Tuesday, March 18, 2014

RCS Monetization Suite

In the past months we have been unveiling additional platforms on top of our pioneering RCS network API GW.

It is time to explain why API itself is not enough in the telco industry today.

We have been talking with many telcos about the possibilities of the API, and they believed in the value, but they think they need huge base of users first. That will not happen if they focus in the person to person messaging where the incumbents today are OTT. We needed to unblock this egg-chicken scenario.

Well, in the last months we have been developing the complementary pieces to the RCS API exposure to move from telco internal trials/PoCs to something they can "sell" to both, enterprise and long-tail developers, engage the final users and the magic world...MONETIZE.

To expose easily the API developers are not keen to call account managers, sign paper contracts, etc...they want a Twilio or Tropo alike portal...and we just used a tier-1 API Management company, 3Scale to offer a RCS Developer Portal cloud based that whatever telco can launch quickly.

As a new way to access to services is born, the rich-chat based interactive cases, it would be needed a way to discover new "chat services" and add to your phonebook, the market of "RCS based cases", and we developed the RCS Store framework to make feasible the "RCS service market" , as standalone app or with API to integrate with RCS clients.

Finally we may talk about money, the well-know sentence "show me the money". Yes, telcos pay a good money to strategy consultants but ask the tech vendors about how to make money :-)

Enabling high rates of API concurrence for B2C is a revenue model with enterprise, but in the other hand, to get adoption telcos need to enrich RCS with casual chat based cases created by developers. How to reward them? Well, in the same way that internet companies are overlapping the telco space and revenue sources, telcos can overlap internet space and their traditional revenue sources as advertisement. Chat based services, person-to-information, person-to-chat-based-game become a new media, providing a context where inserting contextual non-push ads...Yes, the Google model applied to instant messaging. Voilà!, our RCS Advertising Platform fills the gap.

Does it makes sense, doesn't it? Then, bundling all the pieces of the puzzle is what we named as RCS Monetization Suite.



Monday, March 10, 2014

#MWC14 or how RCS is happening without a name.

After the hectic week of #MWC14 and the also hectic post Mobile World Congress week with urgent follow-up's, it's time now to explain our views.

For Solaiemes it was the best MWC ever, more visitors, many meetings with C-level people of telcos and leading vendors, and a lot of unexpected visitors that already knew about our portfolio and interested in include our vision and related portfolio in their future strategy. We can say proudly that had visitors from the 5 continents :-)

This year GSMA did not reserve an specific RCS or joyn area. The RCS acronym is included in the Future Communication space and the commercial brand, joyn, is quietly being removed. Only in a few pods in the Connected City and Future Communication areas RCS use cases were demoed. Does it mean that RCS is being discarded? NO, just the opposite, a lot of telcos are issuing RFP's, and talked openly about plans with us. RCS will happen as messaging evolution, perhaps it does not need new names but providing new experiences and associated use cased based on messaging. Just our vision. Some of the people we talk with expressed our same opinion, we need our own messaging, and SMS is not enough today. It seems that RCS is now in the scope of enlightenment.

http://www.slideshare.net/FrostandSullivan/key-takeaways-from-the-2014-mobile-world-congressAlso, we received many visitors interested in how WebRTC can be used by telcos, not only to expose their legacy enablers as voice but to create a myriad of new services. We returned with the batteries full of charge to walk the extra-mile and help to change the telco industry :-)

Apart from the RCS API Gateway for A2P and RCS Web Access, it has been demoed the Personal Manager, an specia RCS AS with additional features for the enterprise market. The idea is solving the overwhelming messaging mess creating personalized filters and autoresponses far more ambitious than the limited white/black lists.

And last but not least we just read a couple of mentions.
We were mentioned in the Frost&Sullivan MWC 2014 Key Takeaways slides by Ronald Gruia.

Also we were mentioned by Andre Rios from Barcinno.com talking about Telco APIs and listing Solaiemes as interesting company together big names as Apigee and Aepona.


http://www.barcinno.com/mobile-world-congress-2014-deep-dive-digital-future/


Now, it's time to work even harder, this year will be our year!