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Interview: John Boden, Openwave's Senior Vice President, Product Management

Tell us a little about your background and in particular, what drew you to work at Openwave.
 
I've worked in the telecom industry for about twenty years, both as an R&D guy and on the product marketing side of things. Openwave has always had an amazing pedigree as an innovator. Just that aspect alone attracted me.

During my tenure at Nortel, I was speaking to CTOs and CMOs at carriers and service providers around the world. I would always ask them what problems they were trying to solve, not from a technology perspective, but from a business perspective; what is it that they wished they could instantly change about their business.

I can't say that I was surprised that all their answers were the same. They wanted to simplify how they rolled out new services — roll them out quickly, and roll them out across wireless and wireline networks. When I looked at Openwave's portfolio, they had the building blocks to do that today, both pre-IMS and as IMS becomes a reality in terms of deployment.

Openwave has the messaging products and internet access products that actually allow you to create that common user experience across wireless and wireline. They also enable their customers to take a service that might have a limited number of people who would pay for it on a monthly subscription basis and find other ways of paying for it through contextual merchandising and advertising. Last and certainly not least, Openwave is taking personalization — a trend that the industry has talked about forever — and making it a reality.

What have you seen in the mobile space over the last few years that makes you confident in Openwave's position in the market?
 
At the core, all the operators have the same problems: ARPU is flattening out; they have too much churn; over-the-top services (services from outside the network) are siphoning off potential revenue. Operators are looking for ways not just to compete with each other, but to compete with the likes of Google and Yahoo! so that they don't just become a bit pipe when it comes to delivering content and services.

They are looking for a way to personalize the experience to prevent churn and participate in the service transaction. They also need a way to subsidize new services because we know that subscribers won't pay for them. It's not about finding the killer app, it's about having the right mix of services.

So when I got to Openwave, I was very happy to see that they had much of that basic framework already in place for personalization and contextual merchandising. And now that I've met with customers, I can see that we are set up to address their primary pain points from a service perspective. We don't have to convince our customers what direction they need to be headed. And they don't have to educate us as to any unique problems that might be new.

Have you made any big changes to Openwave's portfolio since you've arrived?
 
Over the past three months, I've conducted a top to bottom review of our product portfolio. For the most part, the current portfolio of products is essential and unique in its breadth.

Our WAP gateway is where we have a commanding lead in the marketplace. If you look at that product and where it sits on the network, it allows you to do some things that really add value from a carrier perspective in terms of contextual merchandising. It also adds value from a user perspective in terms of personalization. We can help the operators make sure the content that is delivered to their subscribers is relevant.

We have the client business too, which, among other things, can be used to enable applications and provide a uniform user experience across multiple access types whether it's wireless or wireline.

The fact that we have a big footprint in both broadband and mobile spaces, and those two are converging — we are sitting in a good place with great relationships.

Can you talk a little more about contextual merchandising and how it fits into the portfolio?
 
Let's look at search as an example. You have a free search like Google, and you have a subscription search service like LexisNexis. There are companies that will pay for LexisNexis because it is part of their business, but most of us are fine using free search and wouldn't think of paying for the service of web search.

The same is true with mobile services. There is a limit to the number of services that you and I are willing to pay for. After that, you'll probably only use services if they are free or pay-as-you-go. Contextualized merchandising and advertising help subsidize these services for the operator by uniting targeted advertisers with their target audience.

Openwave sits at the core of the network where we can 1) enable operators to know what their subscribers are doing 2) enable new services and applications, and 3) help operators earn money by launching only the services that their users want, but won't necessarily pay for. We're doing this now; we're putting this functionality into our products while many others in the industry are still talking about it.

You've touched on personalization, mobile advertising and contextual merchandising as the big initiatives for operators. What about convergence? Is it still just a buzz word?
 
No, definitely not. Convergence is happening — operators are figuring out how to take a voice call or video message and flip it between WiFi and GSM access. But really the end goal of convergence is making the user experience the same across mobile devices and PCs. Not literally the same, of course — looking up the weather on a PC might be as simple as going to a bookmark. I don't mind doing that. But that operation isn't quite as simple on a mobile device.

On the mobile end, it comes down to knowing what information to push to the user (and in many cases, letting the user decide) and understanding what the user is willing to go find. At a high level, convergence is just another aspect of personalization.

How important is IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) to the telco industry? More hype than substance?
 
The importance of IMS is how it facilitates network conversion. Although it wasn't originally designed to be a network converter — it started out as a concept in GSM to provide the infrastructure that could deliver services over a packet network — over time, people looked at this architecture and saw the building blocks that would allow them to deploy one service across multiple access types instead of having to build one network per service type (one network for voice, one for data, etc.).

