CEBP, business analysts, and developers= lots of work can now get done

I've mentioned this four step approach for business model evolution in our space previously. From my perspective, service providers like Jaduka ( or Orange or BT) need to move forward to build all four steps in order to create a robust, valuable Telco 2.0 style business.

Here are the four steps:
1. Empowering developer communities.
2. Enriching go-to-market strategies to benefit partners and clients.
3. Value-based transactional pricing versus commodity pricing.
4. Two-sided business model iterations.

On the first item, empowering developer communities, Jaduka has always been focused on providing tools to the broadest swath of enterprise developers. As an alternative example, our respected competitor, Ribbit has focused on providing tools for the Flash/Adobe developer community. With VXML vendors, they focus on their developer community. I can never argue with a strategy that requires true intimacy with a particular user group. These guys do a great job.

Jaduka's desire has always been to provide tools for a global development and business analyst community. Although, we are in beta now and plan to launch the service in early July I am thrilled to see that we will have the ability to extend our notification service to the Netbeans community ( many millions of downloads) and the Excel community. More announcements are in the works too.

To the Telco API industry players, suggesting that we have extended our notification service into Excel should make you pause. Why is that important, you may ask?

From my non developer background, Excel was the first platform that allowed business analysts to create business reports and processes with a tool set that relied on easily understood mathematical symbols and equations rather than arcane coding languages. It is certainly still the most widely adopted spreadsheet offering in the world.

With Microsoft's foray into the SaaS delivery model Excel Live has been turned into the business analyst's equivalent of a mashup platform allowing for Data as a Service integration.

Some would suggest that offering wider and more developer and analyst communities easy access to notification, conferencing, diary, or click and connect type functionality will simply result in commoditization. Let me be clear, our goal at Jaduka is NOT to commoditize but to package our functionality in many different manners. Then, it can be broadly and globally adopted. Granted having a full built telco infrastructure allows us to compete on price if we choose.

However, leveraging the global tools that enterprise developers and analysts already use is certainly a step in the direction of empowering the broadest number of developers and analysts.

Watch Jaduka Exchange in mid-July for a more detailed announcement.



Thanks
Patrick Murphy
Jaduka
VP. Business Development

CEBP: where it all really began= ClueTrain Manisfesto?

I've been thinking about the foundations of CEBP and give plenty of credit to the analysts at Gartner for defining the space. I hope to attend Gartner's CEBP Forums later this year.

However, the more I listen and talk to more experienced Telco industry folks the original thinking that began to drive Telco 2.0 style innovation comes from the ClueTrain Manisfesto.
These writings have been around since 1999.

That's enough history on the topic of CEBP from me. I will get back to posting use cases.

But, if anyone has a different perspective on the background of CEBP please fill me in.


Thanks
Patrick Murphy
VP. Bus. Dev. Jaduka

CEBP: where it all began

I thought it would be important to make sure there is background knowledge available for those who are new to the space or have not seen the term previously.

From everything that I have been able to gather over the years it was a team of smart analysts at Gartner including Bern Elliot, Steve Blood and Bob Hafner who coined the term communications-enabled business process (CEBP). Now, obviously they didn't invent a technology and, at the time, they were hyper focused on one generalized use case (reducing human latency). For good or bad, they certainly coined the phrase.

There was plenty of strong work in both premise based solutions and hosted services going on prior to Gartner coining the CEBP space. Here is a link to a decent write up from 3 years ago. The phrase is only about three years old being publicized by Gartner for the first time on or about April, 4th, 2006.

Here is another link to the Gartner site for those interested in purchasing the original report.

Is CEBP the worst name ever for a technology space?

This is a funny CEBP related post from Rich Tehrani of TMC. Yes, he may be correct.

However, when I compare CEBP to ERP, CRM, BPM, HCM, UC or SaaS I don't really feel so bad about being an avid supporter of all Communications Enabled Business Processes.

I refer to CEBP as a subset or child of the Telco 2.0 industry. It is closely related to many things from the UC industry. However, CEBP as a hosted SaaS or CaaS offering is much more scalable, cost effective, and flexible than CEBP's premise based cousins.

We may all die of acronym poisoning.

How to get started.

I thought this was a relevant postt from STL partners. This is a summary of conversations held at Telco 2.0 in Nice, France.

Much of the post is common sense but it might be a useful reminder.

CEBP and Advertising

I saw this terrific article on GigaOm discussing the micro economics of online advertising.

So, for those who have taken just a few economic courses the big picture idea from the article about the potential disintegration of the online advertising market (other than Google) is easy to follow. For those of you who have taken lots of economics courses follow the thread of comments for the granular details and arguments that exemplify why the general population tends to make fun of economists.

Seriously, I thought the article was great. Check out the author Mike Speiser and his archive . I especially enjoyed the attempts to cost average leads generated by Google and (non search) Yahoo. The author estimates Gooogle generates and average of 49 cents per lead vs. Yahoo's $2.93 for display advertising with costs of 30cents for Google and $2.17 for Yahoo. His argument is that the low cost producer will continue to gain market share. Remember in the online world a simple click though is considered a lead. We can agree or disagree with the numbers but I want to use them as a baseline to show the importance of CEBP driven advertising.

That's some background. Now lets get into the nitty gritty of CEBP and how it can leverage some of the $400 Billion spent globally on advertising.

There are generally three purposes for advertising.
1. Drive consumers to buy something now or very soon.
2. Influence the consumer's perception of a product, service or brand over time to drive decision based purchases. (Cars, Computers, B to B marketing)
3. Position a brand in the marketplace against competition. ( Premium, Cool, Safe, Reliable)

Our (My) experience is that Commmunications Enabled Business Processes can improve advertising efforts at all three levels.
1. Click to Connect functionality can drive real people ( and their phone numbers) to companies advertising. Google is testing this functionality with keywords that are high priced ex. $20 per click through and/or phrases that may have problems with click fraud.

2. Diary functionality is very useful on any product site or community aggregation site that brings consumers together for reviews. It is helpful in providing real time feedback "How's my driving on the back of trucks" or " Tell us about your meal and restaurant experience". It also helps build community around services or products targeted at segments of the population ...new moms looking for help and guidance on product selection, newly diagnosed patients using a drug. ( BazaarVoice)

3. Interactive agencies creating campaigns looking for cool or fun campaigns with an opportunity for a viral upside have successfully added voice functionality. MonkEmail, Tide, Transformers

Each specific advertising campaign is valuable to the client, agency, consumer,and CEBP vendor.
What isn't well understood is how over time the telco service provider could ethically collect ,re-use, or simply datamine the contact numbers driven through lots of these campaigns. To me, that datamining component becomes the linch pin to a true two sided business model for the Advertising vertical.