I spent last week attending TeleEvo, the TM Forum sponsored summit in Moscow. The traffic in Moscow is perhaps the worst I’ve seen in any major city – with last Tuesday being officially the worst traffic day ever experienced by Moscow since measurements began. Let’s face it; a city has to have pretty bad traffic problems in the first place to even have official measures!!

But in contrast, it was fascinating to see how fast that market is moving. We had over 300 attendees at the event from multiple Russian and CIS service providers, and the over-arching impression I had was of a region that has the energy and the means to be perhaps the fastest growth region in the world over the coming years. 

The technical sophistication and ambitions of the companies and the solutions they are deploying compares well with anything I have seen in the more developed markets. In particular, a lot of the discussion was around the need for Service Delivery Platforms and how they will impact the future market dynamics. We had several sessions on this topic, and I shared the view that SDPs are essentially a Service Provider’s defensive play. Without SDPs, Operators are in danger of being relegated to simple, low value add, bit carriers. But add in the value of a sophisticated SDP, and Operators suddenly position themselves directly in the creation & delivery firing line for all new generation services.

And make no mistake, this market gets it. Even though the Russian market has yet to roll out 3G, it is thinking like a next generation market. It is taken as a given that nobody can plan their future on POTS or basic voice services. The future for each of the operators lies in growing ARPU (which is pitifully low compared to the relatively high GNP of Russia), and this growth will come from video, music, games, location services, etc.

Of course the SDP market is a hopelessly confusing mix of similar sounding but entirely different offerings from some of the world’s leading companies. Because of this, TM Forum has been working with these same companies to agree on some basics – such as a common Service Delivery Framework and vocabulary that all companies can use to structure their products. This wasn’t as difficult as it sounds, and we have released version 1 of this framework and are now expanding it to get down to the real detail – such as bringing TM Forum’s information models and business process models up to date for this new world.

Without a doubt the speed of movement of this industry in every part of the globe I visit continues to amaze me. At some stage, I’m sure this pace of change will calm down…but not today or tomorrow!