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Our telecommunications industry is one of America’s true success stories. Built from the ground-up on American ingenuity, the Bell system and its independent cousins were catalytic in transforming the United States into an economic powerhouse during the first half of the 20th century. While sound-minded observers debate the value of the organizational structure that developed through the 1980s, few would question the overall quality of the network or service offered.

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As coverage elsewhere in this issue illustrates very clearly, there's no shortage of entries on the events calendar of any telecom executive. The fall is fairly crowded with trade shows and summits. Even on such a crowded field, however, an event like TMW-Dallas is worth a second glance. The event marks the celebration of ten years of TMW, and sports a new name. While previous events have been known as “TeleManagement World,” or simply “TMW,” this year's Dallas event is called “TMForum Management World,” or.... “TMW.”

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Another month has passed and we are already nearing the end of 2007, which still seems like it just began. Bundle packages are growing, prices are dropping, and companies are merging. Here is your October issue of NewsWatch, where you can read on to find out more about all of the above.

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Ask engineers and product marketing directors: there is no greater professional satisfaction than guiding a new product from conception through to successful launch. Creating a novel, successful product is often the most rewarding experience in a career. For executives shepherding the process, it provides the unequivocal thrill of accomplishment in a job otherwise often cluttered with politics and compromise. And for two decades now the mantra of survival in telecom is “more new services.” So how come everyone uniformly hates the classic telco New Product Introduction (NPI) process?

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There are a number of trade shows that occur throughout the year and it can be a confusing endeavor trying to figure out which ones to attend. We at Pipeline have made an effort to demystify a few of the ones we think might be important to our readers in the next few months. Read on for a quick overview of what it is, where it is, and who it’s for.

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Imagine that we live in a bizarre alternate reality world where there is only one kind of motor vehicle: the pickup truck.

The only family car you would own would be a pickup truck. When you drove the family around someone might have to sit in the bed of the truck. You would commute every day in a pickup truck, through traffic snarls of other pickup trucks.

Network managers have never been in a better position to negotiate meaningful Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with the outsourcing partners. SLAs have traditionally been fairly toothless, vanilla, 'one-size-fits-all' metrics applied by carriers to all customers with little in the way of customization. They also tend to play to the carriers’ core strengths, i.e. the resiliency of the core backbone network, with availability - and perhaps latency - being the key components. Now, clearly, having the network up and running is crucial, but there are some more detailed criteria that need to be considered.

“Promises may fit the friends, but non-performance will turn them into enemies.” - Benjamin Franklin

Ben hit this one on the head. I'd guess that he wasn't talking about telecommunications providers when he was talking about promises and performance. Then again, he was a pretty prescient guy.