I had an opportunity to give the opening presentation at the recently concluded Mobile Cloud Computing Asia conference at Singapore and chair the event for Day1 on July 14th.
It was because of my interest in this subject and being involved in advising companies in mobile space for business development, that I agreed to chair the Day1.
The presenters were nice mix of Telecom operators, application provider, platform provider and security consultant. This helped me to learn and understand different perspectives.
The key learnings were :
1. Majority of the telecom operators had recognised the need to embrace the new ear of cloud computing.
2. The need to collaborate with application vendors, cloud platform providers and grow the revenue through these channels is well understood.
3. Most of them have started experimenting with some offering or the other to test the waters and most are willing to take it forward
4. There was so much creativity in creating new revenue models on the part of participants in the conference. I am not sure how much of that is backed by the respective organisations.
5. It was great to get wider perspective from the participants coming from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan and USA
Unfortunately I could not attend the 2nd day proceedings. I am sure it would have been a good experience.
Mind (and) Your Business 
Sachin
“There was so much creativity in creating new revenue models”
Any specific presentations that involved clouds? Would be nice to know how SMEs are faring.
Tabby,
The session were attended mainly by the Telcos from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Singapore. It was a revelation that Telecos are more curious and anxious to know about trends in mobile cloud computing.
Few things were clear from the discussions with Telcos :
– They have accepted that applications are going to bring revenue stream which does not exist today.
– But all are grappling how is it going to happen.
– All are experimenting in many ways.
Some experiments were :
– To partner with enterprise solutions providers. No payment to each other, jointly promote the solutions, hosted at Teleco’s datacentre and solution provided and managed by the software vendor
– One telco was partnering with Government to host the eduction contents (in line with government curriculum) on Telco’s datacentre and sell the subcription to schools which included PCs and bandwidth charges. I thought that was quite interesting
– One Telco is forging relationship with ISVs for SMB solutions – CRM being the favourite one.
– One application provider created a solution to give access to any enterprise application over mobile network on any feature phone. This included updating the ERP data in the enterprise in real time.
These are some examples which I liked.
Do tell us a bit more about the revenue models.