TM Forum

My pilgrimage to the musical motherland: U2

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…and other dispatches from Dublin during Management World 2011

Aye and Begorrah. The week I traveled to Ireland, President Obama did as well. Honestly not sure why he did not consult with me to sync up schedules…at any rate, the big news of the week for me professionally was attending an event-within-an-event, featuring the team I lead at Stratecast, at the world’s largest IT show for the communications industry. The Innovation Spotlight at Management World 2011 was built around the Rat Pack/10 to Watch report our team publishes each year identifying and analyzing the market’s hottest emerging companies. Check out some great videos from the event here.

Management World (MW) was chock-full of meetings each day plus working breakfasts and dinners, but in a few brief free moments I was able to snap a decent pictorial’s worth of pertinent pix. Continue reading

TM Forum publishes my “Let’s Make it a Good (Mobile and Web) Experience”

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Hello again. TM Forum, the world’s leading industry group/consortium on all things network management, published a little piece I did on what mobile and website operators (everyone from AT&T, Verizon and Telecom Italia Mobile to Amazon.com) are doing to see not just that their own networks and sites are “up” but what WE are experiencing as users, and how to fix it. The piece appears in the Forum’s Inside Leadership newsletter; invite you to read more if you like here. Continue reading

“Verizon (and AT&T), we’ve got a problem.”

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We could have titled this one several ways: “Every Port a Storm?” Or maybe “A Plea for Good Portmanship.” I think we got it right. Apollo 13, the movie that seared the phrase “Houston, we’ve got a problem” into global consciousness, is a masterful mixture of tension and teamwork with rooms full of NASA scientists and engineers, and Jim Lovell and crew in the spacecraft, finding various technological needles in haystacks in a brave effort to get the astronauts back to Earth.

I’m pretty sure the cast of characters it took to port our older daughter’s mobile phone number from AT&T to Verizon over the holidays resembled the NASA team portrayed in Apollo 13. Continue reading

Peace on Earth

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…and mercy mild, all God’s service providers and enterprise IT shops reconciled.

To be sure, there is plenty of disharmony and cutthroat competition in the networking, software and telecommunications industries–and in all industries–and unless our Creator were to suddenly begin to endow us all with a quite different set of characteristics, it will always be thus. Yet especially during this holiday season it is encouraging to see groups that have previously been best characterized as “warring factions” learning from each other and (dare I say it) working together. Continue reading

This election is all about (data) integrity

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With competition from every side, service providers must roll out a great many new services and features in the next few years to slake the thirst of overheated markets. We’ve talked about service delivery platforms (SDPs) that can slash the time, cost and risk of doing that, not just for today’s services but by providing a platform for services we haven’t even thought of yet. SDPs also lend a hand with the cost side of the equation, which is helpful because while service providers gamely strive to reach consumers and businesses with every conceivable service on every possible device, they must also improve operational efficiency to align their cost structures with revenues. SDPs help ease capex by employing more enterprise networking devices that on average are far less expensive than telecom equipment, and because their service-oriented architecture (SOA) structures enable service providers to leverage network capacity, content and other service components from a myriad of other sources instead of having to build it all themselves. Continue reading

TMF + IPSF = IP(solutions)

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As most of you have heard by now, the TeleManagement Forum has acquired the IPsphere Forum (IPSF). The TM Forum said it will integrate the IPsphere Framework into its Service Delivery Framework program, creating a pre-commercial test bed for pilot programs and multivendor interoperability. The TM Forum’s Service Delivery Framework focuses on enabling control of service lifecycle management across all execution environments, allowing flexibility in binding services with product catalogs.

That’s quite a mouthful. Whether the market swallows what the IPSF (and now TMF) is proposing will depend on fidelity to the core aims of the IPSF and delivering something as market-worthy as what is on the drawing board. Continue reading