Protecode Blog

Open Source in Mobile Development Part 1

An Industry in Transformation

The telecommunication industry is transforming rapidly:  from providing voice and basic data services towards a much broader set of services with flexibility of adaptation to customer desires and market opportunities. Communications services providers (CSPs) are investing to serve the hyperconnectivity needs of evolving ecosystems of diverse applications for users and devices: increasingly mobile and interacting ever faster and in more complex ways.

The pace of this transformation towards hyperconnectivity services is driven by the rapidly growing number and categories of devices. These range from smart phones, eReaders, and tablets to connected vehicular systems, environmental sensors, smart tags, and many others. The devices enable highly distributed, responsive, and ever expanding range of applications such as: digital media, gaming, enterprise management, ePayments eHealth, smart-grid, clean-tech, and machine-to-machine. The growing usage of social networking in, and across, many application domains is an added driver for hyperconnectivity, and customer engagement.

Cloud Computing in Telecom

The cloud computing service model is further adding to the pace of this transformation as it delivers application platforms with compelling advantages: time-to-market, operational economies of scale, capital cost reduction, and mobility support. The cloud model is creating new opportunities for service providers to offer application-driven service packages, service level agreements, and elastic resource allocation for demand-based services with real-time billing.

The telecommunications industry is dealing with the increasing complexities of this transformation, within a competitive environment that creates strong pressures for agility and innovation in services while controlling costs.  Equipment vendors who supply the CSPs with products and services, especially given the global nature of their competition, face even greater and continuous pressures for cost-conscious agility and innovation to overcome the commoditization trap. At the same time, the major source of growth for the equipment vendors is in emerging markets where massive scale at low costs is a fundamental requirement.

Implications for software development

The transformation towards the hyperconnectivity services business model creates tremendous opportunities for CSPs and their equipment and service vendors. To address the opportunities, though, it also creates significant challenges for the required software systems:

• Complexity: More systems need to work in concert in order provide broader service solutions for the hyperconnected users.
• High agility: The solutions need to be highly configurable for particular usage and business contexts in order to minimize software deployment complexities. At the same time, as unanticipated requirements arise, the software addressing them needs to be developed, and deployed in time frames for very competitive markets: weeks rather than months.
• Cost-sensitivity: While the number of devices, their interconnections, bandwidth requirements, and communications service sophistication are growing exponentially the related revenues grow linearly within the challenging global economic context and competitive pressures.
• Massive scalability:  Incredible increases in the number of devices per user (e.g. laptop, smartphone, tablet, camera, health monitor) and many devices that don’t have individual users (e.g. environmental sensors, smart tags.) add to scaling requirements, as well as the ramp up in users and devices in the emerging economies.

Given the above challenges, the industry is responding with software lifecycle strategies that include:

• Specialized Components: With the increasing complexity of the software systems, delivery of functionally specialized components improves the ability to provide dependable solutions which can be refactored for different and evolving market needs.  These components are developed in-house, out-sourced to 3rd party development, or obtained from 3rd parties.  Open source software is increasingly used in all three cases. 
• Integration:  In conjunction with the above strategy, there is a need for creating comprehensive solutions from a large number of specialized components. Some of these components are combined to provide a product or a solution by a single vendor. However, the products and solutions from each vendor also need to be integrated across both standard and proprietary interfaces.  There is the need to integrate new additional solutions into existing environments.
• Continuous Evolution:  Given the need to constantly address market opportunities, standards and regulatory evolution, software components and their integration are being designed in such a way to allow change while protecting investment by utilizing as much of the existing software base as possible.
• Business Consolidation: Early stage innovators start up to address niche market opportunities and grow. And, CSP and their vendors merge or acquire other companies for growth and to more strongly address their markets. Business M&A entails integration of complementary software components and systems into more powerful solutions, as well as consolidation of over-lapped solutions to control cost and complexity. Software assets are a significant valuation consideration in most M&A deals in the industry, and open source software should be managed to provide a positive impact on the valuations, rather than introduce business risks.

Next week’s post will go into greater detail on how open source is used and how it should be managed in telecom development.