By Mark Everett Hall

If this week’s crowded Management World Americas conference had been held last summer, the corridors of the sprawling Rosen Shingle Creek resort in Orlando might not have been as packed with buyers and sellers. Times were not so good just a few months ago.

In fact, as late as September, Martin Creaner, President and COO of TM Forum, worried that the communications industry’s seminal event in the Western Hemisphere might have suffered as a result of the global recession.

“When we were planning the conference, the world was deep into the recession with no light at the end of the tunnel,” he said.

“This time last year we were facing the abyss and did not know what would happen,” agreed Keith Willetts, CEO and Chairman of TM Forum.

However, those dark days may be behind the industry. “Things turned around in the fourth quarter, and [the conference] is way above budget and ahead of last year in many ways,” Creaner said.

For example, Creaner said this year attracted 10 percent more senior-level buyers of communications gear than in 2008. And that could be excellent news not just for TM Forum but for the entire communications industry.

According to Creaner, Management World Americas “maps trends in the industry real well. It’s a bellwether for the health of the industry.”

Both Willetts and Creaner expect the industry to follow a few other trends that emerged at the conference. A major one is cloud computing, where this week TM Forum unveiled its Enterprise Cloud Buyers Council (ECBC). The ECBC’s mission is to bring together large enterprises, such as Deutsche Bank and Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and a host of vendors into an ecosystem that will hash out the major unresolved issues relating to cloud computing such as standards, governance, benchmarks and other areas that hold back adoption of cloud services by large organizations.

Willetts said cloud technology “is very synergistic with what TM Forum does.” He noted the organization’s strengths in developing standards and best practices for communications business and operational issues. And for those areas where TM Forum is not as strong, such as in security, he said it will partner with standards groups who have those core competencies.

Putting enterprise buyers front and center in the ECBC is critical to its success, Willetts said.

“They will identify the hurdles to making cloud technology a success in their businesses,” he said. And because buyers have money, he added, “Suppliers will want to fix the problems.”

As such, he acknowledged, the pressure is on TM Forum to bring more buyers into the ECBC.

Another issue facing the communications industry in 2010 will be the rollout of LTE-based 4G technology, which promises to deliver up to 20 Mbit/sec downloads to mobile handsets. While a potential gold mine for many TM Forum members, Creaner said it also poses significant challenges in areas such as fault management and performance management that the group will help the industry resolve.

Finally, Creaner said communications vendors are awash in data about their customers and intend to use that data to create programs to improve the customer experience from the cable systems to mobile communications for individual consumers to huge corporations.

He argued that better customer experience programs will go beyond a smile or a handshake by vendors and added that the companies will use analytics and policy-management tools to deliver tailored programs that make using communications technology not just easier, but more meaningful for users.