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Yet BT did lead their effort internally, using contractors only under BT guidance, delivering to BT architectures. This certainly lets them claim more success than other service providers and as much as any Systems Integrator.
Market Good – Regulation Bad
Lastly Keith Willets, Chairman of the TMF, gave one of his typically inspirational talks. He again underscored why he is one of the best speakers in the OSS/BSS community. This time his talk should have been subtitled “Economics will get you”. He talked about how regulatory practices are causing many problems for service providers and vendors and perturbing the market, resulting in misallocation of capital. Keith pointed out, “Skype has more customers than at&t and Verizon combined, but a fraction of the revenue,” yet in today’s perturbed market still achieved astronomical valuation and disproportionate capitalization.
He implied regulation policies were the real cause of the bursting bubble. I might argue that greedy investors played a part in creating impossible levels of debt and that it took service providers to actively bid up the astronomical prices paid for 3G spectrum ….
Keith spoke against “open access” in IP networks and for a universal fair price for a fair service. We happen to agree that it is better to price based on costs and invest on opportunities rather than by regulatory policy. Too bad the world will never move there; as a policy objective this is good – but not as something to actually base your strategies on. Keith, my good friend, this author believes that universal fairly-priced services will come with technology advances such as Application Aware Networking which uses deep packet inspection with policy-based differential priority and forwarding decisions to structure the flow of traffic based on costs and revenue. Keith finished with a prediction that new services will follow the “long tail” effect, from which we conclude that the point of transforming to the lean service provider is to provide more enriched, customized services in the future. I still do not see how lean implies enrichment.
Linear Roundtables
Dual sessions labeled “Transformation Roundtable” & “Operator Roundtable”; proved to have seating in rows and a panel of speakers raised above us, These sessions included more in depth comments from Philip Glass, Jeff Smith, once CIO of Telstra, and several TMF sponsors. Key themes were about getting budget control and building a cadre of vested partners in the organization, in order to succeed at transformation. Choice “paraphrased” quotes (and author comments):
HP’s Paul Voelker: “Here is what I have, how can I leverage this and pick new products in order to deliver new services”. (A pragmatic strategy from a mature market leader. One that will not play well with those who see revolution as the only way to achieve dramatic reductions in cost and improvements in performance.)
Sanjay Mewada of NetCracker (someone to watch): “Envision a picture of what the network will look like five years out and then design OSS/BSS for that; then operationalize a plan to get there.” (With absolutely no evidence of a crystal ball anywhere in his briefcase however.) His “Usability of services is first priority and management is second” provided a more actionable concept though.
Jeff Smith said to the big established Consulting Systems Integrators when they offered to re-engineer and transform Telstra: “Come back when you have successfully transformed yourselves.” (We note that Telstra’s current management is once again tied to Accenture and IBM Global Services in their current attempt at transformation.)
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"Skype has more customers than AT&T and Verizon combined, but a fraction of the revenue,” yet in today’s perturbed market still achieved astronomical valuation ... |
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Mark Francis of AT&T: “Cultivate champions for transformation inside Operations.” (Absolutely true, well known as a strategy, but almost always incorrectly applied.) “Architecture without funding control is an influence game and overtime it wears you down.” (Keen observation and from an IT perspective I can say truer words were never spoken.) Mark also noted that component architecture via SOA allows incremental release of services throughout a project and not just at the end of the transformational work. (On the surface it seems BT and AT&T are taking contrasting positions in transformation strategies.)
Jeff Smith is a particularly interesting player. Coming from outside telecom, he took over as Telstra’s CIO just after they had disposed of most of their IT staff. He was never popular with the Telstra board and had an unfairly rough time with the Aussie press; however, he provided some very original strategies during his tenure. While he made clear progress, their corporate inertia was too great and external government owners too impatient. Most intriguing is Jeff’s decision to move to CEO at Majitek, a small start up in Melbourne. Majitek has a modern fine-grain style infrastructure product that allows control services to be built to run on Grids. I predict we will hear a lot from Majitek, if and when they overcome the down under isolation trap and begin to focus on a single product strategy.
Teamwork
Behind the conference tracks, the “early risers” were working away at standards meetings. These participants are the backbone of the TMF. Throughout the year, architects and policy makers from vendors and service providers work at hammering out designs that represent the most basic commonly held visions of the OSS/BSS community. Common wisdom states that the forward visions mostly come from the service providers, with the vendors working to dilute the most progressive ideas in favor of continuing their market directions and preserving their invested capital. Nevertheless some standout contributions from vendors do occur in these meetings, reinforcing the benefits that can come from a collaborative relationship with your suppliers.
In reality, the dynamic of idealistic architectural visions vs. practical realities of the marketplace is the core dynamic of the TMF. At its best, the TMF product reaches a balance of the two drivers. It does this through the engineered leadership balance which puts Service Providers, OSS/BSS vendors, network equipment and services vendors, and system integrators on equal footing on the TMF Board. It does this via the real world labs of the Catalyst Projects. But at the core it is the dynamic of the standards teams (paying Huck Finn’s to paint the fence) contributing time and travel costs to participants in the “working teams”. The working teams came up only once in the keynote session, when hard work rewards were handed out.
At each TMW, one or two individuals who have made outstanding intellectual contributions to the standard’s products of the TMF and who have put in lots of sweat equity for many years into the working teams are recognized. This recognition is the award of TMF Fellow. It is perhaps the highest industry award given to OSS/BSS designers (although it is limited to active TMF participants). So far every award is well deserved. This year Dave Raymer of Motorola was singled out at the TMW Americas. Dave has worked in the Forum for many years, first on the mobile team in the earliest catalyst projects.
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