OpenCloud reveals operators prioritising service innovation to counter ‘bit pipe’ phobia

Survey of Asia-Pac, Indian and Middle Eastern CSPs shows importance of open development platforms

Cambridge, UK – 7th February 2012 – Communication Service Providers (CSPs) spanning Asia-Pacific, India and the Middle East see the possibility of becoming a ‘bit pipe’ as the biggest influencer on their operating strategies, according to a survey conducted by Heavy Reading and telecoms software innovator OpenCloud.

The survey, of nearly 100 global CSPs, revealed how operators are adapting to changing market conditions. The majority, 90 per cent, cited that the economic situation and the development of consumer and business markets over the last three years have changed the role of communication service providers, and their position in the value chain. The need to respond to competitive innovation from OTT players was cited as a top three issue of importance to CSPs. However, the response to this market development differs from region to region.

More than 50 per cent of operators in Asia Pacific, the Middle-East and India view the risk of becoming a connectivity and bandwidth ‘bit pipe’ is of greater concern than competition from OTT players – contrasting with fewer than 40 per cent elsewhere. CSPs from these regions also rank customer demand for new services and service personalisation as the 2nd and 3rd most important issues influencing innovation strategies.

Sixty two per cent of CSPs in these regions cited a lack of an innovation culture as a critical barrier to innovation; while around half of the operator respondents also viewed dependence on vendors to deliver service changes as a consistent obstacle to innovation. To drive service innovation, Asian, Indian and Middle Eastern CSPs are keen to migrate to open-standards based platforms to promote independent development; with 73 per cent seeing migration to these platforms a critical, or significant, target when improving service innovation.

“The survey seems to indicate that rather than being driven reactively by the fear of competition, CSPs in Asia, the Middle East and India appear to be proactively focussed on how to make their service offering more relevant to the market,” said Mark Windle, OpenCloud’s Head of Marketing. “These CSPs were very vocal in their backing of an open development ecosystem. Compared with their Western counterparts, approximately twice as many Asian, Middle Eastern and Indian CSPs are planning to provide trusted third parties with access to a rich set of network APIs; allowing them to lead development efforts.”

About OpenCloud (www.opencloud.com)

OpenCloud delivers open, standards-based network transformation solutions to the telecommunications industry. OpenCloud Next Generation Service Layer products enable the agile delivery of classic and telco2.0 telecommunication services at a dramatically lower price-point across next generation IP and legacy networks. OpenCloud provides Rhino, a JAIN SLEE-based Telecom Application Server, together with a portfolio of hundreds of telecom applications, a Telecom Service Broker, and a real-time charging session control point for data, voice and messaging services. OpenCloud Service Layer products use commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software to deliver service layer agility to networks at a radically lower price-point than traditional solutions from network equipment providers.

OpenCloud is headquartered in Cambridge, UK with R&D, Engineering and Support in New Zealand and Spain and branch offices in the Singapore and Jakarta.

Visit https://developer.opencloud.com to join OpenCloud’s growing developer community.