Letter from the Editor: August 2014

By: Tim Young

“It was no small matter to reach that glade. By the beaten paths, which indulge in a thousand teasing zigzags, it required a good quarter of an hour. In a bee-line, through the underbrush, which is peculiarly dense, very thorny, and very aggressive in that locality, a full half hour was necessary. Boulatruelle committed the error of not comprehending this. He believed in the straight line; a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man. The thicket, bristling as it was, struck him as the best road.”
–Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

There is a tremendous temptation in business, as in hiking, to forge ahead on the straightest path possible. This laser focus does not, however, work very well in an environment rife with obstacles and full of obstructed sight lines. Not only does a determination to charge forward in a straight line make the going tougher, at times, it may also cause you to miss out on a wide variety of opportunities along the way.

Businesses in the Communications and Entertainment Technology (COMET) arena have a luxury that many other industries do not enjoy: agility. Service providers, though somewhat limited by physical infrastructure, can change consumer offerings and processes to meet emerging trends. For suppliers, software and services can be applied to a whole host of use cases, and can be modified to confront new challenges quickly and relatively easy. The advent of virtualization technologies such as NFV and SDN further loosens the physical constraints and paves the way for agility on unprecedented scale. Even so, these changes aren’t painless; but compared to what it takes for, say, a durable goods manufacturer to respond to shifts in customer behavior, companies working on the communications and entertainment side are uniquely positioned for success. 

In this issue of Pipeline, we discuss business agility in the COMET space. We look at new areas of expansion for the industry, evaluate the growth of interoperability and examine how NEMs are making themselves more responsive to change through virtualization. We also discuss the competitive advantages of going green and talk to Italtel about how session border controllers could be an operator’s ticket to success. Finally, we’ll talk about network ubiquity and bring you all of the latest news and opinion about all things related to communications IT.

While you’re here, I urge you to check out the latest on Pipeline’s upcoming 2014 Comet Executive Summit, coming in November, 2014. We’ll be heading to San Diego to talk about topics including CEM, Big Data, network security, virtualization, content and much, much more.  To learn more and find out how to participate, visit our 2014 CES page.

Enjoy!

Tim Young
Editor-in-Chief