By Tim Young

“If you're not failing every now and then, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative.”-Woody Allen

It’s not always easy to embrace innovation. It can be a sticky, messy proposition to strive to do something new, if for no other reason than it requires effort and an active casting-off of the workaday mentality that can be so comfortable.

However, in the realm of communications IT, innovation is what we’ve signed up for. But where is the real innovation taking place? Consumers are doing more things in more places thanks to communications technology, but what players, either on the service provider or the vendor side, are riding the front edge of that wave?

In this issue of Pipeline, we talk about innovation. I talk to some of the top analysts in our space (from Analysys Mason, Stratecast, NPRG, LTC International, and TRI) about the innovation they’re seeing in the space and what’s driving it. Our own Ed Finegold examines the intersection of social media and customer care. Jesse Cryderman checks in on advances in real-time billing and charging.

In addition, we hear from Comarch on machine-to-machine communications, and from Telcordia on the ways in which the service factory concept is gearing up for the ongoing mobile broadband explosion. We also hear from Ivan Chochlekov, CTO and co-founder of ConceptWave, on how OTT competition can, through innovation,