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Telecom industry worldwide is undergoing a metamorphosis. The single biggest phenomenon that is driving this industry is convergence. Convergence of services, ideologies and cross industry cultures is redefining the customer expectations. Complexities in hosting, switching, routing and transport platforms on which these services are delivered and managed, have increased. These are making both the network control environment and the service visions more IT based and oriented. Enterprise customers now put stringent demands for a flexible and dynamic service support. To support these trends, telcom operators worldwide are becoming increasingly reliant on the provision of high quality IT services.

Moreover, as the communication needs of the common man evolve, aided by Internet revolution, the stakeholders of the telecom pie are increasing by each passing minute. Each one of them brings in not only a value add for the end user, but also a baggage of systems and processes that were henceforth alien to the communication industry. The new direction is leading to an overlapped and complicated juxtaposition of process engineering based challenges in both IT and telecom space. The future service order will be to define and operate business processes, which facilitate the new service management and delivery. The business process thus derived would address issues like service delivery models, costing and revenue sharing and service support mechanisms.

Service Delivery Models
Internet users are now exposed to different modes of communication as against the telephony. A more loosely bound but immensely more affordable world of web. And this communication is not just voice or text. It includes pictures, videos and is not limited to person-to-person communication. Communities and user groups are being created on the fly and information exchange is not limited to and from the people known to each other. Content is driving the service subscription on Internet, both paid and free. And delivering the content is name of the game here. Identifying the right content, in the right format at the right cost and delivering it in a secure manner is fundamental to any kind of business model for the communication industry. The service centric models now take a top down approach to define the network needs, which would carry them. Today's service models aspire to be network agnostic so that they can deliver services on any type of network. We have come a long way from older network based services to network agnostic services and this transformation is not only impacting the service delivery models but the basic business rules in telecom.

Historically, telecom services have been network centric. This means that the service bouquet, which a telecom service provider can offer depends primarily on the network that the user has deployed. Since voice was one and only service which a telephone company used to offer for a long time, the network from its reach and reliability perspective was the only driver. Technology evolution was more on higher efficiencies, lower failure rates and better reliabilities. Evolving over a long period of time, focusing on the 'how' of delivering voice to the customer, telecom networks have become a benchmark in service level reliabilities. Phrases like 'telco grade architecture' have germinated out of such high redundancy, high reliability requirements with near zero downtime on service.

With unprecedented growth in speed and subsequent digital revolution, the migration from analog networks to electronic network and then to digital networks is history now. The adoption of Internet is the driving force that has fuelled this revolution. Adoption has come from all kinds of sectors be it education, medicine, commerce or retail. The number of Internet users has surpassed all maximums thus achieving a paradigm shift in the perspective of users, service providers and entrepreneurs. This started with free e-mail and chat engines, which revolutionized personal communication. For the first time in the world, we saw international boundaries being blurred and communication happen seamlessly across geographies, time zones and countries. What has given this penetration an added impetus was the fact that these services were offered for free. From school-going children to housewives at home, from elderly parents to research scholars, the use of Internet has been immense and for a plethora of personal needs.

Changing Cost Points
This marriage is not limited to Internet and existing telco networks. The third important player here is the entertainment industry. Fundamentally, different from the telecom and IT infrastructure industries, entertainment industry consists of a huge set of small and big players, both organized and un-organized. With subjects like copyrights and digital rights management evolving to meet today's challenge of content piracy, entertainment industry is also gearing up to address the content hosting, distribution and management issues. However, these three major stakeholders react to the service costing concepts in three clearly different approaches.

Telco's in their best outfit as network owners derive the cost points from a 'cost of effort' or a aproportioned cost model, fully allocated or an incremental one. In fact, this is the way telecom regulators worldwide define a top down or a bottom up approach to define the cost components that are then used to derive inter-operator settlements or to benchmark tariffs. These models work on the principle of identifying tangible cost components in the network and assign a weight to each one of them depending on its role in overall delivery of service.

IT industry has brought in the value add of more sophisticated OSS layer, of open and more adoptive interfaces and most of all, of a remarkably flexibly service layer concept which totally alienates the network layer from the services layer. An isolation of this kind is heavenly for both network equipment vendors and application providers. Network equipment vendors do not need to change the network core, which can now be service agnostic and can serve as 'digital infrastructure' that enables these services. Application providers on the other hand are happy, as they can now create network agnostic services, which can be delivered over any network thus enhancing the spectrum of service delivery. From a cost point perspective, the model is interface based or license based.

Telco's in their best outfit as network owners derive the cost points from a 'cost of effort' or a aproportioned cost model, fully allocated or an incremental one

Finally, the payload that rides over the vehicles thus created by the telco/IT combine decides the cost of services. The variance depends on issues like type of content, availability, copyrights for original and digital rights and most of all market needs.

With B2B and B2C transactions on the rise, there is an increasing awareness and willingness of a big customer segment to start using the 'anytime anywhere' kind of services for Internet access, m-commerce and content delivery. Migrating to such a service centric model from a network centric model would not only need change in network architectures but would involve a much more significant transformation of business processes in the organization. Models like TOM (telecom operations management) are serving as a framework for the newer, service centric business processes.

The path forward is clear henceforth, this unique trilogy has the capability to deliver delight to the customer. However, the transformation has its set of teething problems, and while the forces take their time to synergize, there is a waiting period for the customer before he gets his anytime, anywhere set of services.

Shyam Mardikar, VP, Network Services, Bharti Airtel
vadmail@cybermedia.co.in

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