What's hot and what's hype in carrier infrastructure

IPTV, prepaid/postpaid convergence, universal charging platform and mobile virtual network enablers are technologies sliding down.

Customer-centric service monitoring, convergent carrier advertising platforms, integrated network and enterprise resource management are on the way up.

That’s now Gartner’s latest Hype Cycle chart for carrier network infrastructure applications reads for these and a number of other technologies vendors are pushing at carriers today.

The cycle, prepared annually, is the research company’s way of rating technologies to help service providers figure out when, or if, products are worth buying. It looks like a bell curve with the bottom right-hand side stretched out.

That’s because as Norbert Scholz, the report’s lead author, points out, applications and platforms don’t always succeed or die.

“Every product gets hyped up in its initial stages,” he explained in an interview (see 1, below). But users often find it doesn’t meet expectations or work as the maker promised. Interest drops – hence the slide on the cycle (see 2, below). But often vendors then pour in more money to improve the product, users come back and – if the maker is fortunate or good – the product proves itself (see 3, below). That’s the graceful curve on the right slowly sloping back up.

So the Hype Cycle is a way of telling providers where technologies are in this roller coaster, as well as a guess at how fast it will be before mainstream adoption.

Among the big changes to this year’s evaluation is the resurrection of applications that merge back-office billing and front-office CRM systems, from vendors such as Amdocs, Comverse, SAP and Convergys. The idea is to create a unified customer management system.

A year ago, Gartner judged the concept dead, in part because many providers may have up to 150 billing systems. But Scholz noted that Oracle has recently made acquisitions in this space and others are moving into it. “There probably is a chance it might happen in the long term,” he said cautiously.

Another change is the inclusion in the list of IMS, an open architecture based on SIP and diameter authentication, authorization and accounting protocols. It defines how applications and services are delivered to customers regardless of which network they run on.

Gartner calls it a promising long-term architecture offered by companies such as Nortel, Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens. But, it warns, IMS needs considerable system integration to deliver on promised results.

“Consider waiting until a more real-world offering is available,” the report advises.

The biggest shift from last year’s ranking was deciding revenue assurance applications or processes are moving into the mainstream, said Scholz. These solutions, from vendors such as cVidya Networks, Connectiva, eCtel, Proftivit and others enable service providers to examine points of revenue leakage and correct data before they reach the billing system.