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Ever thought of the real culprits who are behind your increased spending on phones? Be it feature-rich smart phones or paying for a high security e-commerce transaction. There is always an invisible force working behind the scenes, actually responsible for the success of such applications, making you a spendthrift. And the culprits are not your mobile operators or phone vendors, but the software vendors who are always busy developing something niche-of course, they are also eventually responsible for making our lives easier and exciting! Hence, we'll talk about these behind the scenes characters we all are so in love with.

Carriers have invested a lot of money in their networks. And at this point it's a lot like throwing spaghetti on the wall to see which applications will stick. But as India is on a transformation stage with new technologies like 3G and WiMAX ready to be deployed, independent software vendors or ISVs, have an important role to play.

An Optimist's Market
Asia is the hot-bed of ISVs and has consistently demonstrated leadership in wireless application roll out. The Indian market is heavily influenced by the Asian market dynamics with over 120 ISVs developing their products across various categories. The Indian VAS market is slated to touch the Rs 4,000 crore mark by the end of this fiscal, thereby providing enough impetus to all the players in the Indian mobile market. The number of ISVs is swelling with each passing day: the estimated size would be in the range of over $120-150 mn annually in terms of software licenses. However, with transaction-based or managed service business models being adopted, the top-line for ISVs is set to grow into hundreds of millions of dollars in the short term.

The number of mobile subscribers in India is expected to grow from just over 100 mn today to more than 350 mn by 2010-an addition of 250 mn subscribers in just four years. It is estimated that mobile content and entertainment services could be generating 15% of mobile service revenues and over 40% of non-voice revenues within five years. The technological advancements are the market developments driving that growth, and mobile games, real time information and personalization services are evolving at a rate never witnessed before.

“The sheer number and complexity that the Indian market involves, holds out tremendous growth potential to ISVs,” said Nikhil Jain, president and COO, Elitecore.

The Killer-app Hunt
At present service providers are looking for products that can enable convergence over multiple networks. Here, ISVs play a critical role in enabling convergence above the divergent network layer. They are delivering common platforms based on open standards. In the face of numerous technologies and services, the flexibility that open standards impart is enabling providers to move away from their legacy structures and deliver converged services, involving segmentation, rapid service launch and high service levels. In fact, billing and soft switch vendors are replacing the proprietary IN platforms to provide uncomplicated migration of providers to NGN. They are successfully taking on the challenge of doing this shift with minimal disruption to legacy systems, enabling providers to derive maximum returns on existing legacy platforms.

n3G and WiMAX: Service providers are also looking at ability to deliver VAS over high capability technologies like 3G and WiMAX. By enabling this shift from legacy structures towards NGN, ISVs can offer service providers the readiness to deliver VAS over high capability technologies. They are delivering convergence at the control and transport layers that is critical to building margins through VAS.

“WiMAX and 3G enable bandwidth intensive applications such as VoIP, IPTV, video conferencing, content downloads, presence services, location based services, gaming etc. These new applications need to be charged in real-time using innovative charging paradigms and price packages,” said Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech Software.  ISVs need to create solutions for real time charging, integrating with existing solutions, seamlessly upgrading the service provider's network and flexibly launching new services as per the dynamic environment needs.

“3G would make the user experience better and richer in terms of the quality and availability. Considering this, we have set up a 3G competency centre in Singapore so as to innovate, test and pilot the solutions before launching them in India,” said Saket Agarwal, COO, Cellebrum.

3G has certain features unlike 2G such as high speed networks, a variety of data intensive applications, greater capacity for voice and data, enabling rich data applications, and faster and larger applications download. ISVs play an important role in this as current 2G platforms are not compatible for all software. ISVs can provide better and heavy IT products on 3G networks for more response and interaction with users. The ISV's array of products will give rise to more access to users and slash the difference between PCs and mobiles to a large extent.

WiMAX is also taking place in the world of mobile and would soon be deployed globally. It gives extensive bandwidth to the mobile user and the ISVs so major software can be downloaded and utilized.

nBilling System: With the advent of new technologies, service providers would need support to keep their systems running. Billing systems have long been a black box due to security issues and their proprietary nature. ISVs understand that any service has limited value without billing capability. Given this criticality, most ISVs today build an integrated application model that enables billing and provides easy integration with the carriers billing system. On a broad level, services are charged based on volume, duration or qualitative classification and ISVs today are ensuring that they are able to provide billing support for service uptake.

ISVs of billing solutions are offering professional services, which enable product installation, configuration and management right from Greenfield operators to tier-1 service providers. As the requirements of these two levels of providers differ, there are different segments of billing providers that serve these segments, particularly in their capability to deliver professional services.

Opportunities Galore
Undoubtedly, as the telecom industry is evolving with technology deployment happening across domain, convergence, in a true sense, would be pursued by ISVs making specialized software for the niche requirements of VAS users. This would create such a backdrop that whenever a subscriber thinks of a product it will be there at his disposal, even when he's on the move. Technologies such as 3G and WiMAX would make the user experience better and richer in terms of quality and availability.

ISVs will hold the key for operators to be successful in realizing the revenues from deployment of new technologies. Common people will use the new technology only if cost of service is low and if there is some benefit in getting the service. While the former is totally in the hands of the operators, the latter will depend on how aggressive ISVs are in implementing the features.