Accelerating 3G mobile video communications

Mobility, multimedia and the explosion of communities are three major trends in communications today. With the adoption of 3G phones, capturing and sharing video will be an increasingly important part of our personal and business communications in the future. There are dozens of services which permit people to communicate on 3G networks in richer and more exciting ways than using 2G technologies. But the majority of new video services have yet to be built and tested with subscribers. In the short term, investment, innovation and experimentation are required on the part of many industry players.

For operators to monetize their investments, for video to become an integral part of every popular service bundle of the future, three elements must be in place:

Consolidating multiple, disparate legacy Interactive Voice Response systems into a unified, standards-based IVR platform offers service providers the dramatically enhanced performance, simplified infrastructure management, and continuing cost savings needed to increase business agility and successfully compete in today's dynamic services marketplace.

The HP OpenCall Media Platform provides a mature, field-proven and future-proof IVR consolidation solution that delivers ongoing returns and enables a more engaging end-user experience.

Carriers must differentiate on service and application delivery as competition increases in a rapidly changing global communications market. Increasingly, the dividing lines between telecom and wireless carriers, cable operators and internet companies are disappearing as convergence and multimedia gain traction. For over twenty years phone-based automation, routing and service enablement thrived among carriers as they relied on these interactive voice response (IVR) applications to service their growing subscriber base. These were mainly powered by proprietary (traditional) IVR systems. But in recent years, business needs have outgrown the constraints of traditional IVR and rigid TDM-based telephony architecture, where traditional IVR has been the native platform. Carriers want to expand beyond voice portals and provide an infrastructure for all forms of video and interactive experiences including multimedia, visual advertising, video messaging and video call completion. As a result, traditional IVR is quickly becoming an antiquated technology as carriers move to more flexible web services deployment models and IP architectures that favor a web-based open standard like Voice Extensible Markup Language (Voice-XML).

Mobile Service Providers struggling to compete and succeed in the changing market must address the need to enhance their voice offerings and deliver innovative new experiences for their customers. Many companies are accomplishing this by consolidating on a single, agile platform that also allows them to launch innovative new services that go beyond voice to video, instant communication, video conferencing, and other new ways their subscribers want to communicate. This whitepaper discusses four key ingredients for making the approach work: IVR consolidation, flexible deployment, new media capabilities, and a future-proof platform.