Google helps to push CEBP and Telco 2.0 whether they know it or not.

I use Google tools. However, I know that I am different than many corporate workers who are tightly tied into the technology platforms implemented by their IT departments years ago. Google Voice and Google Wave have been making announcements over the past month that should catch the attention of any consumer user. Enterprise users will need to wait a few quarters or release cycles.

What has been well documented by many analysts is the trend referred to as the consumerization of IT and the Enterprise application environment. The meaning is simple. All of us folks who fall in love with web applications (Google) or consumer hardware ( Apple) in our private lives want to leverage these tools in our professional lives. Unfortunately for CIOs meeting this consumer demand from staff for features and functionality within their world becomes very challenging.

So, CIOs do what they do best. They ask (demand) that their ISVs add these features into the existing software now! Vendors tell CIOs the next release will certainly have these features...and the dance begins.

From Jaduka's perspective, the Google Wave and Google Voice announcements are just the most recent wake up call to every software vendor to add real time communications functionality into your core offerings. If it is not in your feature list for the next version launch start advocating now.

If you are a Telco Service Provider then make sure you are reading these two blog post from Om Malik and Jon Arnold.

Momentum is building. Telephony is no longer an application that sits in its own unique device. It is the spice added to all applications.

Pat Murphy
Jaduka
VP, Business Development

Strikeiron as a Trust Agent and platform for CEBP developers

We are in beta with Strikeiron right now but plan to announce a full launch next week.
Here is a link to our first service offering within the Strikeiron platform. It is a simple and easy to use notification service for developers. Please go in a try it out. A lot more will be coming in the not too distant future.

Obviously, Strikeiron provides very cool services from developers' perspectives. So many tools and data feeds are accessible from one company and platform. Strikeiron has evolved their business model over the past few years to build a focused catalogue of services offered by trusted partners. In time, my understanding is they will continue to "package" groups of services together that appeal to various vertical markets. So, for example, notification services and a do not call service might be grouped together.

In addition to their Trust Agent gatekeeper role in aggregating high value services for coders I am very impressed with their reach out to developer or even business analyst type communities. Take some time to surf through Strikeiron's efforts to enable large developer/analyst communities via NETBEANS integration, Excel LiveData methods, and even SalesForce templates.

Although, in my previous post, I mentioned Orange's positive efforts, at Jaduka we believe that telco services are not the main course anymore. Voice services or any telco services are an important ingredient but not the main dish. Strikeiron does a wonderful job of pulling lots of ingredients together and allowing developers to cook up whatever they choose.

Pat Murphy
Jaduka
VP, Business Development

Innovation and Change at Orange

I received an email from Orange stating that their Partner guy Steve Glagow was leaving. Here is a bit of his summary statement.

The Orange Partner focus over the last five years has been about taking your applications to our customers. We have successfully launched Application Shops in the UK, France, Belgium and Spain, reaching over 50 million customers in just those 4 countries. In the near future, we will add more.
After 5 great years, it is time for me to say farewell. I have seen our community grow from a handful of dedicated developers to over 55000 today. I am proud to have been a part of it working with you.

I was always very impressed with the breadth and scope of the Orange API offering. However, I've seen the developer play as only one leg in a complete go to market strategy. For those doubters, remember Apple has made something like $30 Billion with their one device and less than $100 million on the Appstore. The Appstore is a rounding error for Apple. For another example, SalesForce doesn't even break out their App Exchange revenue numbers clearly. At best estimate looking at their professional services line item the AppExchange is less then 10% of revenue. However, for Apple and SalesForce, their platform strategy has clearly helped to make their core offerings dominant.

Yet, Orange has done a lot of things right. Although BT received the most initial praise as a Global Telco launching their own API strategy, from my perspective Orange's API offerings ended up far ahead of the pack.

Obviously, I don't have a crystal ball but the rest of the go to market strategy for Orange should include:
A. Becoming a technology enabling vendor with ISVs and SaaS partners.
B. Creating and leveraging the SI ecosystem attached to ISVs and SaaS partners
C. Creating two sided business models leveraging analytics with these various partners
D. Building workflows or integration methods to leverage other development tools more commonly used by developers.

There is a lot of operational sales, prod. dev, integration, bus. dev. and marketing work to move forward with these four legs of a go-to market strategy. Be assured, the Telco that does it first and best will maintain healthy margins, keep customers happy, and drive their competitors crazy. At least in the US, I plan on making Jaduka the winner. Across the EU, I was expecting Orange to win.

Patrick Murphy
Jaduka
VP. Business Development

CEBP pricing is moving beyond cpm

From the perspective of a service provider like Jaduka and our parent Network IP, the bottom line reason for all this time and energy being spent on Communications Enabled Business Process is one of margin.

The phrase "Falling ARPUS" is one of those really weird pieces of jargon that is common in the Telco space. Because of competition, deregulation, and technological advances (VoIP, IM, Email) the cash cow of voice traffic has been getting skinnier and skinnier for Telcos all around the world.

We ran a quick but useful thought exercise earlier this week with our team. List out all the pricing models that we were aware of in this space.

To be clear, we are only focused on hosted CEBP using a transactional model for billing. With Avaya dropping their CEBP messaging and staffing, I am not aware of any vendor still trying to sell upfront licenses in the manner of the legacy software industry.

Per minute
Per call
Per leg
Per lead
Per record
Per seat
Per contact
Per hit

The cynical might suggest that the cost basis underneath all these different pricing labels is still a price per minute. Thus, we are simply trying to make some actuarial type guesses on usage. Yes, that is partly true. However, with good reporting, good communication with your clients, and a robust telco infrastructure underneath Jaduka the ability to make these usage estimates is not particularly risky. International interconnect or peering agreements are done every day and are based upon similar estimates of future usage patterns.

The more important point is that we are moving towards these new pricing labels in order to model the language our Enterprise clients use. Guess what, new packaging matters, it adds perceived value, thus margins are dramatically improved!

This isn't the end point in our drive towards value added pricing. The goal is to price our efforts based on the value driven by the transaction taking place during the call or message. Honestly, there is a lot more to learn on this topic. It is what the Two-sided business model strives to accomplish. More discussion needed.

If you don't believe me, put down that $3 bottle of water and think a little harder.

How the mighty have fallen

If this post from GigaOm doesn't help you to understand why there is so much energy being put into niches like CEBP and the broader topic of Telco 2.0 then you are still buying buggywhips.

Given the major telcos focus on huge capex investments in wireless or fios and their current debt structures it is hard to see how the US players are going to continue to dominate. At least the European players are being aggressive in trying to reinvent themselves using new and competitive business models.

I would love to see a comparison of US Telcos now relative to US Automobile manufacturers a generation ago. As we have seen with GM it becomes a long, slow slide into bankruptcy.

More importantly, given that the telco hardware/software vendors tend to provide the forward thinking R&D work required by the Telco service providers it is hard to believe these service providers will once again get back into the R&D business.

This GigaOm article should be saved and reposted in 2019 as an explanation for what happened to the US Telco market.

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.