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Why is it necessary for the partner
ecosystem to improve the real time management of transactions?
By Serge Soudoplatoff,
May 2006
The transport and tourism industry
has always had an innovative business model. Even before
the new yield management pricing models, companies associated
with the travel industry integrated their services (plane,
train, car rentals, lodging, entertainment, etc….)
through a partner ecosystem. While offering many benefits,
companies inside the ecosystem have had to evolve and
change their information systems in order to successfully
integrate with their partners, in particular to manage
their joint financial transactions.
The telecommunications world,
which is very similar in some ways to the transportation
industry, currently faces some of the same challenges.
The management of content offers, the problems of interconnect
and roaming charges, and the integration of telcos and
the Internet, are driving the industry to make changes.
As telecommunication companies respond to increased
competition by seeking to increase the loyalty of their
customer base, we can predict more challenges will come
with the launch of new bundled cross market offers.
Downloading ring tones, a seemingly
simple service, can bring into play ten different partners,
as shown in the following figure:
These partners need an interconnected
information system that will put them in contact with
each other to help them manage their common transaction
flow. Parts of such a system already exist for financial
compensation between some of the partners, but it is
disjointed and there is no view of the entire set of
related transactions on an end-to end basis. For example,
when a ring tone is downloaded, rights-management organizations
such as ASCAP, BMI and SESAC in the U.S. must be contacted
in order to transfer the music rights. This is simple,
but these rights-management organizations would also
like to know the title and the amount paid for the downloaded
ring tone, in order to calculate the royalties owed
to their members (authors, musicians, composers, publishers,
etc….). Right now, this is technically impossible
to track if payments are made through something like
a generic premium SMS service where the payment parameters
do not track what services are consumed. This situation
needs to be improved.
To return to the transportation
and tourism industry analogy, airline carriers experienced
similar challenges when they first created the system
of “code sharing.” Code sharing is an arrangement
whereby an airline sells seats, under its own name,
on other carrier's flight. When the system first began,
airline carriers would settle with each other only at
the end of the month, leading to amusing revenue sharing
methods: they literally weighed the voided ticket stubs
of each party to determine who owed how much to whom.
Since then, the airline carriers have modernized their
information systems and now manage these transactions
in real time.
The telecommunications industry
must make a similar change to smarter transaction processing.
Consumers will require that bundled or cross market
offers be launched rapidly and changed quickly to adapt
to market demands. This requires close collaboration
between all partners involved as they work to find mutually
beneficial business models. It is clear that in such
a dynamic environment piecemeal solutions, built around
“end of month” processing will not suffice.
It is necessary to evolve to a
network that can manage, in real time, transaction by
transaction, the flows of value distribution between
the ecosystem’s various partners.
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Highdeal Point of View
Fast
introduction of third parties
A new ring tone,
music or video clip may be in fashion for just one day
or just a week. Or perhaps it is Valentines Day or Christmas
where attractive one time offers can be introduced to
boost revenues. Such short time offers may involve any
number of media and distribution channels and a multiplicity
of commissions and royalties amongst the various players.
On-the-fly offers will require highly reactive, flexible
systems which enable not only the fast introduction
of offers themselves but equally efficient mechanisms
to introduce partners and their often highly customized
and evolving settlement terms. The arrival of IPTV and
the demand for video and music across all communication
mediums, fixed, mobile and broadband will only further
drive the industries demand for such powerful settlement
capabilities.
Standards-based
Integration
The various players in any given distribution model
will need to inter-work and manage information flow
easily and quickly. They will have to do this while
operating different Information Systems, rendering fast
communications for partner settlement even more challenging.
The answer will to be to move to standards-based integration
mechanisms for planning, executing and reporting on
such complex multi-partner distribution models. Promising
work in this area is being carried out by industry bodies
such as the OSSJ/TeleManagement Forum of which Highdeal
is a member.
Learn
more about the Highdeal solution for next generation
service pricing, rating... |
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