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Many, many different companies are pushing into the key Telco 2.0 field of communications-enabled business processes, or CEBP, which unites both the Voice & Messaging 2.0 and Enterprise VAS elements of our thinking. It’s one of the undemarcated frontiers, or creative tension zones, where most of the value is going to be created. In this note, we’re going to examine four leading CEBP platforms, all of which have been featured on the Telco 2.0 blog before, and try to identify some key trends and commonalities that explain something about how to succeed with CEBP and Voice 2.0.
No-one is quite sure where the roles of telcos, Web2.0 players, ISVs, and systems integrators begin or end, or what distinguishes the VAS and voice & messaging elements. But it’s precisely this combination of complexity and openness that gives the scope for differentiation through business model innovation.
Fundamentally, this field is attractive to telcos and others because of the extreme disjuncture between the volume of bits involved - which drives cost - and the social and economic value attached to them, which drives the potential revenue from them. This makes it possible to achieve SMS-like “fascinating margins” and to actively substitute for the falling price of the core consumer voice and SMS products. You might remember that ten years ago, it would be worth employing someone to save an hour of phone calls, and that we calculated that a few text messages at the right place and time could save the UK transport industry £218 million a year.
No wonder operators we surveyed for the Voice & Messaging 2.0 report were so keen on APIs and commerce, although we still think they are worryingly unengaged with voice… The following chart represents the relative priorities a sample of operators assigned to different issues in the survey.
Source: STL
The products and companies we’re going to look at are Ribbit, IfByPhone, Intelepeer, and VoiceSage. (NB We’ve written about all four in the past; on Ribbit, we’ve done Ribbit: the amphibian of telco platforms, why Ribbit is worth $105 million to BT, Ribbit and BT’s evolving platform strategy, and trying to fix BT Global Services with open source. We interviewed IfByPhone CEO Irv Shapiro, and the CEO of Intelepeer, and VoiceSage have been significant contributors to every Telco 2.0 event we can remember, being one of the earliest companies in the field of CEBP and the first we studied in detail.) We’ve also done a Q&A with Thomas Howe, CEO of Jaduka.
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