By: Thomas Vasen

We are told that the cornerstone of commercial success for telcos in these days of next generation services, advanced mobile networks, and interacting devices is agility. 

It – agility – is even the theme of this current issue of Pipeline magazine. Fast moving, lean, quickly responsive to fine-tuning the customer experience; isn’t agile what you’ve got to be if you want to achieve results?

The trouble is, over the roughly two decades since the global deregulation of the industry, telcos have been preoccupied by the pursuit of becoming “bigger” rather than more agile. And big, of course, is the opposite of lean. The result is that, in many areas of business, telcos have become sluggish and monolithic, all too often bogged down by their legacy IT infrastructures.

The systems they have in place are, far from empowering business growth, obstructing it. Yesterday’s obsessive challenge of accommodating increasing scale might have been cracked; but success appears to have come at the expense of the speed and agility that are so badly needed today. Now, time to market is the biggest challenge operators face.

What all this boils down to is that, over the past two decades, telcos have done a fine job of evolving business infrastructures that are, bluntly, often no longer fit for the purpose. With next-generation services, the purpose has changed. If agility has replaced bigness (in IT) as the key determinant of both viability and future commercial success, the data-centers of many telcos now appear to have been left short of the critical element required for profitability.

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About CES 2014

Pipeline continues its legacy of bringing together the world’s leading service providers and technology innovators this fall at The 2014 COMET Executive Summit. This exclusive event gathering Pipeline journalists, Industry Advisory Board (IAB) Members, and key solution providers will be an intimate symposium to shape the editorial direction of Pipeline, gather priceless input from executive-level service provider experts, and create lasting industry relationships.

Pipeline’s IAB is an exclusive group of service provider and analyst executives who have long-term relationships with Pipeline and have played a role in Pipeline programs, editorial direction, and provided content over the last decade. This year, Pipeline opens the doors to provide an opportunity to engage directly with a broad cross section of experts who evaluate, recommend, and purchase communications and entertainment technology (COMET) products and services. Multiple levels of participation provide your company with an exclusive networking opportunity, tailored to your goals and budget.

The COMET Executive Summit will bring together executives from the world’s leading service provider and technology companies, in a flexible format that is filled with unprecedented networking opportunities designed to build relationships that can be carried forward to solve issues facing service providers today. Some of the topics planned for discussion include:

• Networking
• Customer experience management (CEM)
• Big data & analytics
• Exploring cloud offerings
• Enabling new business models
• Delivering and assuring digital services
• Network evolution & virtualization
• Leveraging content
• Network security

For more information, visit
www.pipelinepub.com/info/comet/2014_comet_summit.php

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Agility means facing the unknown with confidence

Here’s an interesting example of how rapid change now is and thus how strained legacy business support systems (BSS) is to adapt to it. There is a growing consensus in the industry that software-defined networks (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) are set to be the trends of the decade. But their impact on BSS is not at all clear. We might say that “we don’t know what we don’t yet know.”

The point is that the detailed questions outstrip the available knowledge when it comes to SDN and NFV, but implicitly there is one thing that we can be sure about: If things change, agile IT will always be the answer to how to quickly accommodate the new, whatever that may be.

Recently, the top 10 trends in the telco industry based on recently conducted primary research were presented a leading analyst house (Heavy Reading). 5G mobile came in at number 10. Service provider IT (a new term to describe the function formerly known as BSS/OSS) ranked 7. The Internet of Things and Machine to Machine (IoT and M2M) communications came in 6th.  The top 5, in reverse order: Gigabit Cities, Utilities companies as communication suppliers, Automotive Communications (isn’t that really the Internet of Things?), Advanced Telecoms Analytics and, as the Number 1 trend in the industry: OTT Service Delivery. Or maybe, how to make money off of it. All of this underlines not just the volume and pace of change we are now experiencing but that the present issue of Pipeline is covering something truly important.