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or more members. From need to code
in one step, as opposed to going
from need to some paper and some
software development and so forth.
Q: And as for resistance?
A: There's not active resistance.
There's a history of operators doing
their own thing, so they're getting
the idea of buying standard, off-the-shelf
commercial systems with open standards
on them. Most suppliers support
that. Those suppliers who own a
pretty big market share of something
and don't particularly want to open
that up and let competitors in may
be reluctant, and that's a balancing
act between the forces that want
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“There's a balancing act between
the forces that want to pull the
standards and the forces that want
to push the standards and the forces
that might want to delay a standard,
as they try to get that lined up
commercially.” |
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The telecom industry, being
immensely profitable for
decades, didn't worry about
these inefficiencies. Only
since the advent of brutal
competition have the operators
begun to consider standardizing.
The tail that hangs out of
the back of that is that
there is a whole lot of legacy
software out there, and it
takes time to change it out.
When operators
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to pull the standards and
the forces that want to push the
standards and the forces that might
want to delay a standard, as they
try to get that lined up commercially.
Groups like the T8 Group are trying
to pull some of these standards into
reality. Another group of suppliers
is trying to push these standards
into reality. Most people adopt standards
because that's the way the industry
is moving. The image comes to mind
of herds of Wildebeest. The herd
gets moving in one direction, and
the guys in the middle don't even
know where they are going, but they
know that they should be moving in
the same direction as the rest of
the group. Trying to get the group
moving in that direction is probably
more important than the technology
of the standard itself.
Q: You touched a bit on the
T8 release. Would you like to go
into more detail on that?
A: Sure. If you go back ten years
and you talk to AT&T, and they
told you how they handled different
services and such, you'd get a different
answer than if you talked to BT or
Telecom Italia, and so forth. Most
telecom operators are littered with
historic lumps of software strung
together in peculiar ways. .....
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have gone out and bought software,
they've told the supplier “I'll
buy your system, provided you modify
it to fit with what I've already
got”, so you perpetuate that
sort of proprietary, custom world.
The pressure on operators have so
much pressure on them now, they don't
want to perpetuate that into the
new generation networks and new converged
services they are building. We've
put together senior executives and
CIOs from the largest SPs in the
world. They have a chance to speak
with one voice. Often, these groups
speak to the need for standards,
but their policies on the ground
aren't always consistent with that.
This allows them to tell the industry
what is important to them and the
priority you put on what gets worked
on first, second, and third. This
is a new project within the last
few months, and we've only had a
few ad hoc meetings. The first summit
meeting with be in May in Nice at
the TMW show. We're inviting into
that group some non-traditional telecoms,
and are including some media companies
and cable companies in an attempt
to look across the value chain and
address these issues. That could
turn into a pretty important group
in terms of what people want to see
and when they want to see it.
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