Tellabs chief expects Supercomm to showcase innovation

The telecom industry needs to shine a brighter light on its abilities to help companies deal with the economic downturn and prepare for a more efficient and environmentally friendly future, according to Rob Pullen, chief executive officer of Tellabs. Pullen is expecting this June’s Supercomm show to focus on where innovation and imagination within telecom can provide leadership for a global economic recovery.

“Our customers need innovation more than ever before to get them through this time,” Pullen said in an interview. “This time around, it’s not going to be building roads and bridges that helps us prepare for the future, it will be the innovation and imagination we can bring to help our customers make money or save expense or optimize what they are spending.”

Much of that innovation will be centered on finding ways of doing things that are not only lower cost but also consume less energy and generate less in carbon emissions and waste, Pullen said. Broadband connectivity is at the heart of many of the solutions he sees.

“The US government has believed in the importance of broadband to the tune of $7.2 billion for broadband to rural and underserved areas,” Pullen said. “We at Tellabs have deployed videoconferencing in all of our key locations to conference with one another instead of traveling, which saves money and the environment. Data applications and multimedia video on mobile devices is growing at a very rapid rate, enabling mobile commerce to improve efficiency.”

Businesses looking to cut IT expenses are increasingly turning to their service providers, who are responding with more managed service options.

“Some of the big expenses of corporations are in their IT department, but that is not often their core competency,” Pullen said. “If businesses can save expense by getting high availability services while meeting my current and future applications, they would look at managed services. That is part of our strategy at Tellabs – helping service providers deliver business services, managed or outsourced, whether that’s cloud computing to virtualize the IT department or getting more scale and scope by using the service provider’s network. We go out with our customers to visit enterprises and help them sell and articulate our value proposition.”

There are solutions for developing nations that use innovation in different ways, Pullen added. For example, he said, Kenyan mobile service providers are acting as a bank, letting consumers use their mobile phones to manage transactions, which improves productivity, efficiency and liquidity. “There are early prototypes of mobile devices being used to test blood or to test water and send information back to a central location,” Pullen said.

The US economic stimulus plan provides funding for major IT projects such as automating medical records, “which will mean increased bandwidth for the flow of images versus a paper flow,” Pullen said.

The Tellabs veteran expects Supercomm, set for June 8-11 in Chicago, to be a showcase of telecom innovation, focusing on both long-term and short-term possibilities. In the near-term, Tellabs is focusing on highlighting solutions such as mobile backhaul, “where we can save 60% to 90% of backhaul costs versus the present method by using packet technology and multiservice technology to get high bandwidth to users and consumers,” Pullen said. “Our ROADMs with Ethernet or packet optical transport help our customers generate revenue and deliver high-speed Internet and wavelengths with a 65% reduction in operating expense.”