Can we do that today? No. Operators aren't really running IMS networks as a whole. They're running small over-link networks with an IMS architecture, but it certainly has promise. One of the challenges is in the divergence of standards. Right now, IMS is very focused on voice services as opposed to data, and so the architecture and standards are being tweaked to take into account other services.

The fact that people have gone from saying "IMS is going to solve world hunger," to a more realistic view of all the issues IMS poses, isn't a bad sign. It's a sign that people are finally taking it seriously and applying it to solve their service delivery issues.

You can tell that I'm much more of an optimist. I think it's proof that IMS is even half right when CDMA and GSM network operators are looking at it and saying, "Yes, with tweaks we can both standardize our architecture."

How would you respond to those who say carriers can't avoid ultimately becoming a bit pipe?
 
I'd say look closely at the broadband world. I've personally seen companies that started out as only broadband providers; I've seen them move up the value chain and start adding new services, namely VoIP and video services, and packaging them affordably in one bill. So if companies who started as a pipe can move up the value chain, certainly companies like our customers, who already have value, can preserve that value and add services.

So what competitive advantages do carriers and service providers have in competing against a company like Google who threatens to extend its branded services "over the top" of providers' networks?
 
The big threat from a company like Google is that they can show up and say to a carrier, email is costing you lots of money for the amount of money you're making from it. Tell you what, I'll take it over for you, in fact I'll pay you for it.

Problem is that once the carrier has lost that mailbox, they've lost control of that subscriber. Google can deliver advertising content and contextual merchandising and make money from it -- which they've proven they can do.

As mobile networks become faster and data packages become cheaper, more and more devices across the network are capable of open internet browsing. In that sense, the portal becomes less essential, but it still has value. Let me clarify: a good portal still has value. A bad portal is worthless. How worthless? Well, how many of us go to our broadband provider's portal homepage? Not too many. We're all using Yahoo!, Google, or some other slick new custom homepage product.

That's where our client products and technology come into play. Yes our products help facilitate open internet browsing, but our real value comes in providing a zero-click environment with our widget technology. If you want the weather report, you can easily have that information pushed to the phone's idle screen — a mobile device's true homepage — either as a backdrop or inside a little widget app.

Not only do widgets increase usability, but they can drive traffic back into the portal — even from another network. You might have AT&T as your carrier, but Verizon has a very popular widget — let's say one for discount camping equipment — and it starts getting passed around. That's an example of going over the top and competing for additional revenue regardless of what provider the user subscribes to. This is similar to what Skype and other VoIP companies did with their phone services.

Bottom line on how we can best help the service providers: give them the power to present the right information to the right subscriber so that subscriber doesn't have to leave the network to go look for it. Here's another example: it's common online behavior to read an email and then go search for more information about something you read in that email. Whether it's a song recommendation, a travel spot, a crazy news story. Problem is, once that user leaves their email, you've lost them.

Our Richmail product hyperlinks relevant words in your email and you can click directly on them to learn more, buy merchandise, book travel, check weather get directions, etc. It's a convenience for the user, but the carrier doesn't lose the subscriber. They remain part of the transaction. And remember, these aren't just dumb links that dump you somewhere. They are informed by location information as well as other bits of data that the carrier can reference to deliver a personal experience.

And of course, no conversation would be complete without bringing up the iPhone . . .
 
First and foremost, the iPhone has validated what we've been doing in our client business. The iPhone delivers information like weather without forcing the user to log onto the browser and go find it. And if you want more detail, maybe you want to see a radar map of the Pacific, you can browse in the most seamless manner (we've all seen the commercials). That's exactly where we're going with our client capabilities.

The big difference is that Apple is going through their own gateway which partly marginalizes the carriers' role. Openwave's gateway is open. So the carrier can own it and own their relationship with the subscriber.

 



 
Index Autumn 2007
Introduction
Interview: John Boden, Openwave's SVP, Product Management
Me 2.0
Technology Spotlight: Behold, the Power of the Widget
Overtime: Ikholwa Home, Johannesburg, South Africa
 
 
 
 
Openwave Rich Mail offers the ease of use of a PC-based application with the flexibility of a web-based application.  
 
 
 
 
Openwave's Suite of Products 
Openwave Sells Mobile Phone Client Software Business To Purple Labs
 
Press Release - 06/30/2008 
Openwave Joins Major Organisations to Improve European Emergency Service 112
 
Press Release - 05/28/2008 
 
 
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