Fundamental to our mass-market penetration strategy is the ability to offer innovative, mass-market, value-added services (VAS) over the best infrastructure available. We knew we had a successful content business and a significant growth opportunity. Our value-added strategy is extremely important in reaching our goal of becoming the market leader in Israel.
Early on, content and applications were identified as the main drivers for our success. To penetrate the mass market and guarantee future growth we knew we needed to:
Our solution unified hundreds of thousands of content items, including those from a huge group of partners. It also supported innovative delivery mechanisms with a superior customer experience.
Today, Pelephone can deploy new services in just a few months — a time frame that previously would have been years. In addition, we manage the enormous range of content that customers expect while delivering the “wow” factor — simple, intuitive and appealing interfaces to our new services. The result — our customers get a stunning user experience and Pelephone wins with rapid top-line growth to our VAS portfolio.
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A value-added strategy to penetrate a mass market
Pelephone’s value-added strategy was designed to leverage our content business and penetrate the Israeli mass market.
The strategy focused on three key areas:
- Location-based services
- Mobile broadband
- Multimedia content – in particular, TV and music
These key areas would be underpinned by embedded, device-specific applications to give customers the “wow” factor we knew would win their business.
Our position as market leader in GPS gave us a platform to build on. We were looking for a content management system that would allow us to design and quickly launch innovative new services and applications. To bring our strategy to fruition we deployed a new High-Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA) network and a state-of-the-art multimedia content management (MCM) platform. This new infrastructure would allow us to increase flexibility and scalability into the future while reducing the time-to-market of innovative services.
Our first choice for a potential MCM partner was Alcatel-Lucent because of its unparalleled experience in this area. After agreeing on a roadmap that reflected our needs, Pelephone selected the Alcatel-Lucent 5920 Multimedia Content Manager (MCM). It provided a flexible, scalable solution to assist us in meeting the challenge of managing and quickly delivering a huge range of content.
Innovative services deliver the “wow” factor
One example of our innovative service offering supported by the 5920 MCM is Super TV. This widget-based application offers users a dashboard where they can intuitively access video-on-demand content, TV channels and live music streams. Customer acceptance has been excellent — average viewing time has increased threefold since we launched the service. And Super TV fans get the “wow” factor.
More recently, we used the 5920 MCM to launch our new music download service, Musix. With 250,000 tracks and numerous playlists, Musix delivers Israel’s biggest music catalog. This innovative service leverages not only a unique content management approach but also an “easy going” customer experience. An added benefit of the 5920 MCM flexibility is that we can offer automatic synchronization between user devices. For example, if you use a PC to download a “jogging music” playlist to your private content area, that playlist is automatically available on your mobile phone. You can listen while you jog — without the need for local synchronization via wires or WiFi.
Immediate benefits
Quickly delivering applications like Super TV and Musix to the market is key. If you want to be the leader in broadband cellular applications and multimedia content, you must continuously enhance the customer experience.
Having a large set of content partners is a prerequisite for success in this arena. Pelephone is fortunate in that respect. We have signed partnership agreements with many of the major global and local players. The Alcatel-Lucent 5920 MCM helps us to manage the volumes of content — mostly on-portal, but also off-portal — through policies and agreements.
Our business generates millions of transactions across the network every month. It was imperative to us that our customers not be impacted as we transitioned our systems. The fact that we had two professional teams working together to achieve a common goal made the switchover process a success. We were able to introduce the innovations we wanted soon after switchover, and we’re very happy with the result.
Secrets of success
One of the key milestones was getting to the point where we agreed that we needed to change systems, and we were ready to do so. After all, a project of this scale requires a significant investment of financial and human resources. To ensure success, many of our brightest people allocated a major portion of their time to this project.
In-depth planning for the implementation and integration of the new system allowed us to move smoothly from the test lab to deployment, always with backup plans in place. Our customers are our business, so we had to work hard to minimize disruption.
The pay-off has been phenomenal. We now offer some of the most advanced multimedia applications in the world. Top-line revenues are growing very quickly, and customers are happy. Musix is set to accelerate that growth and revolutionize the market in Israel; we charge a flat fee for unlimited downloads, so we anticipate rapid service uptake.
We continue to launch innovative services that we hope will delight our customers. Our plan is on track to become the biggest operator in Israel. Reduced time-to-market for the introduction of innovative services, enabled by the flexibility of the Alcatel-Lucent 5920 MCM, means that Pelephone can maintain its technology leadership position, and continue to grow in market share and revenues.
About Pelephone
Pelephone is wholly owned by Bezeq – The Israel Telecommunication Corporation Ltd. It currently has some 2.7 million subscribers, 100 points of sale, 39 service and sales centers, and employs 4200 people. Its 2006 revenues were 4.478 billion NIS. For further information, visit www.pelephone.co.il.
To contact the author or request additional information, please send email to enrich.editor@alcatel-lucent.com.
(Average: 3.67 out of 5)
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