The Device Management Summit held in the heart of the Silicon Valley this week was a success, not only as a meeting of minds, but as an opportunity to explore new related technologies.
 
A significant new step forward was also taken by the TM Forum.  Chuck Trent, VP of Information Technology from Cisco, described the need to leverage the TM Forum collaboration program to consolidate Enterprise IT requirements for device management, in order to reference them in the procurement process to service providers and device manufacturers.  He offered to help us document these for review and to help engage his peers (CIOs) in other large enterprises across other industry verticals (e.g. banks, real estate) to participate.   Chuck wants to redeploy many people on his staff who are currently engaged in activities managing devices that are not part of his core business, since he prefers to outsource these activities to his service provider and device manufacturer suppliers.

Chris Albano of Comcast, together with Jim Thomsen of Westell and Jim Hunter of 4HomeMedia,  participated in a lively discussion of device management in the home networking context, that included Matt Herdlein of Telcordia and Uwe Alkemper of Detecon.  The requirements and business drivers for device management were introduced by Abraham Joseph of the Device Management Forum, who also led the panel.

Architecture implications of these business requirements were addressed in a second panel, with Jaime Fink of 2Wire (representing the DSL Forum, which is now has a new name – the Broadband Forum), Frank Den Hartog of the Home Gateway Initiative, and Stan Moyer who is President of the OSGi Alliance.  Jim Hunter offered another perspective from his experience in CableLabs.  The TM Forum will be contributing to the understanding and definition of device management requirements across the industry.

Following the summit were two days of sessions and interactions at Connections 2008 with its 1000 attendees and exhibitors, which also included the TM Forum demonstrations of zero-touch deployment, integrated CPE testing, and delivery of device user support.  TM Forum members attending commented that  this was a very important opportunity -- they were able to engage new companies to work with them in their businesses, and with us in the TM Forum.  Even though the event was much smaller than Management World, they were able to gather an equal number of quality contacts.

Another comment was that they attended not so much to participate in TM Forum work or to meet customers (which they are able to well accomplish at Management World) but to explore a part of the industry that is innovating in ways they do not normally see and ensure their capability to address these requirements.  And that this event delivered on that expectation.

Perhaps the most gratifying comment of all was that the TM Forum activities in device management have come a long way since we launched them last year.  They need to – the industry is moving very fast!

Comments?

Seven weeks is a short time between major wireless tradeshows, and the US focus of the CTIA Wireless show in Las Vegas reduces further the volume of news one can expect, but nevertheless some interesting thoughts and reports came from those who attended.

I have compiled some major observations from the trade press and want to share them with you.   Please do comment on them – we hope to encourage reader interaction in our blogs!

The iPhone has revolutionized web browsing using wireless access, and although Apple's presence at the show was hardly overt, this has stimulated other manufacturers to meet the challenge, as Jan Dawson of Ovum describes here.

Antoine Wright, posted in Mobile Computing, discusses how the iPhone has created greater expectations in general for device usability.

The emergence of true internet browsing over wireless (with the iPhone and other devices that will be coming out) and the demand for it from the advertising business is creating pressure on the wireless internet - see this interesting piece by Paul Grim of VC firm Sunbridge Partners.

The Chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Kevin Martin, announcing the FCC ruling against SKYPE, complimented the new "openness" of carriers - read Brad Reed's article in ComputerWorld. 

Chetan Sharma (reporting to the French website of Service Mobiles) points out that, however, openness depends on the point of view of the industry stakeholders involved.

Your thoughts? Conflicting views?

Welcome to my blog! And welcome to the many new companies and new types of companies that will be joining us thanks to one of our new focus areas – end-user device management. I am delighted to have the opportunity to share some ideas with you and get some feedback in agile fashion to keep us on the right track. Things are moving too fast to take a waterfall approach!

My main sounding board up to now in the device arena has been my 8-year old son who can configure our own home devices in a twinkling of an eye. I could sure use him at the trade fairs I am attending but he is too young to get in and he is busy attending school.

So now I will turn to you too – please send your comments in to this blog.

These past four months have been a whirlwind of activity in the TM Forum in the Device Sector as we launched it – and I'd like to share my excitement by describing how it unfolded from my point of view.

We started with an open webinar on October 19th to the membership introducing some key thoughts on the topic from Deutsche Telekom and Motorola. Within only two weeks we had attracted some 31 more members to the new interest group, including 7 more service providers! This led to us to issue a press release in Dallas on November 5th describing the group and its goals and objectives. One of the objectives that I had set within the team of members and staff was to recruit a large corporate enterprise that needed to manage large numbers of end-user devices. I reasoned that this would help drive and prioritize the correct set of requirements to manage end-user devices to service providers and the entire business operations supply chain.

The morning of November 6th when I turned up to breakfast in Dallas, an energetic and enthusiastic young lady ran up behind me and called out, "Are you Chris Ballard?" I turned around and confirmed this. She said, "Good morning, I am from Cisco! I have never heard of the TM Forum, but I live in Dallas, and one of my suppliers advised me that there was a big conference in town. I checked out your website, saw the press release quoting you, and I really need your help!" As we started to talk, I realized that she was the person that I needed help from even more – she had the management responsibility, within the internal IT organization of Cisco, to deploy a set of wired and wireless end-user devices, and a home gateway, to the homes of several tens of thousands of teleworking Cisco employees. And her team was based in California – she herself was teleworking from her home in Dallas! So I had found my large corporate enterprise, or rather, she had found me, the same day that we issued the press release. I take this as an omen that the industry need is overwhelming and the time is right for the problems we are describing to be addressed.

This was the start of a collaboration that will culminate in a catalyst demonstration on "Zero-Touch Deployment" at Management World 2008 in Nice in May, led by Cisco IT. The requirements spinning off from this catalyst have been identified in a first pass in Lisbon at team action week, and fall in the areas of (at least) service delivery framework (SDF), product lifecycle management (PLM), and the shared information data (SID) model, as well as end-user device management.

Another company that spoke on a panel discussion during the spotlight session I chaired in Dallas, Peak8 Solutions, proposed a second catalyst demonstration that is also out to open call and will be demonstrated in Nice, "Delivering Device User Support". They invited me to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in early January, the huge annual extravaganza put on by the Consumer Electronics Association. We spoke there with several large tier-one device manufacturers and their consistent response to the question, "What is your main pain point?" turned out to be sure enough, "The cost of user support." One of these companies was the division of a large industrial conglomerate that manufactures automated home locks that can be controlled by the user when he is away from home using his home gateway. We are recruiting the conglomerate into the TM Forum as a new member and plan to demonstrate the support of their devices in the catalyst.

Please do have a look at these catalyst program open calls (under "Technical Programs") – several companies have joined the catalysts already and we welcome wider participation to broaden the requirements and increase the relevance of the outputs to the membership and the wider industry.

We had a record attendance last week in Lisbon at team action week, and a lively discussion in our team. In addition to the catalysts, we started a third project to write an overall strategy document on end-user device management. See our program webpage (under "Business Solutions") for a high-level description of the program and instructions to join the team that is writing this strategy.

Now I am off again tomorrow to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to speak at the Business Operations Symposium and to as many device manufacturers as I can – I'll give you an update next time!