Telecom API Event 2014 Conference Summary

Summary •  Are carriers giving up on the long tail and standardization? Guillermo Escofet, Senior

Analyst, Ovum •  Telecom APIs: Introduction & WebRTC. Dean Bubley, Disruptive Analysis •  The Ecosystems Recipe: What Telecoms can learn. Andreas Constantinou, CEO &

Principal Analyst VisionMobile •  making a place in the API world. Laurent Benveniste, Programme Director, Orange

APIs •  Orange AMEA API Program. Aurélien DUVAL-DELORT – Orange Technocentre

AMEA •  TRANSFORMING TELCO AND API BUSINESS FOR C21. Rob Thompson – Deutsche

Telekom •  What is the current service provider involvement with WebRTC? Sebastian

Schumann, Senior Designer, Slovak Telecom •  Play Way to WebRTC, True Story of WebRTC and a Mobile Operator. Kornel Zątek

PLAY Poland •  A2P Messaging successful cooperation with Partners. Brage Bjøntegaard, Senior

Business Developer, Telenor Norge, Norway

Guillermo kicked things off with a frank review of Telecom APIs.

Which left most people wondering why they bothered to come to the

event. But it is a fair status report on external Telecom APIs in developed

markets.

For developed markets the focus has moved away from the long tail.

Should carriers even bother? Instead just let the aggregators fulfill the business? The answer is a partial yes.

Dean chaired the 2nd day which had more of a WebRTC focus. He had a nice slide that sums up

the challenge facing the industry.

This is the challenge facing the industry how to maintain revenues.

Andreas has some good slides explaining the need to leverage the dominant Apple/Android

ecosystems – not compete.

Put simply – forget it

The key is leveraging the ecosystems – they offer immense distribution for the bundles of services telcos can offer.

Orange has done a reset on its open innovation program, and it has strong CEO support.

API Factory helps divisions in telcos offer APIs, this is more an end-state vision, as most telco groups need lots of hand-holding in offering APIs. I think

Telecom Italia’s focus on a small group managing APIs on behalf of all the groups within the telco is a better interim step.

Orange is taking an ‘Orange’ centric approach like AT&T. Which makes sense for some lines of business, but not all.

This is interesting in building value around the free 100GB of storage to some Orange customers. The challenge will be addressable market and the channel

to market Orange provides, else it will go the same way as all the other API initiatives. Go to market is critical.

Internal consumption of the API should be strong, external consumption will depend on the go to market support for partners.

For Telus this is their most popular API, mainly through internal web properties accessing the API.

The developing market aspects are more interesting as we’ve seen from Dialog Axiata and Etisalat Sri Lanka, developing markets are quite different (at the moment) to developed markets so operators can adopt a broader integrated approach to their API programs across internal and external consumption.

Orange can take a different approach in Africa

Dialog and Etisalat have shown there remains significant value in messaging and mobile money.

An integrated strategy across all partner types, not just chasing the long tail. As well as consuming the APIs internally.

Orange is taking advantage of the lack of Twilio in Africa (1B population).

Critical will be speed of execution before smartphones and online competitors catch-up, so Orange and remain a contender for distribution of services.

Rob gave a great presentation on the learning from Developer Garden and the approach telcos need to adopt.

APIs are NOT optional for Telcos

Great summary of what drove the fail!

Great summary of the challenges we need to overcome.

Telecom is valued lower than utilities as its competitive – no natural monopoly.

Great summary!

Solution is: focus on big partners to drive scale, with assets not easily available online, with small teams that are developing the market!

Great summary of WebRTC for Telcos

Key points: it’s a technology, it’s a way of thinking about RTC in a Web context, as well as extending RTC across the web.

WebRTC is not a thing that is acquired, it’s a technology, an ingredient. For Legacy services its more important to improve the service than ADD WebRTC.

RTC has adopted a Web model, its becoming embedded everywhere. Telephony is not going away, simply the use cases are becoming richer.

A WebRTC gateway does not mean you have WebRTC. Use Open Source, all the online competitors do.

RTC will now have many more use cases – meet them or loose market share.

WebRTC is a Web approach to RTC, its impacts are far broader than simply using the technology, it expands the ways of thinking about RTC and hence the

problems telcos can solve for their customers using RTC.

Great review of WebRTC on its impact on the business.

Nice Summary from Kornel on the challenges of introducing WebRTC

Many telcos go through this process in trying to find business buy-in.

Open source will be increasingly adopted in telcos.

Extending existing services to any web connected end-point appears to be the consensus. Arguments on QoS are a customer communication issue. People expect their services on any device AND over WiFi to avoid data plan burn.

Telenor have been at the API business for 15 years

Some APIs have to work across everyone in a country.