Fast, Flexible Service Delivery Key to Broadband's Growth

Broadband service providers realize that speed is no longer enough to keep customers on the books. Subscribers want bundled services that meet specific needs, such as home surveillance, sharing media such as photos and video, and other features they will use regularly. Sun partner Casero offers service providers a platform from which to launch and manage such services.

Broadband service is turning into a sophisticated mechanism to deliver wide-ranging collections of services for businesses and home users. Offering bundled services radically reduces customer churn, according to a recent Forrester Research report.

"Users want video and games on demand, broadcast TV, music—and offering these services requires the ability to deploy, deliver, support, and bill a wide range of product offerings," says networking architecture consultant Fred Gorskin.

"Used to be, the broadband provider just needed big pipes to pump out simple connectivity; the early adopters just wanted speed. Now the less technically inclined are coming onboard. To woo them, you need to offer tangible advantages over dial-up. And to deliver those advantages you need intelligent solutions that enable snappy development and deployment, and easy management."

Broadband for Everyone

Casero, a Sun Microsystems technology partner, offers one such smart solution. The company believes the secret to success for broadband service providers is to focus on mass-market consumers. This involves offering services that are easy to use and integrate into consumers' everyday lives, according to Prateek Dwivedi, director of product marketing at Casero.

"Broadband service providers are well-positioned to use their brand and marketing power to reach the mass-market consumer," says Dwivedi. "It is the platform and technology that allow providers to easily launch, manage, and support these services that have been missing up until now."

Which is not to say Casero has hit upon the killer app that will compel customers to sign up for broadband in unprecedented droves.

"We don't anticipate that there is going to be a single application that is going to be labeled the 'killer application.' Instead it will be a killer solution," explains Dwivedi.

"The killer solution will contain a group of compelling and relevant applications that works with a variety of devices in the home. It will become part of the consumer's daily life. These applications will be things like home surveillance, Internet safety, and photo, video, and music sharing. They are services that let people safely and securely stay in touch."

Gorskin agrees that service providers should not pour all their resources into finding a silver bullet.

"Focus instead on providing easy and reliable access to a bundle of services that consumers see value in," he advises. "Move away from the always-on, fast-music-downloads spiel and make broadband as necessary and as critical to a fully functioning home as the telephone or the refrigerator."

To that end, broadband service providers will start to roll out services such as home security, where wireless cameras keep an eye on the house while its owners are away, according to Bruce Baikie, telecommunications industry manager at Sun. Such services not only take advantage of broadband's faster connection and superior data-transfer capabilities, they also offer an immediate consumer benefit.

Covering the Bases

To enable providers to deliver sophisticated portfolios of services, Casero offers a three-pronged solution. The first component is a management platform integrated into a service provider's back-end system that performs four critical functions: operations support system (OSS) integration, device management, subscriber management, and service management.

The second is a flexible application environment that allows a consumer to access the services from a variety of off-the-shelf connected devices. And the third component is the group of applications that are delivered as services.

Telus, one of Canada's leading telecommunications companies, recently signed an agreement to develop future services for its residential broadband customers leveraging the Casero software platform.

"We believe the key here is timing: We can have the platform and the first service up and running in a matter of a few months," explains Dwivedi. "Imagine offering home surveillance as a start, and then the next quarter offering photo management, and then the next quarter offering music management, and then the next quarter offering Internet safety.... You get the idea.

"The end result is that subscribers are adopting compelling services and will eagerly wait to see what's next. Meanwhile, the broadband service provider is realizing unimagined revenue."

The Casero solution runs on a combination of Sun Fire servers, the Sun Solaris Operating System, and components of the Sun Java Enterprise System solution stack. Casero built its solution on Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE platform) technology at the back end, and Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME platform) technology for consumer devices.