It was 20 years ago this week that TM Forum held its first general gathering of members, and as we enter our third decade of being in business and serving the communications industry, there’s no better time to reflect on how far we’ve come and how far we have yet to go to achieve a truly seamless experience for customers across all products and services.
During the keynote address Tuesday morning, Jerry Brace, Senior Vice President for Information Technology at Rogers Communications, discussed quad-play services and that while it’s generally thought of as the Holy Grail for providers and customers, it’s a lot easier said than done and can be likened to fitting a square peg into a round hole.
Brace walked the keynote audience through a general timeline of how to reach quad-play, which involves starting with triple-play services and then converting customers from legacy applications, reducing overall complexity and time-to-market, and then extending the scope of delivering quad-play on an integrated platform with consolidated billing, customer care and service assurance.
He said it’s absolutely critical to have a visionary at the helm of your organization and to align the business and build a center of excellence within the organization around service delivery.
Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi, Chairman and CEO of Divvio, said that if you look past all the technical jargon, there’s a fundamental change going on in the world as it transforms from legacy applications to more of a virtual MPLS/IP/wireless world.
He said that while the U.S. today accounts for about 40 percent of worldwide economic traffic, today’s Internet simply was not designed to support 21st century applications.
Eslambolchi outlined a list of top technology trends—including next-generation speech recognition, the global availability of broadband, e-collaboration and social networking, the explosion of wireless Internet access, more sophisticated security requirements and the dominance of wireless IP—that will necessitate a dramatic infrastructure transformation to drive the applications of tomorrow.
Madhusudhan Mysore, Chief Officer-Customer and Services Operations at Tata Communications, said that even in times of financial uncertainty there is a role for mergers and acquisitions if they are done step-by-step in order to improve a company’s overall performance.
He said mergers and acquisitions should be used selectively where it will complement a company’s business and strategic partnerships should also be considered.
Eric Pulier, Executive Chairman of SOA Software, talked about how a Service Oriented Architecture will be the foundation for what’s to come and that companies from the Fortune 500 to government entities to startups are shifting to an SOA model.
He said that as we move to a service oriented economy, it doesn’t make sense for enterprises to only use their own resources; rather they could create a service that would be consumed as part of someone else’s business. But to do that, they need to conform to standards that are commonplace and widely accepted.
During the special keynote panel session, “What Does a Global Recession Mean for Service Providers?” Zenas Hutcheson, Senior Managing Director of Vesbridge Partners, described the current economic recession as having its root two decades ago when credit started becoming very easy to come by. He also said that the globalization of financial markets has not helped the situation.
The bottom line, according to Hutcheson is that consumers have less to spend and will return to the basics. The good news for providers is that today cable and wireless service is considered essential to many consumers, so the broadband and mobile markets may be more shielded from the broader financial problems.
Keith Willetts, Chairman and CEO of TM Forum, pointed out that as we’ve moved from billing calls based on time and distance to flat-rate pricing, people could end up making a wholesale decision of either keeping or disconnecting their phone service rather than simply cutting back on calls to save money.
Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi of Divvio, said as we move into a flat economy, providers absolutely need to be nimble in terms of operational excellence and if they shift investments from the network core to the edge, it will help them to come out winners in the end.