Somewhere over the NGN rainbow

Kieran Moynihan, Vice President & CTO Telecoms, IBM Tivoli Division

As we journey together along the yellow-brick road to the exciting land of next-generation networks and services (NGN), we are all asking ourselves the same question : what exactly will it look like and how will we know when we have arrived ! If you were to step back in time to even 5 years ago in the early days of WAP and looked at today's mobile internet of users accessing fascinating Second Life services over HSPA networks approaching 14Mb/s, you would definitely feel that we had arrived in NGN land :)

In truth, the NGN transformation is already well underway and each of us as users are finally seeing the reality of the NGN vision of seamlessly accessing a wide range of complex multimedia services over any access technology through convergent smart devices interacting with a powerful ecosystem of users and content. While intense competitive forces in the telecom infrastructure market together with increasingly sophisticated user requirements will continue to drive innovation in access technologies such as WiMax, LTE, fixed-mobile convergence and smart multi-mode devices, perhaps the most profound NGN-enabling change of all is the separation of the service and control layers from the underlying telecom infrastructure. A leading service provider once described this evolution to me as akin to having open-heart surgery without an anaesthetic! Not only does this comparison go to the heart of the complexity of IP Multimedia System (IMS) and Service Delivery Platform (SDP) deployments but also highlights the profound business model challenges the NGN world presents to the various players in the eco-system particularly the established service providers. Service innovation, the ability to bundle high-value services and customer experience will inevitably decide the winners and losers in the NGN world. While everyone asks the questions such as "won't the existing telcos just become dumb pipes?" and "it's only a matter of time before the media & content players emerge as the large long-term winners of wallet-share", the reality is that it's going to be a lot more complicated than this with existing service providers utilising their incumbency, retail networks, triple-play/quad-play bundling and customer intimacy to repel the boarders on the castle walls!

One factor that will influence the NGN ecosystem is both the openness and interoperability both within and between the value-chain components. Technology evolution has always been and will continue to be a fine balance between commercial advantage and the reality of making new technologies work in the existing environment. While many would love to see convergence of NGN standards such as WiMax and LTE, what ultimately is more important is the interoperability between our NGN technologies needed to enable the seamless anytime, anywhere experience. While the telecoms ecosystem see the benefits of plug-and-play standards such as USB and HDMI in the consumer electronics world, commercial realities and telecom technology complexity will continue to make plug-and-play challenging in the NGN world.

The TeleManagement Forum has made great strides in recent times on addressing this critical interoperability. The inclusion of both the cable and content/media sectors have been critical decisions to enabling the TMF play a key role in the success of the NGN world. Tough challenges will continue to lie ahead and we all in our respective positions in the value-chain will have key responsibilities in ultimately enabling an exciting NGN world that will see our billions of citizens and many more billions of machines connected in manners that will simply take our breath away!

Kieran is an experienced Telecommunications industry executive with an outstanding track record over his 16 year career in the network equipment and OSS/BSS sectors. Kieran is recognised as a leading visionary in the telecommunications OSS/BSS software industry and has pioneered the customer-centric management of telecommunications networks. After a very successful 8 years in Motorola’s wireless infrastructure group, Kieran co-founded Comnitel, a wireless service management company in 1999 and led the company as CEO from initial start-up through a 30 million-dollar series of fundraising with leading international venture capitalists. Over the period 2003 – 2007 Kieran had a strong track record as Chief Technology Officer for Vallent ( a combination of 3 telecoms OSS/BSS companies Comnitel, Metrica and WatchMark ) driving the company’s product and go-to-market strategy. Since the acquisition of Vallent by IBM in February 2007, Kieran has taken on the role of Vice President and CTO for Telecoms for the IBM Tivoli division and has taken on a visionary role for IBM’s overall telecoms business worldwide. Kieran is an advisor on the TMF board and is a frequent speaker at telecommunications conferences & contributor to telecommunications publications worldwide.