Letter from the Editor - June 2015

By: Tim Young

“Innovation is serendipity, so you don’t know what people will make.”
-Tim Berners-Lee

We are in an industry largely driven by and, in many ways, obsessed with innovation as a concept. That’s true for the wider communications world, always looking to change the way people interact with one another and consume media. It’s even truer for firms dedicated to making the products and services offered by communications service providers more reliable, more profitable, and more satisfactory for customers. Those are the technologies we cover in Pipeline every day, and at no time are these technologies on more glorious display than when we discuss the topic of innovation.

As Berners-Lee notes in the quote above, there is a little bit of magic to innovation. It certainly takes tremendous insight and a willingness to take great risks and fail gloriously, but a successful innovation takes more than that. It takes timing and luck, both in its creation and in its adoption.

We at Pipeline are very fortunate to have a front row seat for some of the most exciting new technologies in the space, and heartily salute those CSPs and vendors who have embraced the concept of innovation so fully, and have embedded a sense of exploration in their organizational fabric. They make the magic happen, and we are excited by what we see happening in the space and what still remains just beyond the horizon.

In this issue of Pipeline, we discuss innovation in its many forms. We discuss some of the very coolest tech we have seen so far this year, especially at MWC 2015. We explore the latest on WebRTC and Unified Communications and get into the details of License Assisted Access, which may just be the future of LTE. We examine the Internet of Things and hear from Vodafone on M2M healthcare applications. We hear from MDS on the future of managed services and feature Razorsight in our Vendor Spotlight. And we talk money, exploring the funding models that keep innovation going. We also bring you a full re-cap of our 2015 Innovation Awards program, which took the Cote d’Azur by storm early this month.

Enjoy, and keep creating, striving and dreaming.

Best,