Europe UK : This week Nokia announced that the N95 handset, noted for its next-generation services including GPS, has sold a million units. This amounts to a significant success for a Smartphone in the UK market.
AppTrigger, the application connectivity specialist, notes how the success of advanced devices is predicated by some extent on the services those devices bring to the consumer. To capitalise on these high-end consumers, operators must be in a position to fully leverage their network investments by connecting next-generation services quickly and cost effectively.
Paul Cronin, head of EMEA for AppTrigger comments: “For mobile operators today, it is no longer about finding the ‘killer app’ – it’s now about the ‘killer environment’. The N95 brings a rich set of features and advanced services to business users and high-end consumer markets. This demonstrates a trend: users are becoming savvier about advanced handsets and the iPhone should only increase this movement.
“To capitalise on this marketshare by delivering the killer environment to them, mobile operators need to be able to push advanced services quickly and raise ARPU in turn. For operators, connecting applications to their next-generation networks is at the heart of this.
“At present operators are plagued by connectivity issues. It can take between 18 – 20 months to connect applications when migrating to advanced networks. Also application developers are often in charge of connecting applications, which is like asking a roofer to work on the plumbing in your house.
“Ironically the promise of next-generation networks, such as IMS, is about driving more applications like location-based services through phones like the N95. But connecting these applications through the traditional soft-switching/media gateway methods can take an operator months or years and cost $10 – $15 million per application. Clearly a new, quicker business model is needed – without being hampered by this arcane way of connecting applications. Keeping applications immune from the evolving network layer is the way forward to obtaining this killer environment.”
AppTrigger’s Application Session Controller (ASC) can deliver a 40 per cent cost reduction over traditional application connectivity deployment models for service providers’ mixed networking environments. It enables service providers to unlock the revenue generating power of high-growth IP service applications such as location-based services (LBS) and presence-based services. An INSIGHT Research report projects that the market for these high-growth applications will be worth $66 billion by 2010. The report notes that an ASC is a key element to this migration strategy for service providers. Download the report here: http://www.apptrigger.com/downloads/insight.php.