps will resonate.

It probably still is a fair bet that wireless apps will be early candidates, as IMS originally was created by mobile carriers.

at&t 4Q: Guidance More Important Than Results

What's important about at&t's fourth quarter results is less the robust wireless and broadband services gains; or the matching financial performance. The fourth quarter included growth contributed by the purchase of BellSouth, so comparisons to the same quarter of 2006 do not mean much. More important is the guidance at&t offers about its 2008 performance, as that will reflect more directly--but not exclusively-- internal or organic growth, rather than growth by acquisition.

The company says it is confident about sustained double-digit growth in adjusted earnings per share in 2008. Some of that will be delivered by merger synergies or other cost cuts, as revenue will be growing at a mid-single-digit range in 2008. Growth in 2009 and subsequent years is expected at about that same rate: at mid-single-digits, possibly better.

Mid-teens wireless service revenue growth is expected in 2008, but again that partially is driven by the acquisition of Dobson Communications.

Enterprise revenue growth is expected to be in the mid-single-digit range by 2010. In-region consumer revenues will "be positive." In-region business services will grow in the mid-single-digit range as well.

So the company says it is "confident" it has the ability to deliver sustained double-digit growth in adjusted earnings per share and strong growth in free cash flow in 2008 and on an ongoing basis.

Some of that performance is driven by cost savings over the next few years because of the BellSouth merger. Company executives say they wrung about $2 billion in cost out of the company in 2007 and will save $5.9 billion in 2008 as well. Savings will grow to "more than $7.0 billion in 2010."

The forward-looking guidance arguably is more important than the fourth-quarter results themselves, which obviously were driven by acquisition-inflated numbers.

The company's net gain of 2.7 million wireless subscribers was the highest quarterly subscriber increase ever for any U.S. wireless provider, up 13.5 percent from 2.4 million net adds in the year-earlier fourth quarter.

But that performance includes the impact of the acquisition of Dobson Communications, which added 1.7 million subscribers.

That's not to denigrate at&t's performance. It was a good quarter. The point is that we all need to separate out organic rates of change from those wrought by the impact of acquisitions. Lots of companies in communications hide slow or lagging internal growth by buying other companies, with a predictable growth in revenue or customer base. That sometimes is a sign of weakness, not strength.

BroadSoft for Act!

Forget the hype about "voice mashups," the integration of communications capabilities with applications. The idea is about as simple as mating the BroadSoft call control and feature set with the Act! customer management application.

The VoIP AddOn developed by C3IP seamlessly integrates ACT! with BroadSoft’s BroadWorks platform Basically, BroadWorks users now can access those features directly from Act!

That means the ability to "click to dial" from the database, automatic logging of calls and screen pops on inbound calls, for example. So far, voice mashups largely have been developed as a way to improve the efficiency or effectiveness of current business processes.

That's just the way such innovations are introduced, because in a business context there has to be some measurable benefit on either cost or revenue fronts. The easiest way to demonstrate such effects is to "save money" or "save time" doing things that already must be done.

It will be a while before people start to redesign whole processes in light of ubiquitous communications embedded inside the applications themselves.

EarthCaller: Free U.S. Calling

EarthCaller (http://earthcaller.com), a new PC-to-phone service developed by Jaduka that allows its users to call any landline in the U.S. market for free, has been launched.

EarthCaller is said to run the calls over the Public Switched Telephone Network, with obvious call quality benefits. That's really a teaser for international calling, offered on a prepaid basis.

EarthCaller currently is PC-compatible at the moment.

Service Providers Don't Know Much About Customers

About 62 percent of global network service providers (telcos) say they do not today have enough information about how their customers behave, according to a new study commissioned by Apertio.

About 76 percent of respondents say customer profiling is important, closely followed by identity management. (64 percent of respondents say that is important. That sort of knowledge is important since 67 percent of respondents say "personalization of services" is a key revenue opportunity for IP and data services

The situation won't be too surprising to anybody who has been in the service provider industry long enough. The problem arguably is easier to deal with in the IP realm, but even there network service providers might not have access to as much granular data as IP application providers do.

Some observers continue to think that demographic information is helpful, and it is, up to a point. More significant, others think, is actual user behavior expressed in application use, and what users do inside those applications. Since telcos and cable companies don't have much useful information on their customer demographic profiles, ability to capture clickstreams, when legal, is much more useful.

That's another reason why the drive to capture Internet access account is so important. It isn't simply that broadband access is becoming the foundation service for a landline services provider, it is that the ability to personalize a user experience comes from knowledge about clickstreams, not calling patterns or street addresses.