I very much agree with this statement in Antoine's slide 9: "Opportunity to become 'enabler' of 3rd party services & applications". This is truly the monetization opportunity available to operators in the mobile application open ecosystem. The operators who can best enhance value in the delivery of popular 3rd party applications will be the most successful in increasing ARPUs beyond mobile data access plans.
I do think Antoine sells operators a little short when discussing what these “enablers” might be. He cites Billing and CRM as significant operator assets to be leveraged. In fact, operators can leverage other unique network-based assets as the basis for increased services monetization, such as policy control systems to provide the flexibility to offer user personalization of the applications and services they consume (e.g., by type, time of day, application, usage quantity, roaming, etc.), network-enabled targeted advertising (while ensuring subscriber privacy), content filtering to provide protective services for minor subscribers or preservation of cultural norms, enhanced user experience by ensuring quality of service for bandwidth-intensive applications, and more. These network assets can even enable sustainable business partnerships with 3rd party application providers, at least for those operators who move quickly with a true value proposition.
