Telecom Web Services for the Enterprise

The Enterprise market represents high value services for the Telco as many of these types of customers will pay a premium for availability, reliability and quality of service. However, these types of customers often view Telco service offerings as largely lacking innovation and competitiveness when compared to the Web.

Users within Enterprise organisations, just like consumers, also seeking more openness and tailoring of information and content to suite their individual needs to compliment their job functions. In response to this, a number of specialist Enterprise vendors are now introducing Enterprise 2.0 Servers to bring Web 2.0 to the Enterprise. These Servers take web service feeds from vertical applications and mash these up to present information that aligns with the Enterprise user's role. For example, a customer service manager may wish to produce ad hoc reports to identify the number of visits each service engineer in his fleet makes. Perhaps additional information may also be required including repair times, travelling time, etc. Information to produce such a report may need to be sourced from several separate systems.

Likewise, some Telcos are now developing strategies to re-position themselves in the market as Telco 2.0 operators. What this means in essence is that these Telcos are beginning to adopt the concept of openness towards their customer base, providing a more granular set of service capabilities such as messaging, location presence, etc. in addition to traditional packaged service offerings such as "Inbound Services", Centrex, VPN, etc.

Taking this concept further and supporting the creation of mashups across Telco 2.0 and Web 2.0 components creates more value to the Enterprise. Telco resources can be embedded with the Enterprise applications to identify the real time location and distribution of the service engineer's customers (using Google Maps and Location feeds) to view the geography of the area covered. Perhaps then, real time mms push could be used to introduce a more dynamic way of allocating service engineers to customer calls rather than to have pre-scheduled lists.

The potential for improved customer retention is one of the main benefits of offering a more granular set of service capabilities using telecom web services APIs. Increased revenues can be attained by offering higher value services by demonstrating to Enterprise customers that combining real time network knowledge and communications with Enterprise application logic can reduce costs, improve effectiveness and efficiency and increase sales.

In addition to this, these APIs can be packaged as part of a "Systems Integration" service offering by the Telcos. Telcos can offer SI skills (perhaps themselves or in partnership with an SI vendor) to create "telecom web services call outs" from Enterprise application logic towards the APIs exposed by the Carrier. This may also need the Enterprise customer's applications to be "WS enabled" and ESB products from Vendors such as IONA could be use to integrate back end Enterprise applications with the Telcos APIs.

The challenge up to now has been finding a reliable and secure way that deepens the relationship with the Enterprise through increasing the scope of services offered. Through choosing Aepona's telecom Web Services platform, Telcos can provide one or more APIs (as Telecom Web Services) towards the Enterprise customer. Some of the more typical applications that can be created are shown below, however there are many more that can be defined that will be tailored towards customer specific use cases:

• Broadcast of newsflashes using sms (mobile terminated) for such things as customer updates, sales updates, traffic information, etc.
• Real time allocation of tasks to mobile field service engineers relative to their physical location
• Real time management for distribution of perishable goods (e.g. groceries, confectionary, cement, etc.) in environments where traffic congestion is a problem
• Application initiated calls for debt recovery/bill payment
• Click to call features for Enterprise web sites
• Secure access to back office enterprise knowledge and information systems using carrier authentication systems
• Targeted distribution of information to enterprise workers
• Collection and broadcast of near-live media to emergency workers and news reporters
• Adding Q.o.S to create reliable messaging, guaranteed bandwidth, etc.

Through adopting a 2.0 service layer architecture, Telcos can now exploit the advantages they already have in providing broad coverage and reliable networks. These can be combined with systems that enable easy integration with Enterprise applications to extend the intelligence of the application with knowledge about the end users status and location. Enterprise applications can then become "user context aware". This is what telecom web services can offer. Creating levels of closer integration between carrier networks and enterprise business logic means that the benefits the Enterprise gets from choosing a carrier that does this means it is less likely that Enterprises will switch Telcos on the basis of price only.