Communications is vital to today’s small and large businesses. And as the technologies evolve, so must customers. Keeping these smart customers in mind, some service providers are developing new strategies to deliver new tools and apps to users in this age of intense competition, while other are readying solutions to manage cloud computing and some are going green to be eco-friendly. All this and more exciting news stories kept the next generation communications space interesting this past week.

Speaking of new strategies, TMCnet contributor Beecher Tuttle wrote that mobile operators are looking for new ways to increase revenues in this age of fierce competition. Sitting and watching others eat the cake is not an option for them, wrote Beecher. “With the market for mobile applications only expected to get bigger, the time is now for service providers to get in the game, partner with developers and begin utilizing their application programming interfaces (APIs) as a product development tool,” noted Tuttle.

In fact, service providers can employ several new strategies to garner bigger share of the mobile data revenues, which are expected to exceed $550 billion by 2015. Some of these strategies were outlined in a recent white paper “Monetizing Mobile Applications” developed Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert).

Here, wrote Tuttle, Alcatel-Lucent wants service providers to open up their APIs and publish their network assets for trusted app developers. This can help cut their app development cycle from as long as 18 months to as short as six weeks, says ALU in the paper. Opening up APIs can also help entice developers to jump onboard and create more diverse and robust applications, added ALU. In addition, service providers should build a new ecosystem for apps with internal developers, strategic partners and independent app makers in mind, says ALU.

Widespread popularity of cloud computing is creating its own management challenges. So ALU’s white paper also focuses on the issue of management in the cloud computing era. It talks about the importance of managing cloud computing – and the inherent challenges that come with it. Tuttle wrote in his piece that the document also details a number of new solutions that can help enterprises take firm control over their cloud applications and services.

Another trend that is fast catching up is cutting energy consumption. In other words, communications companies are going green by deploying eco-friendly solutions. By doing so, they are not only protecting the environment, but also reducing energy consumption, which further minimizes operating expenses, wrote Tuttle.

ALU has written another white paper entitled “Green Routing Innovations in Service Router Power Efficiency” that highlights the benefits of saving energy at the component level, the platform or system level, and the network level, wrote Tuttle in another piece.

With rising popularity of smartphones and tablets and their bandwidth hungry mobile data and video apps, TMCnet contributing editor Susan J Campbell looked at the challenges wireless network service providers were facing to accommodate users’ insatiable appetite for new content-rich services. Towards that goal, Campbell’s column explored the potential of Alcatel-Lucent’s lightRadio products that offer the capabilities of physical backhaul media, and also examined lightRadio’s potential for centralized digital baseband processing.