A major theme from this year’s Mobile World Congress, and a topic I hear repeated when speaking with mobile operators around the world, is how to create “value” in the mobile internet beyond data carriage. (And if you’ve noticed the price of mobile data reducing in every market worldwide, you aren’t alone).
This month we are profiling Locatrix/XLF, our hosted enabler-access and application framework solution. Mobile “enablers” – network elements that provide location, subscriber identity and profile, SMS/MMS messaging and charging – are powerful network assets that can create tremendous value for an operator and their subscribers, through facilitating personalized, interactive and monetizable consumer experiences.
While these enablers of course exist in mobile networks, the cost of opening them up for access by mobile application developers, either directly or via middleware or some sort of service delivery platform (SDP) can be an expensive proposition. We’ve seen VAS business cases shot down because of extensive capital expense requirements, or through provisioning and management costs that make consumer services commercially unviable.
That’s why we’re offering Locatrix/XLF to mobile operators as a hosted, capex-free solution; as the foundation for our consumer applications (friend finder, family minder, location-enhanced marketing and social networking) we’ve already proven the value in enabling multiple applications utilising the same enabler access framework. And by encapsulating the business logic – per-event charging, subscriptions, trial periods and usage caps – within the framework, operators can also launch more “revenue-safe” initiatives, targeted at specifically focused subscriber demographics. We’re also participating in the GSMA’s OneAPI initiative to ensure compliance with the relevant industry standards.
The Locatrix/XLF hosted solution reduces both costs and time-to-market, meaning our customer can design and launch VAS solutions faster, and realise ARPU growth sooner. In one case we’re reducing a six-month initiative cycle (from concept to launch) to just six weeks.
In the current mobile market environment, we believe that operators will be under increasing pressure to both launch new services and reduce capital spending. Locatrix/XLF is our argument that the two objectives need not be mutually exclusive. Send me a note if you are interested in exploring Locatrix/XLF further.
