Thoughts from the IMS World Forum: RCS – what does it mean?

01 June 2010

RCS is the new star of the mobile industry, but there were a lot of darts thrown at it.

Despite the enthusiasm of its main proponents, it seemed to be fashionable to hurl brickbats in its direction. Is the criticism warranted?

Well, judging by preliminary findings from our research project, developed in conjunction with Moriana, some of it certainly is. We showcased the early findings in a workshop at the IMS World Forum and RCS elicited considerable interest from the participating operators. But all recognise the challenge and none could be breezily optimistic.

Both the respondents to the survey and those in the room felt that, while it was a useful initiative, it really was coming a bit late to the party. Worse, given the significant obstacles in its way, RCS has a major challenge to offer anything useful. Let's recap.

To be successful, RCS needs to achieve critical mass across multiple handsets and operators need to ensure full interoperability so that they do not sit as islands with small populations of users. All of this needs to happen, from an initial base of a few trials, within the next couple of years, while the OTT gang, against which this is some kind of response, continue to forge ahead.

That's a big ask, as British football commentators are wont to say.

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IMS is here – and if you haven’t got it, you will have soon

01 June 2010

And so to Barcelona for this year's IMS World Forum, organised once again by Informa. After several years of scepticism and even sneering in some quarters, it's safe to say that the key message from this event is that IMS is definitely happening, and it's happening now. While not quite an unstoppable juggernaut, there is a broad consensus and understanding that the IMS model for call and session control is the only effective and scalable means available to communications service providers. Essentially, if you have a large subscriber base, this is really the only game in town.

So, the first question is now not if, but when a CSP will deploy IMS? As we know from the Moriana research we conducted last year, many CSPs have already deployed their IMS, but everyone else we interviewed had declared their intention to do so. We would expect other CSPs that haven't made up their mind to follow suit within the next few years. Deployments will obviously be driven by LTE adoption on the mobile side, but any operator with a creaking infrastructure or ambitions to consolidate its network will also be considering the jump. Momentum is definitely apparent.

The second question though is perhaps more interesting. That is, assuming you have launched an IMS, what services other than those targeted towards the enterprise can you or should you offer? This remains unclear. The idea that IMS will unlock a host of new, interactive and rich multi-media services doesn't appear to have borne fruit yet and as we found, no-one has a very clear idea of how to resolve this issue. To our way of thinking, it's clear that CSPs should not be focused on this issue, but rather on finding ways to enable other parties to deliver these services. They should be thinking about the segments that do offer more immediate returns and about incremental improvements to their services, allowing capabilities to be delivered across terminals and platforms. Spending time worrying about new consumer services which can already be obtained in the cloud doesn't make a great deal of sense.

The 5 steps to an effective keyword strategy

18 May 2010

The search for the golden keyword. (It's a lot of hassle, so why would you bother?)

Ask anyone involved in web content creation and they'll tell you the same thing - keyword research is a time consuming, fairly tedious process. Despite the fact that there are many tools available to help with keyword sp, it's still mainly a manual activity. An activity that involves a lot of spreadsheets, significant head-scratching and hours of staring at screens in search of these elusive, golden keywords.

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RCS – what does it mean?

18 May 2010

RCS is the new star of the mobile industry, but there were a lot of darts thrown at it. Despite the enthusiasm of its main proponents, it seemed to be fashionable to hurl brickbats in its direction. Is the criticism warranted?

Well, judging by preliminary findings from our research project, developed in conjunction with Moriana, some of it certainly is. We showcased the early findings in a workshop at the IMS World Forum and RCS elicited considerable interest from the participating operators. But all recognise the challenge and none could be breezily optimistic. Both the respondents to the survey and those in the room felt that, while it was a useful initiative, it really was coming a bit late to the party. Worse, given the significant obstacles in its way, RCS has a major challenge to offer anything useful. Let's recap. To be successful, RCS needs to achieve critical mass across multiple handsets and operators need to ensure full interoperability so that they do not sit as islands with small populations of users. All of this needs to happen, from an initial base of a few trials, within the next couple of years, while the OTT gang, against which this is some kind of response, continue to forge ahead. That's a big ask, as British football commentators are wont to say.

Read more...