Finding Services and Business Models for the Next-Generation Networks

Almira labs as an NTBF in Madrid science park

Almira Labs is a company which was founded in 2006 with the clear vision of developing a technology allowing fast and low cost development of services for the telecommunication networks. After working in the industry for several years, the founders were convinced that developments for those systems should be made in a completely new way, bringing to the telecom space the practices of the software engineering world, with special attention to the SQA (Software Quality Assurance) principles, with technologies allowing the rapid development of services over open standards and programming languages that could be used from any device.
A new technology, Next-Generation Network (NGN) or IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), and a new programming standard called JAIN SLEE (JAINSLEE, 2009), based on Java, appeared to dramatically change the industry panorama. The services developed with this technology for the telephony network, work universally on the network nodes of any manufacturer, as long as they are compliant with the standards described above, either for mobile or fixed networks. This technology allowed the birth of a new concept: Fixed-Mobile Convergence or FMC (see Figure 7).
With this new paradigm, the number of possible service providers for operators increased, as it was no longer limited to the manufacturer of the network equipment acquired, but opened to service providers who were able to program with standard JAIN SLEE and had a good knowledge of the telephony network. Nevertheless, this situation still involved a certain degree of restriction for operators, since they were dependent on suppliers with certain specific knowledge of software development.
Almira Labs went a step beyond this. It positioned itself ahead of its competitors in this space, offering a graphical tool to create NGN services, reproducing the concept of a Service Creation Environment (SCE) that existed in the classical intelligent network for this new NGN paradigm. With this tool any non-technical member of a product engineering or marketing department can develop these kinds of services without programming, in a fast and efficient way and at a reduced cost.
To complete its offer to operators, Almira Labs has a catalogue of plug and play network services that were developed using its own technology and which can be deployed on any NGN node of any operator (see Figure 8).

Fig. 7. Intelligent network evolution

In summary, Almira Labs defines itself as a next-generation product and services provider for telecom operators’ next-generation converged networks. The main aim of the company is to become one of the key providers within this area at a global level, as its target market is composed of all telephony operators worldwide. Its go-to-market will be undertaken by a direct sales force in both geographically and culturally similar areas such as Iberia, Northern Africa and Latin America, and by a strong partnership with JAIN SLEE network node manufacturers in the rest of the world.
The results of four intense years of R&D effort are condensed in The Five Billion Store Concept (www.fivebillionstore.com). It is an Application Store with services that can be used by any person, from any operator, with any mobile device or fixed line. Useful services at affordable prices. And it is complemented by a developers framework that can be used both by developers (using a JAVA-based library with all the telecom components) and non- technical people who can create complex telecom services using a graphical tool (in prototype stage at the point of writing this book). Developers are offered a typical revenue sharing schema on a site where a single development addresses a huge market of consumers.
This ambitious plan has been developed by a very strong team of professionals with wide experience in this domain. The founders have accumulated a total of more than 25 years experience in working with operators. In addition, they have put together a team of software engineers who have previously cooperated and worked together for many years in the same area.

Fig. 8. Almira Labs technology schema

The members of the founding team have a remarkable university involvement. The company’s entrance into the Madrid Science Park (MSP) is due to the team’s remarkable research profile and its ability to transfer basic university research to an industrial application within a strategic field.
For Almira Labs, the advantages of belonging to MSP are innumerable, but may be summarised in the following points:

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  the MSP brand – a prestigious, nationwide-acknowledged brand which raises the Almira Labs project to a higher level, since it ensures the quality of the business project
  
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  associated services, employment service, grant management, marketing management, etc.
  
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  physical space at a reasonable price and with a flexible scheme, which reduces the enterprising risk by controlling fixed expenses
  
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  international services
  

In brief, the objective is the creation of a product for the development of services for telecommunication operators, which involves a great deal of research in leading fields
within the new trends in computing technology; for instance, Modern Driven Architecture (MDA) (Miller and Mujerki, 2003; Kleppe et al., 2003; Meservy and Fenstermacher, 2005), and Design of Object-Oriented Applications or Product Lines. In fact, these fields are currently being studied by the postgraduate members of Almira Labs. Fostering schema from the Madrid Science Park has proved key in allowing such a long research period for current industry standards and Venture Capitalists schemas that prime short-term results.