I just wrapped up a day and a half at AT&T’s business analyst event here in New Jersey. I “live tweeted” the event to some extent – see here for a broad view of some of the themes discussed there.

But one of the things I was most encouraged about and interested in was some of AT&T’s activities that I would classify as fitting within my social telco definition. As AT&T expands into the cloud computing space, it will be launching storage-as-a-service and compute-as-a-service offerings in the coming months. But it will also be developing something it calls “platform-as-a-service”. It’s not the best name, because it’s not all that descriptive – as a colleague said, it reminds you of Salesforce’s efforts to expand from its core CRM-as-a-service proposition to something broader. But the concept is good, even if the nomenclature isn’t.

What platform-as-a-service would do is expose both computing and network functionality through APIs to third parties. This would allow those third parties – whether ISVs, enterprises developing their own apps or even web players – to create apps that would be able to issue commands to AT&T’s compute and network infrastructure. The focus in AT&T’s presentation on the topic was on the compute-type commands, but the plan is very much to roll out more or less the full set of Parlay X commands over time in handfuls at intervals over the next year or two, starting later this year. 

One of the things I found interesting about this is how AT&T is approaching some of the greatest challenges associated with exposing this kind of functionality to third parties: namely, verifying identity and providing security in order to protect privacy. AT&T is piggybacking off its efforts on the mobile application side here, benefiting from its DevCentral developer community and the processes and interfaces developed to facilitate the development of mobile apps by partners. This is probably a good model for other telcos with well developed mobile developer ecosystems since a lot of the legwork has already been done. 

I’m going to be requesting a more detailed briefing on these activities, and especially on the linkages between consumer and business efforts in this area, and will likely put something together for publication subsequently. But this certainly looks like an interesting and promising initiative from AT&T in this area, and one that other telcos can learn from.

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I was asked recently during a call with a client about the prospects for enterprise mobile social networking. My first response was that I thought two other things had to happen before that could become a reality – successful mobile implementations of social networking, and successful uses of social networking in business settings.

Having had the opportunity to think about it some more, I think that initial reaction is still the right one. Only once those two things are well established can the combination of the two really occur in the form of mobile enterprise social networking. And those aren’t insignificant barriers.

Ironically, even though I think the opportunities are far greater in some ways for mobile social networking, enterprise social networking actually seems to be taking off more quickly, in part because there are companies with the right assets to take the job on. Oracle, IBM and others are taking the lead in creating enterprise-grade social networks with the appropriate structure and controls for the business setting. They have the software expertise and the credibility and knowhow in business to make it work, and they are already doing so, both for internal use and for use by customers.

On the mobile side, most of the players only have half the story to tell – the social networking companies have the SN knowhow and the customer base, but not the mobile knowledge or operator relationships to really make things happen. The mobile implementation of Facebook (both the mobile website and the BlackBerry application) is limited at best and doesn’t do a lot of the things you’d want it to in order to be really useful. Mobile operators, who have many of the other pieces needed to make things work, don’t have the credibility as social networking providers in their own right, and so need partnerships with SN specialists to make things work. In time, the two groups will come together in such a way that mobile social networking is enabled in a more mainstream way, but we still have a long way to go.

Only once both of these trends move a lot further down the road does it make much sense to expect mobile enterprise social networking to take off. But that doesn’t mean that the various stakeholders shouldn’t start thinking about how it might work now. Both the Oracles and IBMs and the mobile operators and social networking sites should be actively working out how they will take advantage of this future opportunity today. But that shouldn’t prevent them from staying focused on nearer-term opportunities in both mobile and business flavors of social networking individually.

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