SPONSORED CONTENT: Rebirthing the Telco App Store

Over The Top App Stores such as Apple have built a model and a market dominated by low value impulse buying. There is minimum stickiness or brand awareness. This gives rise to “Telco App Stores” to now focus on Enterprise grade Business applications as well as apps that monetize the telco network assets to the optimum. Recurring service revenues rather than “one-off” sales is the way forward for the Telco App stores.
The concept of downloading applications to a mobile phone and paying for it was instigated by telecom operators and has evolved since. Typically, end users would pay a fee to download games, ringtones, wallpapers etc. on a WAP based browser. In summary, the Telco App store existed years before the Apple app store.
Apple fine-tuned the existing model by introducing an easy-to-use platform for third party application development for iPhone etc, an attractive revenue share model positioned to give more to the app community, added features for marketing and retailing such as community ranking and comments – A model that Amazon introduced many years ago. Apple did and did it very well – They took the telecom operators existing run-of-the-mill model and products, added an excellent flavor to it and has dominated the market place.
Ever since, the operator has taken a back seat and has no option than to offer “All you can eat” data plans to customers in their battle to survive in the ever shrinking voice market. These data plans are used by their subscribers to lavishly patronize app stores such as Apple. The telco operator has taken a detour to become a “dumb pipe.”
The Telco operators now understand the fact that they are not utilizing the fullest capacity and capability of their network assets to monetize it, rather, engulfed in boundless fierce price wars on voice related services. Value Added Service (VAS) and platforms that enable them are taking significance.
To monetize the Telco App Store, building the complementing eco-system around is key. The focus is to move away from primarily an atomic transaction based model (App store model) to a continuous service driven model increasing recurring revenue.
Telcos have the unique strength to attract low to very high-end application developers, thus building an application developer community that can stampede towards the Apple developer community. In an increasingly competitive app development market place the operator has a great potential to attract high-end developers than others. The different service pricing, bundling, packaging, cross-product discounts, location based services, segmentation and profiling capabilities makes the operator very unique and powerful in service offering than others. What this means is that the developers have the flexibility to choose charging options such as fixed price, recurring fee, packaging and bundling, discounts and promotions etc. There are many number of app developers who complain the absence of the aforesaid benefits and flexibility on Apple platform.
Operators have the network capabilities to offer much comprehensive, end-to-end and flexible app developer platforms which include developer community building programs, solutions that offer easy to use application test environments, simulators, Software Development Kits (SDK), Beta-Testing services, rapid provisioning and approval processes etc. These features put together can offer an “application development powerhouse” which can easily outrun the Apple model.
It keeps getting better – All of the above put together and added with the Inter Carrier Interoperability, the application developers gets an opportunity go global with their applications reaching tens and thousands of people with great revenue potential.
All these services complemented by the unique fact that the “operator know who you are more than anyone else” – Identity Management capabilities, adds the icing on the cake.
All this put together, the operator offers its Network As A Service (NAAS), thus increasing the monetization of it.
Resurrection of the Telco App store will largely depend on how fast the operators can offer an end-to-end platform to the application developers to come on board and how well the apps could be marketed. It is evident that this model will succeed above and beyond, if the right solutions and the focus is in place.
hSenid Mobiles offers a comprehensive product portfolio that includes a Cloud Enabled Telco App Store, end-to-end Rewards, Loyalty/Customer Churn Management and Retention Solution, a Community driven VAS platform, A SIGTRAN based Location Based Server and a SMSC, A comprehensive recharge/top up solution and a USSDC. www.hsenidmobile.com