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Product Lifecycle Management: The process of taking a product from earliest concept to eventual disposal. It's nothing new in the manufacturing world, as the development, introduction, maturation, and eventual obsolescence of a given product has been a matter of strategy for decades. However, within the world of CSPs, it's a technology that's still finding its feet.

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Welcome to December! Our last NewsWatch of 2008 contains a plethora of information, because yours truly had the opportunity to have first-hand discussions with many vendors in Orlando last month. We've also included news from outside the world of Orlando, so whether you were there or you weren't, after reading this month's NewsWatch, you should be filled in on everything we think you need to know. Enjoy!

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Back in 1987, some creative telecommunications IT types, and one very frustrated DBA, had an idea: what if we designed a corporate Product Catalog, sat it in the middle of a suite of OSS/BSS application modules, and only allowed communication between those modules through the Product Catalog data base? Every customer request would pick up only the parameters that existed in the Product Catalog to create Customer Product; Provisioning would see exactly which components from which vendors were required to fulfill...

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Watching oilman T.Boone Pickens on The Daily Show and 60 Minutes promoting his plans for energy independence evokes something my sarcastic father used to say about Wall Street philanthropists: "first you get rich; then you get ethics." If only the phrase were universally true. The rich and unethical have been exposed in recent months, and yet governments around the world aim to hand them bundles of cash and hope they've learned a lesson. The communications industry doesn't need a bailout, which is fortunate for those...

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There are a thousand reasons why projects fail. And people have written thousands of articles trying to explain why projects fail, quite a few of them fingering the project manager in charge. That's not exactly unfair, because we put Project Managers in charge expressly to achieve success, and poor project management plays its part in delivering failure instead. The PM's primary role is to shepherd their projects through the minefield of functional and technical challenges, budget constraints, demanding users, ridiculous deadlines...

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The Management World show enjoyed a change of venue, shifting from the Dallas Adam's Mark Hotel that had been its home for the past three iterations to the Rosen Shingle Creek Resort in Orlando. Though the weather was unseasonably cool for Central Florida, the new location offered several perks, including enhanced scenery (I heard at least one person remark that, even with evenings approaching freezing, at least the views from the hotel rooms featured golf courses and winding creeks, rather than empty parking lots), improved...

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Driven by the pressure to increase market share, boost subscriber revenues, stave off competition, and reduce churn, communications service providers are being challenged to deliver a richer mix of products and packages that include voice, video, Internet, wireless, content, entertainment, and other multi-media application services. Operators are actively attempting to deliver differentiated and dynamic product offerings that are constructed from many reusable underlying components, have several variations, are introduced faster, and retired more quickly.

In a cut-throat market, what really persuades customers to move or stay with a service provider? Instinctively, we believe that the range of innovative products available to the customer, the technical quality of delivered service (QoS) and competitive pricing are the key factors in ensuring customer retention and extending the service contract. But we should challenge these assumptions - not least because they are often so costly to act upon.

Products: They're the cornerstone of many a business. They are conceived, developed, launched, used, and eventually retired. They follow a pattern not unlike the one we'll all follow in our own lives. Conception. Birth. Growth. Eventual death.