On Wednesday Mar 2nd at 1030 EST, 1630 Europe AND Monday Mar 7th at 1300 EST, 1900 Europe: we ran TADSummit Revisiteds with Grzegorz Sikora, T-Mobile Poland, on Building a Successful Local Developer Ecosystem & Martina Saric, T-Mobile Austria, on Practical Experiences in Partnering. It ended up being a sessions for Grzegorz, and another for Martina where audio issues meant she provided the answers in text form, old school but still effective 🙂 You can view the Q&A sessions live or recorded in the video at the end of this weblog. Here are the previous TADSummit Revisited sessions.

T-Mobile has an impressive grass-roots coordination effort in service innovation across its service enabler groups in Europe. Its simply an informal group of employees getting together one or twice a year to share experiences and coordinate development / purchasing.  Its exactly the people-led approach that delivers results, rather than creating centralized groups or coordination policies and processes. Empower smart people working in the field to make it happen. We’re fortunate to have both Martina Saric from T-Mobile Austria and Grzegorz Sikora of T-Mobile Poland on this TADSummit Revisited.

Martina Saric, Service Enablers, T-Mobile Austria, presented on “Practical Experiences in Partnering.” In her presentation Martina provided a very simply quantification on the need to 3rd party development: Out of the box development is 2.5 times more expensive. BUT there are challenges in working with 3rd parties, such as parallel development, legacy thinking within TMO, how responsibilities are divided, and what provides the trigger for new services.  Her presentation and slides are shown below.

Grzegorz Sikora from T-Mobile Poland presented on “A Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Successful Local Developer Ecosystem.” Building a community of developers can take many forms. At T-Mobile Poland they have created a small and focused community. In his presentation Grzegorz quantified the business impact of this community, and explained the tools and people required to make it work. His presentation and slides are shown below.

Questions Received so far:

1. Martina – You mentioned the avoidance of vendor lock-in. Did you find yourself locked-into the JAIN SLEE / TAS provider? Where the services created really portable to another JAIN SLEE / TAS provider?
2. Martina – You mentioned some services created can be shared across TMO OpCos. Would you please provide some examples of the type of services where this happened? Is this included in your 2.5 times costs saving?
3. Martina – We found the services we create are so much simpler than OOB services which try to cover all bases. Did you experience this?
4. Martina – A big challenge we face is getting marketing to do anything with the services we create. Alan has a nice weblog about this, the litany of excuses. How do you get the services to market?
5. Martina – You highlight the trigger-point for new services. What is your experiences there?
6. Martina – The cultural issues in being more open, flexible and willing to try new services in the market is a massive issue. How are you solving this?
7. Martina – How have you achieved such impressive support and maintenance costs?
8. Martina – How do you divide the responsibilities between TMO and the the 3rd party?
9. Grzegorz – How did you find and choose your partners?
10. Grzegorz – Do you collaboratively define the services, or is does TMO define them only?
11. Grzegorz – Specifically, what type of services are you building?
12. Grzegorz – How do you choose which services to develop in your ODE?
13. Grzegorz – How do you work with marketing in launching new services?
14. Grzegorz – Why do you use system integrators for maintain the services rather than the developer of the service? What if you want to update the service?
15. Grzegorz – Martina mentioned a 2.5 times saving compared to OOB services, it that your experience as well? And where do most of those savings come from?
16. Grzegorz -What is the focus of your open development community? Is it business customers, developers, local system integrators / value add resellers?
17. Grzegorz – How many people are working at TMO Poland on the ODE?
18. Grzegorz – What new services are you working on? Or if you can not answer that, where next for your ecosystem?

TADSummit 2015 Presentation and Slides:

TADSummit Revisited Q&A Session

Unfortunately we could not get the audio to work from Martina’s PC for Google Hangouts, so instead Martina has provided her answers below.

You mentioned the avoidance of vendor lock-in. Did you find yourself locked-into the JAIN SLEE / TAS provider? Where the services created really portable to another JAIN SLEE / TAS provider?
I mentioned vendor lock because at first we used Jain/SLEE platform with one system integrator which had all IPR and we were not able to make our changes flexible.
With a new partnership program and service creation environment we reached full flexibility and vendor independent services. We had a couple of examples where one partner implemented one service which was later adapted/extended/reused by other partner without any complexity.

You mentioned some services created can be shared across TMO OpCos. Would you please provide some examples of the type of services where this happened? Is this included in your 2.5 times costs saving?
We already had examples where we shared the source code: CAP-SIP re-router extension of R-IMSSF & USSD GW. It was included in cost saving because T-Mobile Austria owns the IPRs and we are free to share code with other NatCos

We found that services we create are so much simpler than OOB services which try to cover all bases. Did you experience this?
I cannot say that solution is always simpler but I can confirm that they are adapted to Austrian market and needs. Austrian market is very tough and we were used to make many changes based on OOB services. Now we are developing our requirements and solutions are in many cases very complex but fulfilling our needs.

A big challenge we face is getting marketing to do anything with the services we create. Alan has a nice weblog about this, the litany of excuses. How do you get the services to market?
In our case our marketing is involved from beginning and they are supporting us. But issue that we have is that ideas are coming from technologies and we are trying to encourage our marketing to request new services by themselves and not only to analyze out of the box solution.

You highlight the trigger-point for new services. What are your experiences there?
At the moment is it technical team. We are summarizing ideas visiting such events like TADS and then we are trying to present it to our marketing. Our goal is to involve business people in future events to present them the flexibility of such platforms and motivate them to design they own service on top of it. We are trying to use design thinking method. Of course we need to consider that IT and CRM systems are not as flexible as we are and this could be conflict point.

The cultural issues in being more open, flexible and willing to try new services in the market is a massive issue. How are you solving this?
We are faced at the moment with cultural issues. Very quick development and unsaturated market are supporting needs for cultural changes. We all know that we need cultural changes to stay along the market needs but we are very far from culture that is needed to be flexible. We need closer work with IT solutions, we need some IT rules in telecommunication, we need to accept the fact that there is no vendor and we need to predefine and describe all our needs, we need to change our thinking about making mistakes. We must take risk and try new services without being sure that service is already tested and improved by vendor etc. We are still on working modus to recognize all necessary changes and then we need to find way how to apply them:-)

How have you achieved such impressive support and maintenance costs?
Negotiation, negotiation & negotiation 🙂 There are many JainSlee company on the market offering very acceptable support and maintenance cost.

How do you divide the responsibilities between TMO and the 3rd party?
We have our partnership program with predefined rules who has which responsibility. We do not leave much space for discussion during the project. We have a couple of development/project variants and per project we are choosing most suitable variant. The process and together working is better if rules are predefined and well-known to each party. We are improving our partnership program with each lessons learned:-)