investment decisions sound and insightful? Or are they driven by exhaustion in the face of the power of marketing might?

Mark Francis of AT&T crystallized a strongly emerging trend: “We (as the Service Provider) cannot abdicate the role of Principle Integrator. The SI is a partner, but not a leader.” That’s good news, too.

There were some issues, however, to be addressed. It was regrettable that some conference chairs were not up to par. A good chair can tie together sessions and ask insightful questions that give presence and theme to the track – but this did not always occur. Indeed, only one chair came from a Service Provider – the rest were vendors or forum staff.

Once upon a time, the panelists would have been helped out by a degree of expert participation from the audience. After one session at this conference, an audience member said he found the discussion of the implications of ‘domains’ in the architecture of management most interesting, but could not follow it all …. Not many years ago, five architects would have jumped in, expressing different views and interpretations, all to the benefit of the audience. They would have continued their debate out into the halls for the further edification of by-standers. Unfortunately, that did not seem as common at this event.

Conclusions

In the end, in addition to answering questions, the TMF conference programming raised some others:

• To what extent will the continued burden of heritage applications and a reliance on big COTS products, linked by expensive systems integrators, hinder the teleco/cableco Service Providers as they face the challenges of the new OTT world?
• Is there any future value in the big Operators besides their network plant and its reliable high-quality operation?
• Why is the integration tax still so high, and why have we stopped talking about it?
• What is the role that the TMF must play in all this? And how can future Management World events really support the TMF’s role?