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The value proposition underlying fixed-mobile convergence has always been compelling, on the surface.  Have a single handset, and a single bill.  At home or in the office, use that handset on a home network, paying less, given the fact that your voice and data is being passed along by your broadband connection rather than crowding the wireless spectrum.  Once you leave the familiar confines of your LAN, seamlessly pick up a wireless signal and carry on with your conversation.

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SUPERCOMM has had a history of showcasing technologies that sound great, but may not have a lot of the bugs worked out yet. The technologies have some value, but perhaps not enough traction to be viable in the marketplace yet, or pricing has yet to be determined, or other parts of the business-technology relationship have yet to be worked out.

Wireless was all the rage at the SUPERCOMMs of the late 1990s, but it was a few years before everyone...

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The BSS sector is odd, from an IT industry perspective, because it isn’t dominated by Microsoft, Oracle or other massive companies whose TV commercials you’re likely to see during The Masters. The big dog that dominates billing needs no introduction, and will receive none here. In this bizarro world, the biggest dogs play catch-up when it comes to COTS sales. There’s a different perspective to consider, however, because Microsoft – and other major technology suppliers – tends to play a more fundamental role in the food chain.

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Service Providers, who have to continuously stay ahead of the competition by introducing new Product Offerings to the market, have been turning to Product Catalogs and Service Catalogs to fulfill their rapid time-to-market requirements.  By and large, this has been via either internally developed catalogs, or via extensions of ISV offerings.  ISV CRM and Billing vendors have stretched their Product Catalogs to perform the role of a Service Catalog, while Service Catalog providers have moved into the Product Catalog space.

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In today’s evolving telecom landscape - new networks, new market entrants, new services and new subscriber expectations - the ability to quickly create and drive usage of multi-service offerings, while providing a personalized and consistent next generation user experience, in an efficient and cost-effective way are paramount to future-success.

The term ‘convergence’ and the associated supporting technologies are irrelevant to consumers.

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SUPERCOMM 2009 visited Chicago’s McCormick Place a few weeks ago (Oct 21-23).  The flagship show for the major telecom trade associations in the US (TIA and USTelecom) has been around since 1988, and was a regular fixture on any self-respecting North American’s telecoms event calendar throughout the 1990s and beyond.

Over the past few years, there have been some bumps in the road for the show developers regarding...

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The Internet has become the central nervous system for our networked life. As a global network of loosely connected IP-based networks, it reaches into every country and provides governments, businesses and consumers worldwide with a common platform for communication. And now, a new kind of criminal has emerged.

As the 21st century criminal has moved into new realms and dimensions, law enforcement agencies ...

“I took a speed reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes.  It involves Russia.”

This is a fast-paced world we live in, folks.  Not everything, as Woody Allen attests, is better when faster, but that’s the pace of life and the pace of business.  As a result of the pervasive hurry we’re all in, perpetually, the relevance of a single device for all of our communication needs is greater than ever.