By Mark Everett Hall

Today at the opening session of TM Forum’s Management World Americas, keynote speakers spoke directly to the current uncertain global economic environment while offering strong optimism about the near and long-term future. And one speaker offered the experiences of a company that was on the brink of catastrophe as a concrete example for optimism.

Keith Willetts, Chairman and CEO of TM Forum, introduced the keynote speakers, noting that the past year had been an exceptionally difficult one for business. He said with banks failing and other businesses going under, communications companies were charting uncertain waters.

“We really didn’t know what was going to happen,” he said.

However, Willetts added, “telcos came out okay.” He said they did so by driving down costs in 2009. And he expected they will continue to grow in 2010 in some measure by offering new services to both businesses and consumers.

To underscore his observation, while he was speaking, a roomful of the 1,200 attendees at the event replied to an interactive audience query, asking what market areas offered the most opportunities for TM Forum members. According to those who answered to the question, emerging cloud computing services (34 percent) was the top response.

Willetts noted, “Cloud computing is going to affect everything we do.”

In his following keynote address, Neil Cox, executive vice president of Product & IT at Qwest, gave listeners a brief history of Qwest’s business difficulties early in the decade that almost led to the company’s demise.

In 2001, he said Qwest’s stock fell from $80 per share to less than $1. And soon thereafter, the ex-CEO Joseph Nacchio ended up in prison for stock fraud, where he still sits today. Plus, Cox said, the company was burdened with an overextended $20 billion infrastructure investment that was not paying dividends.

Cox painted a dramatically different picture of Qwest today. He said after the entire old senior management was jettisoned, the company’s revival is a result of a relentless focus on the customer experience. As a proof point, Cox said the company has been cash-flow positive for years and pointed to eight consecutive quarters of paying shareholders a dividend.

Also, Qwest has cuts its debt load by 45 percent while investing an additional $13 billion in its infrastructure. Despite these investments, Cox said, “We’re stingy on how we spend out capital.”

As such, he said, Qwest has reduced its data centers from 12 to three and that IT costs are 30 percent of what they were only four years ago.

However, it’s the infrastructure that will boost growth for Qwest. He said today the company can offer millions of customers 40 Mbit/sec downloads over its fiber-based networks and 20 Mbit/sec uploads.

According to Cox, that broadband performance will be used to attract developers who will offer applications to both consumers and enterprises. These applications will depend on high-performance, intelligent infrastructure from Qwest, he said.

Cox predicted that enterprises would rapidly adopt new business models for consuming IT services, such as cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS), as business problems like security get resolved by providers.

He added that new standards and protocols will need to be developed and implemented for these new business models to get wide adoption. He said TM Forum was a valuable arena for those new standards and protocols to reach the market.