BLUE SKY & CUMULUS CLOUDS

By Tatu Tahkokallio, Group Marketing Director

This Monday people woke up with lots of excitement in the air. It was time to turn our eyes and ears towards California and hear what Steve Jobs had to present. No surprise, sky was blue and clouds were expected to appear at the center stage! And they did, amongst many other game changing services and solutions.

But California is not the only place where we see lots of innovation, progress, and development. Already for several months, Tecnotree has been promoting three solutions suits of which ‘Bundle Services for Every Taste’ is the first one. For this suite, the idea and message behind has just become timelier than ever, and Apple is a great example of a player following the same philosophy. I believe a golden opportunity truly exists if different demand from customers is met by packaging services individually, pricing them attractively and offering the bundles out through channels relevant to buyers. I call this opportunity the blue-sky business for tomorrow’s communications service provider!

So what did Steve announce then? Well, as expected the iCloud came out. It is the current (and soon to be closed) MobileMe service extended with a set of new features such as Photo Stream, App Store, iTunes, and storage and it offers a full integration and synchronization between all Apple platforms (iOS and MacOS), products, and applications. iCloud is able to store the pictures you take, device settings, and apps and make them available via all your devices. However, iCould is intended to be a sharing cloud, not a permanent full storage. For this reason, it for example stores only the most recent 1,000 photographs, and albums for 30 days. On the music side iTunes is expanded with a new iCloud service called iTunes Match, which at an extra annual cost of USD 24.99 gives cloud access to songs purchased and ripped from previously owned CDs.

No doubt, the iCloud offers a great set of services for end-users but the impact for mobile operators is less attractive. The system will heavily utilize existing networks, both Wi-Fi and 3G, to connect and signal between applications and services, and as such leave the operator as a bit pipe.

An other new interesting service launched by Apple was iMessaging. It will enable iOS5 users to communicate with each other free of charge by utilizing Apple’s own messaging infrastructure. This system sends notifications over SMS and MMS but uses data connection for actual messaging. As the service and user experience is integrated into the same iOS Messaging application now used to send and receive SMS and MMS messages, there should be no question about its success. What’s the impact for service providers then? A mobile operator will most likely see an increase in data traffic but at the same time a decrease in SMS/MMS revenues.

These new services from Apple are important and there is a lot to learn both from the packaging but also from the pricing point of view. Needless to say, they may also act as precursors on what to expect from the other ecosystem ‘owners’ such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft/Nokia in their future service offerings.

I bet the question pondering in many of the mobile operator’s minds is: “how should a service provider act upon these news?” Are they true cumulus clouds just ahead of rain and thunder? Or is there a way to keep diving in the blue sky? I think there is, and it begins from keeping in mind that there are several ecosystems at play, there are many consumers with various needs and wants, and an operator must be able to locally pull of a similar show – creating the positive service buzz – as what Apple often does. This means, that service provider’s business owners, technologists, and sales & marketing professionals must be working hand-in-hand towards an operator controlled digital marketplace bundling best in breed offerings for subscribers to enjoy!

Yours,

Tatu T

p.s. Talking about clouds, if you haven’t seen the latest Tecnotree press release about private cloud deployment go read it here!