Panel member Giovanni Chiarelli, CIO, Telecom Italia, started off the session commenting, “It’s not easy to do more with less; our strategy and experience has been more about medium and long term benefits,” acknowledging that the shorter term is becoming much more important.

Mehrdad Mansourpour, MD and CIO, UPC Broadband, agreed, saying, “Return on investment has to be under two years, longer is no good as the market is moving too quickly.” He didn’t hold back either about what he sees as one of the greatest obstacles to service providers being able to do more with less quickly – lack of proper partnerships with vendors.

He commented, “So many times vendors are not supporting our roadmap and our business. I know four senior CIOs who have lost their jobs since January for not delivering on time, but it wasn’t the vendors who were in the boardroom explaining how they screwed up. They keep consolidating.  I don’t know if this a good thing in the long term, but right now 80 percent of the disks in my data center are no longer supported; they aren’t in the merged roadmap.”

He added, “ Previously our attitude big was beautiful with vendors, but now there is often conflict in our roadmaps and then two years down the line they jump on top of me and kill me all over again.”

Iain Morris, editor, Technology Briefing – Telecommunications & IT, Economist Intelligence Unit,  said, “Telecoms is no longer a high growth and probably will not be again. Even emerging markets such as India that were revenues were growing astronomically just a few quarters ago are now facing intense competition. The move to 4G is no longer about the business case, it’s for competitive reasons.”